Alex Bozikovic of the Globe and Mail wrote an excellent piece talking about what I wrote about last week in Old Toronto, and then the rest. Here are some of the zingers:

And Mayor Olivia Chow? She barely spoke. She ultimately supported the compromise, but she declined to stand up for a bolder vision. For a mayor elected with a mandate to address housing and equity, that silence was striking.

Meanwhile, the opposition – led by suburban councillors – offered little beyond incoherent panic. “We are risking suburban alienation,” said Parthi Kandavel of Scarborough Southwest, as though allowing modest apartment buildings might rupture the civic fabric. “A one-size-fits-all approach does not fit the bill.”

For Mr. Kandavel, as for a thousand politicians before him, one-size-fits-all is fine as long as that “one size” gives the loudest homeowners exactly what they want – and preserves economic segregation by keeping tenants away from where they don’t belong.

He goes on:

In Mr. Kandavel’s ward, at least 52 per cent of residents lived in apartments as of 2021. Nearly half are renters. To speak as if tenants are invaders is to insult the very people he represents.

If the federal government decides to withhold that $60-million, it would be entirely justified. A city that won’t allow a sixplex – a building the size of a large house – is not serious about housing, about urbanism, or about its own future.

Cover photo by Julian Gentile on

This week, Toronto once again demonstrated that there are two cities within our city: There's Old Toronto and then there's the rest of Toronto. The former generally corresponds to the boundaries of Toronto prior to amalgamation in 1998. It represents a city that was built around streetcars and subways and is therefore embedded with certain urban sensibilities. Then there's the rest of Toronto. This part of the city ranges from being reluctantly urban to overly hostile toward it. And it shows up in many areas, from its modal split to its voting patterns.

This week it showed up in a debate to permit multiplexes with up to six homes (sixplexes) in all residential neighborhoods city-wide. It is also important to note that adopting this zoning change is a prerequisite to the city accessing $471.1 million in funding from the federal government. But this is not how City Council voted this week. Instead, a "compromise motion" had to be put forward that isolated sixplexes to Toronto and East York District, and Ward 23 in Scarborough. In other words, we are not that far off from splitting Toronto between Old and the rest.

I'm glad that something, instead of nothing, got done. But it's disappointing that Mayor Olivia Chow did not stand up and show any leadership on this recommendation from planning staff.

Alex Bozikovic of the Globe and Mail wrote an excellent piece talking about what I wrote about last week in Old Toronto, and then the rest. Here are some of the zingers:

And Mayor Olivia Chow? She barely spoke. She ultimately supported the compromise, but she declined to stand up for a bolder vision. For a mayor elected with a mandate to address housing and equity, that silence was striking.

Meanwhile, the opposition – led by suburban councillors – offered little beyond incoherent panic. “We are risking suburban alienation,” said Parthi Kandavel of Scarborough Southwest, as though allowing modest apartment buildings might rupture the civic fabric. “A one-size-fits-all approach does not fit the bill.”

For Mr. Kandavel, as for a thousand politicians before him, one-size-fits-all is fine as long as that “one size” gives the loudest homeowners exactly what they want – and preserves economic segregation by keeping tenants away from where they don’t belong.

He goes on:

In Mr. Kandavel’s ward, at least 52 per cent of residents lived in apartments as of 2021. Nearly half are renters. To speak as if tenants are invaders is to insult the very people he represents.

If the federal government decides to withhold that $60-million, it would be entirely justified. A city that won’t allow a sixplex – a building the size of a large house – is not serious about housing, about urbanism, or about its own future.

Cover photo by Julian Gentile on

This week, Toronto once again demonstrated that there are two cities within our city: There's Old Toronto and then there's the rest of Toronto. The former generally corresponds to the boundaries of Toronto prior to amalgamation in 1998. It represents a city that was built around streetcars and subways and is therefore embedded with certain urban sensibilities. Then there's the rest of Toronto. This part of the city ranges from being reluctantly urban to overly hostile toward it. And it shows up in many areas, from its modal split to its voting patterns.

This week it showed up in a debate to permit multiplexes with up to six homes (sixplexes) in all residential neighborhoods city-wide. It is also important to note that adopting this zoning change is a prerequisite to the city accessing $471.1 million in funding from the federal government. But this is not how City Council voted this week. Instead, a "compromise motion" had to be put forward that isolated sixplexes to Toronto and East York District, and Ward 23 in Scarborough. In other words, we are not that far off from splitting Toronto between Old and the rest.

I'm glad that something, instead of nothing, got done. But it's disappointing that Mayor Olivia Chow did not stand up and show any leadership on this recommendation from planning staff.