Kandavel keeps saying he supports housing in the abstract but then it turns out he opposes every actual proposal in his ward. Who could have foreseen?

Heroic point missing stevemunro.ca/2026/04/21/s...

Pedestrian Observations: How Much Community Outreach Does the Urban Institute Think Italy and Turkey Do? pedestrianobservations.com/2026/04/20/h...

It's been 50 years. Do we really need this ridiculous reform council propaganda? They did some good and some bad and we don't need to shy away from an actual evaluation. www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...

Catching up on council committee business from last week. The new vision for Exhibition is... pretty underwhelming. There's nothing new to bring people there outside of existing events. Just a pile of empty space by a highway. I guess better than the current parking lots... but meh.

Toronto, as always, ruined this for everyone by asking for a bunch of extra tax powers, getting them, promptly cancelling the vehicle registration tax, then taking in money the land transfer tax in good times before complaining about its volatility when tides turned. Then asking for more tax powers.

In honour of @akareynolds.bsky.social I'm going to just fire off parking takes: -residents in new developments should never be blocked from applying for street parking -parking passes should cost way more -suburban areas should allow street parking -TPA should sell, develop, or demolish all lots.

Catching up on council committee business from last week. The new vision for Exhibition is... pretty underwhelming. There's nothing new to bring people there outside of existing events. Just a pile of empty space by a highway. I guess better than the current parking lots... but meh.

It sure seems like no one is remotely afraid of violating third party advertiser spending rules.

Surely if drivers are running a red light at an intersection 15 times a day (to a level that's clear enough to get ticketed) that calls for a design intervention. www.thestar.com/news/gta/tor...

This is obviously thinking way too far in the future given how slow we are at transit construction, but extending on Ellesmere (not Sheppard) also sets you up much better to turn south towards Lakeshore GO and turn Line 4 into a really nice circumferential.

Interesting to compare and contrast given the Toronto system has basically the same number of active docks (1030)

An underrated nuisance delay tactic by city staff: you need to go pay someone to prepare a report to tell us about our own infrastructure.

This is the secret to "winning" Guess That Density in Toronto. If the site is near a highway or noise, guess high. If the site is in an established Neighbourhood, guess low. Throw any mid-range guess away. That's Planning!

If you guessed "as much density as possible, regardless of the consequences" meant 4 units, congratulations to you (but, sadly, not to our city). But why does this site need a rezoning for 4 units if 4 units are already allowed in Neighbourhoods as-of-right?

It's time for a game of "Guess That Density." Based on Councillor Burnside's anticipation of a "long battle" over "as much density as possible, regardless of the consequences," how many units do you think were proposed on this site in his ward? Clues in 🧵⬇️ before the big reveal later.

This is my contribution to Toronto transit debates today.

The Ossington stretch is still very fun (despite it moving more and more upscale due to zoning induced scarcity) but man does it ever feel like it's just constantly under siege by cars.

Cllr Dianne Saxe moved a motion to improve stops retained post consolidation by raising platforms for level boarding (reducing dwell times, especially due to ramp deployment. Cllr @joshmatlow.bsky.social moved a motion to improve streetcar entry/exit of loops, such as through new priority signals.

I sometimes worry about the absolutely giant rights of way along suburban Toronto arterials (which are supposed to be adding housing as part of Avenues policies) will make for terrible urban places. I'd hope they could do something like the right but that's supported by adjacent dense streets.

It would be stupid of me to read this right? Like knowingly reading a Toronto Life "how they live on $150,000" article.

I have now read two takes today from people I think should know better that go like "the @fast-track.to 10-point streetcar improvement proposal is bad because if I ignore 9 of the points then it's unfair to remove stops". Yes, that's why there's 10 points in the plan that reinforce each other.

Some Beaches residents are up in arms over a few midrise buildings, drawing collective eye rolls from every other TEYCC resident. beachmetro.com/2026/04/16/e...

At a certain point here in Toronto we need to be asking ourselves why Edmonton is producing more than 10x as many multiplex units as us per year. (It's zoning and DCs/taxes).

NEW BLOG POST Edmonton's housing momentum didn't stop at the end of 2025. Q1 2026 data is in and Edmonton is on track for another strong year of homebuilding in the places people want to live. The rowhome revolution continues. 🧵 #yeg #yegcc #yimby jacobdawang.com/blog/2026/q1-building-permits/

I can't even begin to fathom how this list of minor upgrades to Line 1 can cost $6.7 Billion. About half the cost is the maintenance and storage facility, but again it shouldn't cost more to build that than Line 6 (which was itself catastrophically expensive).

Should the government be reserving a bunch of land in our cities for wealthy "estate zones," where every building is required to be located on 8000 square metres of land? Or could we allow that land to be divided up to create the co-housing community of your dreams?

The actual reason to be upset about tree equity is that the city totally ignores its supposed goal when revising its land use policies and tree bylaws. We made an EHON program to let more people live near trees and then almost immediately launched a "Growing Space for Trees" item that limits that.

Based on the consultation for the circulation study I attended last month, the plan appears to be to simply pave over a bunch of new areas to accomodate the trucks destroying the park rather than do anything about them. www.toronto.ca/city-governm...

One of the busiest parks in Toronto and as usual, it looks like trash. Staff destroying the landscapes they’re supposed to care for by driving full-size pickups through them. Incoherent design. Poor construction. Ugly fixtures. Somebody should lose their job over this.

I am running through Rosedale tonight and I think of all the accounts I've read of mid-century planners inventing the rules and restrictions *in Rosedale* that would become our zoning and how they thought they were just protecting "middle class" Rosedale from blight. I don't buy it at all.

Broad recurring pattern throughout the anglosphere.

More broadly, I think we need to learn the lessons of the anti-growth "quiet revolution" state-level reformers of the 1960s/70s, whose partisans likewise initially groused over whether any of the reforms they had passed would amount to anything. In hindsight, it rather obviously did—but why?

Extremely quiet day at the Planning and Housing Committee today. Can't tell if we've started the slowdown before the election or just the calm before the storm of MTSA and Avenues zoning implementation.

There are so many changes being discussed as part of Bill 98. I've talked about minimum lot size and official plan standardization and overhaul. Another interesting one is a consultation on overhauling Secondary Plans and SASPs. Short 🧵 1/ ero.ontario.ca/notice/026-0...

This video reminded me that luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/... exists and you can play around with the interactive stats. Despite slightly different distributions, Canada's three largest cities have roughly the same population weighted density.

I wish they had couched this opposition on any other principle other than just protecting economic incumbents. Many more reasonable arguments that could have been made without just sounding like reflexive Luddites. www.thestar.com/news/gta/way...

There are so many changes being discussed as part of Bill 98. I've talked about minimum lot size and official plan standardization and overhaul. Another interesting one is a consultation on overhauling Secondary Plans and SASPs. Short 🧵 1/ ero.ontario.ca/notice/026-0...

People often complain about the construction impact of new housing but some underground utilities work for a new build has shut down Strachan north of King and it is glorious how quiet the street is today.

The Church Street Pedestrianization project I’ve been working on the past year is finally public! I would love if u could sign the petition, do the survey, & speak to council (dm me if u are) (1/3) Info & Survey: torontocentreprojects.ca/en/projects/... Petition: win.newmode.net/campaigns/ex...

Oh good. The province approved the City's Official Plan Amendment for the Major Transit Station Area for GO station that neither of them want to fund. Perfect planning all around. No notes.

Amazingly, two simultaneous stories of people attempting to increase fuel supply by blockading the fuel supply.

So the subtext is that Torontonians are driving to High Park and then parking on local streets, leaving area residents aggrieved about not having exclusive access to *their* spots? They’d rather make worse the great park they live near than share the public curb space on their own streets

We're not far enough away from the eurozone crisis for everyone to have forgotten about optimal currency areas and the grinding pain of suboptimal monetary policy. But I'll take the train, building, elevator, and car regulations and proportional representation and more.

There's a few very nice visions for missing middle housing out there in Canadian cities. This one, and impossibletoronto.ca jump to mind. Neither would be allowed under the current rules in Toronto.

We need to allow our urban 'single family' neighbourhoods to evolve. Our vision: Accessible, zero emission, bright, social, bike oriented, #singlestair homes - allowed on individual residential lots - everywhere.

I think in the context of an announcement about a capital project and a request for a second (awful) one: -this is an odd and incorrect framing -these are not the right questions to be asking, these are just questions about a different topic stevemunro.ca/2026/04/10/t...

Just quietly the homicide rate in Toronto through the first 3 months of 2026 is showing another huge drop. And no one is talking about it.

Happy to see the TTC itself starting to do international comparison. Their list of items is good, lots of very low hanging fruit. I just hope they realize the difference between us and central European trams isn't just stop spacing. It's dozens of things.

This is good but I want to see a completely different alignment. This makes no sense. It's part radial, part circumferential. It would require transfers for basically many (most?) trips while being also circuitous. It feels like a horrible attempt to avoid extending all the more useful lines.