Sidewalk Labs, the private partner in Toronto’s waterfront ‘Neighbourhood of the Future’ is a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. The ‘public’ partner is Waterfront Toronto, a corporation created by three levels of government: City of Toronto, Province of Ontario, and Canada, to develop Toronto’s waterfront.
So this project has . . . good ideas? Great Ideas? Disastrous Ideas? Who knows? The project is currently . . . awash? . . . in a sea of optimism. No, not a sea, which suggests some transparency. This project is to date a mire of sticky vagueness, trendy terms and questionable metrics.
Futuristic? Maybe. Maybe not. Learn a little about the project in a CITYLAB article. CITYLAB is doubtful about the ‘futuristic’ claims, describing the project as contemporary good planning practice with high tech bells and whistles tacked on: Sidewalk Labs’ Neighbourhood Of The Future In Toronto Is Getting Closer
“For starters, it won’t be all condos,” says Jesse Shapins, Sidewalk Labs’ director of public realm in a press release. That might seem a profoundly lame introduction to a glossy new future. But it has a virtue of necessity in Toronto, where practically the only thing being built these days are condos.
As far as contemporary good planning practice is concerned, the neighbourhood will include retail, business and residential. The residential will include housing for rent and for sale. Zoning will be inclusionary.1 So far, the project theoretically ticks all the right boxes. But practical details? Not yet.
Take affordability. It’s a mandated feature of any public/private partnership these days. Sidewalk Labs’ word salad proposes to include housing that is, ‘below market,’ ‘affordable,’ ‘middle income’, ‘deeply affordable,’ and ‘shared equity.’ How many of these forms of housing are actually affordable? Two? All of them? Depending on precisely how the terms are used, each may fit somebody’s definition of affordability.2
Not even our own analysis of affordability definitions will help you with the term ‘deeply affordable’ — from our daily surveys it’s a species of animal previously unknown to affordable science.
Anyway, more to the point, how many of the units will fit the various affordability definitions? How many will support single people? Families? How long will those units remain affordable? A few years? More or less forever, protected by a land trust? All we know now was pretty much known at the start of the project: that it will include ‘some’ currently undefined housing that is affordable to ‘some’ people.
A rather unusual use of the term ‘diversity’ however, gives affordablehousingaction.org some cause to make a prediction about the project. Jesse Shapins describes “. . . a minimum of 20 percent affordable housing, making sure that this community reflects the full diversity of Toronto.”
Diverse? With Toronto’s population speaking two hundred different languages, the city is truly diverse. What is not at all clear is why ‘affordable’ equals ‘diversity’. To our ear it sounds suspiciously like the thinking that infects virtually all public/private partnerships: affordable housing is a nuisance, an expensive one that must be sprinkled into a project like some kind of spice — the least amount possible for the lowest possible expense, explained away by a statement about diversity.
Our prediction: that regardless of all the other merits of this project which will no doubt be revealed as time passes, this ‘neighbourhood of the future,’ like virtually all public private partnerships, will not keep pace with the deepening affordable housing crisis, let alone help to tackle it.
Can the City of Toronto and its partners really afford to fiddle with these heady, world-class public relations extravaganzas while their population burns? The city’s waiting list for its subsidized social housing approaches 100,000 households. What kind of a dent in this backlog will the ‘neighbourhood of the future make? 125 units? Indeed, any social housing at all? Try: My Way Is The Highway: Toronto Renters & Buyers Losing Faith With Government, Consider Heading For The Hills
