Canada’s political and media class has spent years chasing convenient villains to blame for the housing crisis, pointing the finger at foreign buyers, immigrants, supply shortages, zoning rules, or an overheated market.
Canada’s political and media class has spent years chasing convenient villains to blame for the housing crisis, pointing the finger at foreign buyers, immigrants, supply shortages, zoning rules, or an overheated market.
Nobody wants to live in Kingston, come on.
This made die laughing hahaha
That’s halfway by road not halfway.
Also Belleville is closer to half on the 401 than Kingston.
Even worse.
To be serious, the new Alto high speed rail line will go through Peterborough. Could be that it helps spur some development there.
The problem with Peterborough is kicking the people out to start building apartments and have no low density housing in the city.
That’s why it must be in an undeveloped place.
I really don’t see why we can’t infill Toronto and Ottawa. Make single-family home builds illegal, only triplexes or bigger. Kill off parking minimums. Expropriate demolition-by-neglect sites and abandoned commercial property. Same thing with Peterborough if we want that built up. Building a metropolis from scratch usually ends up awful anyway, see Brasilia as a notorious example (in James C Scott’s Seeing Like a State.
As someone who lives in Peterborough, and has to look at the burned-out husk of the Baskin Robbins Ice Cream building every day and wonders “Why the hell isn’t this housing?”, I can agree with all of this.
As seen in China, it only makes sense to build the city and then move people in. Intermittent building causes inefficiency as you have to build around people and people have to work around building.
Infilling keeps Canada separate and limited. As per the above we have to put the GTA people somewhere while we demo their homes.
If we can string together cities across Canada with rail that has a 30 minute to 1 hour between stops then it makes Canada function much stronger logistically and muvh more defensible.