But there cannot be a full renaissance without challenging progressive political power, which, unfortunately, has risen in Toronto.

Swing and miss by NatPo. Not that anyone should expect much from an opinion piece from any of a conservative American hedge fund’s papers.

NIMBYs can come in any political stripe and must be countered everywhere.

There’s grains of truth peppered in throughout this piece but it’s light on quality sources.

Cities will have to become denser mixed use places. More car dependent suburban sprawl is not the answer. It’s been proven not fiscally sustainable.

It’s exciting to see that the government could cut up to a year of development time with these blueprints. I’m curious what they’ll come up with that reflects the best of what modern BIM, digital twin, offsite manufacturing, CLT, and modular construction technologies can do.

Hopefully there will be a variety of to choose from for different kinds of environments and tastes. Personally I’d like to see some 6 storey apartments complexes, designed to accommodate car free lifestyles.

Because of competition

We don’t do that well in Canada

NIMBYS will be the downfall of this country. We don’t need more feasibility studies, we need bold action, ambition, and an inclusive permissive environment.

Canada, like many other places, has tried to balance minority rights with democracy but lately it seems like we’re doing a bad job of it and subsequently failing to address people’s basic needs. Strong mayor powers were supposed to address this but the Bonnie Crombie is missing in action.

This outcome could have been avoided if she had voted to break the tie. It shows how unserious she is about addressing the housing crisis and how terrible she’d be as OLP leader, and maybe premier.

Not as much as they hope it will.

Electric or not, we need less cars in cities, not more. Rather than making the next generation of mildly more sustainable but just as dangerous and space inefficient road congestants, we should be thinking harder about how best to meet people’s mobility needs in more safe, sustainable, and effective ways.

People need options not more car dependency.

Those resources are better used to build up public transportation, (e-)bike shares, sidewalks, and the accompanying infrastructure to go with it all, with seamless handoffs between modes.

Electric cars are here to save the auto industry, not the planet.

Cities don’t tax only based on the potential for what land could be doing, but instead include taxes on improvements to the land as well. As a result, there’s incentive to sprawl rather than pressure to densify.

From the article:

The existing open-source plugin, which we’ve been working on for a number of years, has served as the building block for RustRover. This plugin will remain open source and freely available on GitHub and the marketplace. However, moving forward, we will be investing our efforts into RustRover, which is closed source.

It started here: https://world.hey.com/dhh/turbo-8-is-dropping-typescript-70165c01

Toronto city council is unlikely to get its wish for a sales tax. They should instead raise property taxes, as they currently have the lowest property tax rate in the whole province.

I N D U C E D D E M A N D

Great for sidewalks, bike paths, and trains, but terrible for cars.

The Netherlands has annual reassessments, Denmark’s are biannual, and Sweden’s are every 3 years.

It’s been 6 years in Ontario.

Fair and productive property taxes require both good initial assessment and periodic re-evaluation to reflect changes in value.

These delays are contributing to an unfairness in our tax system and subsidizing the rich at the expense of the poor.

See this paper for more great information on property taxes and their reform: https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/81246/1/imfg_paper_21_slack_bird_sept19_2015.pdf

The Rust community has usually favoured more permissive licenses for some reason