Has it ever occured to anyone (who knows anything about how the business world works
) that these large retail outlets would rather cater to people with cars because they can carry more goods? How much can you drag on a steetcar? What will your little buggy take?
One issue here is creating shopping opportunities within the city that do not just cater to the car-driving bulk shopper, with all the land-use consequences that entails (business size, parking space, environmental issues, etc.).
Why should I have to walk 1 or 2 km. to shop for food for the next couple of meals, or to pick up some milk, simply because a huge mega-super-market has effectively shutdown smaller, more easily accessible places closer to me, or makes any such businesses economically infeasible?
We have to ask: whose rights are primary here, the city, or the business plans of large corporations? Which kind of urban development will create city neighbourhoods with the mix of uses and human scale we need? These are choices we can and must make--though when I say things like that, I always hear the cynical retort "Oh, how naive, the idea that you can oppose what people/powers-that-be want..." from people who've evidently always "go with the flow" and accept what happens ("whatever...")--but who exactly is being naive here, if they really want changes in the way land-use planning is done in Toronto and Ontario?
These changes would have come from a revised sharing of authority and responsibility for planning decisions.
For instance, imagine that the land at, and adjacent to, 629 Eastern, had been remediated to provincial residential standards and that something like the original mixed-use development proposed in 2003-5 had gone forward: then the city would have had to address the question of how and whether they could prevent adjacent tracts from undergoing a quick, lucrative development into a sea of condos (or "lofts" as the trendies call them), abandoning any pretence of mixed-use.
Clearly each and every city requirement for serious mixed-use (and the proportions of that mixed-use) set on other developers would have generated an appeal to the OMB, unless and until the city could make thorough development decisions that are responsible *in the eyes of all the parties involved*, and that would have stuck, without regard to being dragged in front of the OMB for the final decision.
In that context of authority and decision-making responsibility diffused over two levels of government, the baffling decision by the city in 2005 to refuse mixed-use development at 629 Eastern becomes a little more understandable, but even so hardly acceptable. The subsequent events--the Rose Corp., having sold a half-interest in the land to Smartcentres (who would become the primary development agent), prevailed upon the OMB/province to "grandfather" the original OMB appeal for these new owners and their entirely new proposed development--is even less acceptable.
No, the proposed development at 629 Eastern repudiates any kind of sensible land-use planning in the public interest, and it will show a city and province incapable of making the necessary decisions.
