The Star has a feature on "26 Ways to Make Toronto Better" and the first one appears to be "Dump on condos and condo residents, who you admit you never took the time to get to know." Some midtown Toronto traditions will never die, apparently. www.thestar.com/interactives...

"One thing that is particularly frustrating about Portage & Main is that the city could have arrived at this result years ago, for almost no cost... Instead it took agonized political debate and extensive, ultimately incorrect, theorizing about the impact. This is not a problem unique to Winnipeg."

A gentle reminder that the protagonist and hero in Its A Wonderful Life, George Bailey, is a real estate developer. The villain, Mr. Potter, is a NIMBY slumlord who doesn’t want any new developments because they threaten his monopoly. Weird, I bet that never happens IRL…

MNTO member Hana Suckstorff has penned a reflective piece over a small apartment proposal that lost at CoA and is now being appealed at TLAB. On the nature of "neighbourhood character", and what is lost when we apply it only to built-form. hsuckstorff.substack.com/p/saving-the...

Only another nation could make Global News sound like it was doing anything interesting, let alone controversial

The full spiked 60 Minutes CECOT package, clean & subtitled. 1/5

Year 1 data on congestion pricing in Manhattan… * Vehicle traffic: -11% * Foot traffic: +3.4% * Storefront vacancy: -0.9% * Pollution: -22% * Revenue for mass transit: $548M So YES this has been a huge success.

Bazaar understands the relationship between outdated angular plane requirements and the housing crisis.

my quick look at the province’s new rental vacancy numbers and yes, I did have to wear my novelty cbc christmas sweater, IT’S CALLED GRAVITAS

Toronto's Official Plan strikes again!

This was explicitly stated in Toronto’s ban of apartments in neighbourhoods. The justification used terms like “loose women” and “irresponsible mothers” and “mixed race relations” “destabilizing the family neighbourhood” “Stable Neighbourhoods” is still in our OP today… :(

Yeah, as I've been saying, we overcompensated because the media ran with the stupid 'GDP per capita' and 'immigrants hurt housing' framing. This is long-run damage to the economy by short-term thinking, feeding xenophobia, and helping to further destroy Canada's world class universities.

THREAD. My parents' cat Bridget vanished. As the weeks dragged on they became ever more worried, so to distract himself my dad began to paint Bridget's adventures, imagining her travelling through time and popping up at some of art & music's most important moments. I've collected his work here...

It's one thing to have been wrong about Trump (how many politicians do what they say?), but it's another how sneering some people were about those who turned out to be right. And how many of the sneerers are still prominent media figures who have doubled down on the sneering rather than reflecting.

1. Absolutely amazing indent size for each new paragraph. 2. Still learning that choices have consequences all this time later.

The difference between real estate and, say, business investments though is that home equity gains are often unearned (ie homes that had no improvements and appreciated wildly) and are inflated because of public investments. In that sense, it's just redistributing some of this back where it belongs.

Very excited to see how this passionate defense of property rights from Holyday holds up in this afternoon's Avenues debate, when we are talking about the government preventing 23 apartments instead of 23 parking spots. Surely we will see an equally robust defense there!

"The potential to have things seized will send a message that you can't ride on the sidewalk," Burnside said.

It costs: - 32x this for the yearly mechanical leaf collection we used to do in select Etobicoke and Scarborough neighbourhoods - 320x this for yearly snow windrow clearing (mainly in suburbs) - 6x this for one Heritage Conservation Study of Yonge-Yorkville (according to ABCRA) Buy the damn water.

Sometimes the memes write themselves

Have you ever played Sorry? Two people get to the same space and one of them has to start again even though they were there first! Is that what this is? I didn't even think those people are sorry!

Trying to imagine the reaction if it came out that Toronto Council had delayed the LRT opening for six months to try to get better vibes from riders who would still presumably be on a very slow trip.

I been saying.

Q: how can we make the street below safer for people outside of cars? toronto transportation services: 💡 force the LRT to operate 20 km/h slower than the adjacent traffic! vision zero! 🥰

At this point, putting anything about "United" or "One" in your party name is asking for trouble*. *offer void in Quebec, Ensemble Montreal

I know that I regularly ask this but, just to make sure I spread it around to topics other than housing and transit, what is the Ford government doing? www.thestar.com/news/gta/int...

As-of-right zoning for housing people, discretionary approvals for housing cars

Obviously no one from Toronto is in a position to criticize Calgary since we didn't even pass the citywide sixplex reform that our HAF agreement required. But I feel for Calgary advocates who worked on zoning reform, saw it succeed and people then said "Too much housing. Roll it back."

I understand the hypothesis. NIMBYism prioritizes existing residents over future ones. Rent control also does this when it is strict enough to discourage new supply. Both are incumbency-prioritizing views, but I'm not surprised that they can be separated. 🧵

A politician finding new and innovative ways to attend multiple Christmas parties is actually the most relatable thing that I've seen in a while. Makes me nostalgic for my grad school days.

Majestic. They used to be the tallest apartments in the Commonwealth. Home of three former mayors of Toronto or East York. The "luxury apartments" of their day.

Wowza www.thestar.com/news/canada/...

If only Ontario had the guidance of some sort of housing task force report to help with this.

The Premier: ❌ barely showed up to Question Period ❌ barely answered any questions ❌ rushed too many bills without due process ❌ has too much unfinished business ❌ is leaving behind too many crises: healthcare, housing, affordability Walking away is inexcusable. #onpoli

The local west end list serve is loosing it's minds over the rezoning of main streets for midrise -- all kinds of conspiratorial messages that schools are going to be torn down for housing. So dismal and depressing. nobody reads the paper anymore.

About a year ago Dianne Saxe asked for TTC board meetings to be scheduled and recorded in TMMIS like every other committee and now they're easier to find and more people follow the agenda and proceedings. Sometimes seemingly dumb little things matter.

News today about the Ontario Science Centre: Its "temporary location" will take over most, or possibly all, of Harbourfront Centre. 86,000 square feet is a larger fraction, if not all, of Harbourfront's buildings. news.ontario.ca/en/release/1...

The Bacon in question, being Edmund Bacon, father of the actor Kevin Bacon. Read the entire🧵 it's great!

It’s simple: intensifying the city near transit is more important than certain heritage issues and certain NIMBY preferences. That is not “hijacking.” It is the implementation of a 25-year-old provincial policy. The same policy, BTW, that protects the greenbelt everyone claims to love

Heritage designations are used to limit development and building heights in low-rise Neighbourhoods next to the subway. Everyone except for Toronto heritage staff will say this. (This particular example is from the Swansea Area Ratepayers' Association.) www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis...

In addition to all of the other benefits already reported about NYC congestion pricing, "In the first six months of the program, air pollution – in the form of particulate matter 2.5 micrometers and smaller – dropped by 22% in the Congestion Relief Zone (CRZ)" news.cornell.edu/stories/2025...

On the one hand, I am trying to be a better liberal pluralist. On the other hand, if a group of "libertarian edgelords" who talk about a "neo-Promethean aesthetic" as "based" want to self-select out to their own cities, who am I to stand in their way.

I missed this when it was posted. Interesting to get into whether financial compensation could incentivize change. Yes but not much? The next post in the thread says it's the same effect for community benefits (new buildings paying for new community amenities increases support but only a little).

My "We don't deal with hypocritical countries who show disdain for others' national sovereignty" T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.

Surreal meeting @uytaelee.bsky.social from About Here, @carastern.bsky.social from Missing Middle Podcast, and Paige Saunders at the @moreneighboursto.bsky.social AGM/Holiday Party!

"Outsourcing institutions did not make our government modern; it dissolved the foundations of competence, and now we rent it back at a premium because the capacity no longer exists inside the state at all. A government that cannot do its own work cannot defend the public interest."

Appreciate these clear statements from CMHC. It's got some good insight. "As a country, are we comfortable with the implications of using a “growth pays for growth” approach in municipal development financing? And what are the alternatives?" www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/observer/202...