It is also hugely misleading to believe that a single project will not have impact on the future developments in the area, along the forementioned lines. Buildings don't create people - they house people - and if you think density has no impact on infrastructure needs, just visit the subway during rush.
All things being equal, if there was no densification in the entertainment district, the crush on those subways would be even worse since current residents would be redistributed to areas where they'd be much more transit and auto reliant.
The City's own data suggests that every person moving into the core reduces transit demand into the core by 0.8-0.9 trips; if you wanted to reduce pressure on transit the best thing would be to drastically increase the rate of residential construction within walking distances of the CBD.
Just to put things in perspective, compare M-G to the new RBC building on Harbour. MG is proposed to total 252 floors, over three buildings. RBC, OTOH, is just 30. Yet while MG will have 2,600 units, 4,000 people will work at RBC. What's more, the vast majority of those RBC workers will arrive and depart within peak hours. The overall contribution of residential buildings to peak congestion downtown is minor. Even the biggest residential projects have lower impacts than minor commercial projects.
Lenser said:
I'm merely pointing out that every new residential tower adds to the existing, strained load.
Much as that's intuitive it's not necessarily true. Peak hour transit use and congestion is mostly a function of CBD employment. The density of jobs in and around the CBD definitely causes strains on transit infrastructure, the density of residential structures much less so. If each new resident in a given condo tower reduces trips into the core by close to 1, building more residential units in the core hardly overloads the system.
I wasn't being trite by saying buildings don't have kids. What we're talking about here isn't reducing or increasing demand on the system, it's simply rearranging it. If people don't live in the ED, they'll just live somewhere else and create even more strain.
Lenser said:
Toronto's growth of late has a great deal to do with its popularity as a safe and stable destination city and its burgeoning reputation as a happening place in the world; pretending it were otherwise is absurd. Part of what makes contemporary cities attractive is inspired, daring architectural projects - I'd have thought you'd agree to that in principle.
You're right that I agree in principle to what you say. Another way M-G could encourage growth in Toronto would be, in so far as any new residential supply decreases prices, by lowering prices and inducing more demand. In both cases these effects would be totally swamped by the millions of other considerations people make in choosing where to live.