Where pavement is more important than people

Poor marginalized by urban sprawl

The Straight Goods Cyber Forum
with Larry Solway

Commentary:

  My cousin told me that the in-laws of his newly married son asked them to visit in Saskatoon. They live just outside the city. Which suggests that they have moved from the hurly burly of downtown, (even Saskatoon must have hurly burly) to the peace of the 'burbs'. I don't know for sure. I'm guessing.
  Around Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver is suburban sprawl that makes no sense except to developers, and to commuters longing for "space" and a front lawn and barbecue and "safety" for their children. That myth explodes under pressure from the twice-day commute through a huggle-muggle gridlock of cars, trucks and assorted wheeled monsters.
  The notion that a quiet cul-de-sac is a better place to raise kids and fight crabgrass absolutely escapes me. Been there. Done that.
  Toronto has just published their master plan for the millions will come here in the next twenty years just as they will come to Vancouver and Ottawa and perhaps to Saskatoon and Halifax and Winnipeg.
  We have fixated on urban sprawl, the destruction of farmland and the acceleration of traffic gridlock. There is another issue, even more significant: the marginalization of the poor. There are truly "poor" but even more, there and many so-called "working" poor, people who work in the city but can't afford to live there.
  The tony 50-foot-lot municipality of Markham, hung on the northeast edge of Toronto, is a choice place to live. The glittering malls of Markham and the chic main street village merchants need people to work there. The awful irony is that those people can't afford to live in Markham. The problem is repeated wherever lush suburbs bring new families.
  It is even worse in revitalized city cores. In downtown Manhattan, wealthy investment bankers and pre-crash dot com millionaires put real estate beyond the reach of everyone. Lofts in Soho and Greenwich Village and Chelsea are still astronomically expensive, even after the stock market meltdown. The posh Upper West Side and Upper East Side neighbourhoods still flourish with limos and dog-walkers and unbearable chic.
  To staff the retail and service establishments of this gorgeously bloated community employers bus in people from more than a hundred miles away in New Jersey and Connecticut. If you live in, say Patterson New Jersey, you can't afford to live in Manhattan, but that's where you work.
  Any master plan for a city must accommodate the need for places that just plain folks can live in. It won't be charity. It will be necessity.
  The issue everyone wants to talk about is still sprawl. People who have never read "The Life And Death of Great American Cities" cite Jane Jacobs for her crusade against the destruction of urban neighbourhoods by bisecting them with expressways designed to bring people in from the suburbs. She stopped the Spadina Expresssway and put an end to further expressway building. In spite of Jacobs, lobbyists for more and better highways as an answer to gridlock, (a fruitless foolish notion) still believe that Toronto needed the expressway to cut through neighbourhoods to funnel more cars to downtown. But that debate should be largely over.
  It is not over in many "great" American cities, where pavement is more important than people. It is not over in Phoenix, five times larger in area than Manhattan, where the superhighway expressway runs right to your door and where people live (and for all I know eat and sleep) in their air-conditioned sports utility vehicles.
  On the other hand there is Portland Oregon, where the constituent municipalities have agreed on a master plan to stop sprawl.
  Toronto's new master plan revives the earlier plan to intensify housing along major roads. Toronto can handle at least one million more people, just by adding to the stock of condominiums and for the sake of sanity, please, the stock of rental housing within the budgets of the very people who have to live there.
  I have a final note. I have always been a city person. Now more than ever, I view it as a "duty" to live downtown. So, along with tens of thousands who found the suburban cul de sac a snare and a delusion, I have moved to where I can walk to work, or take transit; a place where the car, if you choose to keep it, will be dusted off for out-of-town trips only. Many people have realized the folly of paying for and maintaining a car. So they don't own one. If they feel the urge to hit the highway they rent a car. They've done the arithmetic. It's cheaper.
  Let me diverge for a moment. A week ago I was forced to travel to Mississauga. With apologies to Gertrude Stein: "There's no there there." Cars and trucks were everywhere. There we no people on the streets. They were all in malls. They got there in their cars. You can't live there without a car. You can't shop or go a restaurant without a car. Downtown you take your shopping cart and walk to shop. Novel idea. The sad truth is that for all their pretensions, Mississauga and Markham and Vaughan, and for all I know Kanata and West Van are just Levittown 60 years later.
  The downside is most people can't afford downtown rent. I'm paying through the nose to live in a 1500 square foot loft right across from downtown's premier jazz club. But I sold my house for a profit of more than 2000 percent! That's what happens when you buy in 1961 and sell in 2002. Besides, I console myself that I save big time by cutting out one car and spending next to nothing on gas.
  I am a lot older (as one observant reader unkindly noted) than I appear in the ancient picture SG uses of me.

UNDER THE HEADING OF "CAN'T RESIST COMMENTING":
  The New York Times ran a piece about the bidding war for nurses in America. This caught my eye: "Hospitals around the country have 126,000 nursing vacancies, Health industry experts predict the number could triple over the next decade as baby boomers age. But the problem's roots go back a decade. As the health system shifted toward managed care, hospitals merged, and nurses were laid off to cut costs. Those who remained found themselves working longer hours and caring for more patients. When workloads became so heavy that hospitals had to hire again several years ago, many nurses had moved to work in other fields or to nursing jobs in the calmer environs of doctors' offices, pharmaceutical companies and neighborhood clinics."
  Sounds familiar!

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