What should be on the new chief planner’s to-do list

[M II A II R II K]

What should be on the new chief planner’s to-do list


August 7th, 2012

By John Lorinc

Read More: http://spacingtoronto.ca/2012/08/07/...ing+Toronto%29

Progressive Toronto was feeling pretty darn good about its collective self last week when the City revealed it would be hiring the poised planning consultant Jennifer Keesmaat to take over as chief planner. In a round of media interviews (including one with Spacing editor Matt Blackett), she made all the right noises, stressing her interest in pedestrian life, bike lanes, and transit. With all due respect to her outlook, it’s difficult to imagine a new chief planner speaking any other language: her comments echo consensus views in the profession, expressed in cities from Calgary to Los Angeles to New York and beyond.

- No one ever expected the City to hire someone cast in Mayor Rob Ford’s mold. But Keesmaat will be dropped through a ring of fire when she starts the job in September, given that council in October will be considering what to do with a suite of far-reaching staff reports on a long-term transit expansion and financing plan. She’ll have to stand up to the likes of James Pasternak and Giorgio Mammoliti and resist the temptation to equivocate in response to their queries about subways. (I’m not even going to speculate about how brother Doug intends to conduct himself.) No one, I should add, should delude themselves about the length of Keesmaat’s leash: the City’s de facto chief planner is deputy city manager John Livey, a tough-minded veteran planner who holds the keys to the waterfront file and much else that goes on in the murky corners of the bureaucracy.

- Acknowledging Keesmaat’s official role, however, I’d suggest she faces two other major priorities that are every bit as important as the mobility issues she foregrounded in the media last week. Start with defending the Employment Lands. The City has a lot of the land zoned for industrial or commercial uses, much of which is either sitting fallow or at risk of being gobbled up by voracious condo developers. In my view, job one for the City, broadly, and Keesmaat, as chief planner, is developing a novel and imaginative strategy to bring employment back to the 416, and not just the office/institutional districts downtown.

- The chief planner, of course, is limited in his/her ability to alter global or even regional investment patterns. Yet the GTA Greenbelt/Places to Grow regulations should, in theory, draw commercial/industrial investment back towards the city, just as these growth management policies have prompted subdivision developers to build downtown. But Invest Toronto seems to have had extremely limited success attracting business to the city. In 2011, according to its annual report [PDF], the agency persuaded just 19 companies to settle here, adding between 549 to 1,221 jobs. (For you kids keeping score at home, that’s a .4% increase in the number of new establishments in the city and a rounding error in terms of Toronto’s overall employment base.)

- Meanwhile, Build Toronto officials, having been given firm marching orders by brother Doug to rapidly monetize the city’s land holdings, appear to have shifted their development priorities to the residential market, which is to say merrily transferring land to the aforementioned voracious condo builders. Keesmaat, who professes an interest in doing things differently, should take it upon herself to spearhead a multi-department effort to figure out how the city can turn this particular page, and do so without transforming all those parcels of land into shopping malls. Her other major challenge is breathing sanity back into the condo sector. Two generations from now, Torontonians will look at one another and wonder what the hell we were thinking, building so many shabbily constructed glass towers filled to the brim with veal fattening pens masquerading as starter investments.

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