重口味SM

Don't forget about community centres amid Toronto's condo boom, writes U of T's Jeff Biggar in the Globe and Mail

Construction cranes dot the downtown Toronto skyline
Construction cranes dot the Toronto skyline in the summer of 2019 (photo by Rene Johnston/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

With condo construction booming in Toronto, it鈥檚 important to not forget about community centres and parks, 重口味SM researcher Jeff Biggar writes in a Globe and Mail op-ed.

Section 37 of Ontario鈥檚 Planning Act allows the city to make deals with developers to pay for community amenities in exchange for allowing them to build higher and denser buildings. However, bureaucratic errors and insufficient enforcement have resulted in some of these deals falling through.

鈥淧ointing the finger at a developer shirking their responsibility to pay up is easy, but when looking deeper we see a municipal system with cracks and blind spots,鈥 writes Biggar, a lecturer at U of T Scarborough鈥檚 department of human geography.

鈥淭oronto is tripping over itself to build higher and denser buildings, but if supporting community infrastructure doesn鈥檛 follow 鈥 reliably, consistently and in a timely manner 鈥 the promise of development will fail.鈥

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