Quote:
Originally Posted by phil235
Tearing down an older home on an urban lot and replacing it with a monster home is not intensification in the sense that term is commonly used, and is not being promoted by anyone. Complaints about those houses seem to be confusing this debate.
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If it were possible to make a clean break between the two, I would tend to agree, but as a practical matter that's not possible.
What we tend to see a lot of is
not the knocking down of an old house to replace it with a single monster house (i.e. your first sentence), but rather the knocking down of an old house (in some cases less than 1000 sq. ft.) to replace it with a monster semi-detached house.
So you're getting both "McMansionization" (i.e. replacing a small house with an enormous one) and intensification (i.e. replacing a single house with a semi-detached house) at the same time.
Then you add to that the fact that often these houses clear off any trees and landscaping from one end of the property to the other (including, at times, gardens that had literally decades of work put into them), have prominent garages, extensive paved frontage*, high-level entrances and then their new residents are as aloof to existing residents as the façades their houses present to the street and you have a slow-boiling seething dislike of "intensification" on your hands.
As Ottawan notes above, the major projects become the lightening rod for this dislike, perhaps because of their wider visibility and the fact that "consultations" and various community meetings are sometimes part of the process that they go through. It probably doesn't help matters that the larger developments are often pushed through with the same kind of aloofness and even arrogance exhibited by the developers of the smaller ones - developers declaring from the outset that they'll go to the OMB if they don't get their way really isn't conducive to a serious discussion.
"Extremification", is, somewhat ironically, a pretty apt description for this kind of redevelopment.
Somehow, I doubt this can go on forever. Sooner or later, the best friend of the developers and the planners at City Hall, the OMB, is going to come under increasing attention at Queen's Park. The OMB exists as a non-democratic institution within a democracy that routinely overrides the public or democratic will and is generally not seen to be acting in the public interest. The OMB's defenders like to compare it to the courts, and in the sense that the courts are also a non-democratic institution within a democracy they're correct. But the courts are also widely seen to act in the public interest, whereas the same cannot be said of the OMB. Sooner or later the OMB will be abolished or heavily reformed such that all or most Council planning decisions can no longer be overturned.
The danger is that the planning and development industry will have so poisoned the public's mood by then - my guess is that the OMB will carry out one outrage too many, or possibly a few of them in short succession across the province in the run-up to an election - that the pendulum will swing far too far in the opposite direction once power is finally returned to the public and their municipal representatives.
*These infills get away with a degree of paving over that you couldn't actually do in new suburbs. Most of the streets in Westboro don't have sidewalks and most don't have curbs either. In some sense, they're sort of like woonerfs and there are many advantages to it, not least is that there is a far more gentle transition from property to street. But it is also being taken advantage of by developers to create pairs of 25' wide driveways that would be impossible ion a street with curbs requiring curb cuts.