Toronto Renters Forum

Monday night's “planning townhall” (sic) in Ward 16 was lively in terms of lots of people wanting to engage city and TDSB officials, but the issues were grim nonetheless. Just as an example besides inflation and the tight housing market, people who live near the C.P.R. were still quite concerned about the Mississauga train crash!

I posted a bit about the meeting on my 25 Problems (dot com) board. More to follow.

If you're not up to speed on the train crash and the current Office of Emergency Management see '1979_Mississauga_train_derailment' in Wikipedia English.

City planners held another virtual “community consultation” in Ward 16 last evening - this time it was regarding a revised plan by the Menkes group to build around the Foresters building  on the SE corner of Don Mills and Eglinton. Lots more towers may be going up there, transforming the area and not always for the better.

Councillor Jaye Robinson has called the process that surrounds these things (virtual consultations) “daunting”... I think that's putting it mildly. Example screenshots... in the first one my participation in the meeting ended abruptly; note the "privacy statement" which - wait for it! - has more to do with Northern California than Toronto Canada. I think the second one is a reference to a proposed build on the golf course in Flemingdon Park... Marian Prejel is a skilled presenter but here she's working in the restrictive space of the planning office's AIC.





It's hard to get a count but it looked like maybe 25 people participated in last night's session. Absolutely the #1 takeaways were public transit and the lack of any affordable housing in the Menkes plan. And Yo! Developers! Hands off our mature trees!

The bizarre Cisco "webinar" (sic) format also prevents you from networking with your fellow citizens. One participant strongly cautioned the planners against using A.I. techniques to convert audio from the meeting into text, suggesting a preference for manual transcription. I have never, ever seen one of these things transcribed or even summarized, on a councillor's or education trustee's web page.




The March 27 “planning townhall” (sic) in Ward 16 was lively in terms of lots of people wanting to engage city and TDSB officials, but the issues were grim nonetheless. Just as an example besides inflation and the tight housing market, people who live near the C.P.R. were still quite concerned about the Mississauga train crash!

I posted a bit about the meeting on my 25 Problems (dot com) board. More to follow.

If you're not up to speed on the train crash and the current Office of Emergency Management see '1979_Mississauga_train_derailment' in Wikipedia English. You may also want to look up the relationship between former CPR boss E. Hunter Harrison and the big U.S. roads like Norfolk Southern. I am not making this up.