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Honor system.
That's not going to work.

The fix is simply. There are bound to be entire departments of city staff running at half speed right now, many working from home. Task these staffers to finding ghost hotels and other bylaw-contravening units on AirBnB and other STR sites. Once identified, the City legal office sends a cease order with threat of commercial designation and property seizure.

Why this City government pussy foots around on important issues when they have hammers at their disposal baffles me. Private and commercial vehicles parked on bike lanes.... f#ck the $150 tickets. If we're hitting fare scofflaws with $800 tickets on the TTC, automobile owners should get $1,000 fine for every hour they sit in a bike lane. And immediate clamp and tow for all black plate (commercial) operators. Hit them hard, hit them often, and make sure you have enough enforcement people to near guarantee the bastards get dinged. Same goes for illegal STRs, hit them hard.... make the fines huge, $1,000 for every day an illegal unit is seen on STR sites.... property seizure and auction for multiple offenders.
 
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Can anyone that lives there chime in? I knew it was bad, but sheesh!
I have never been in the building, but I am acquainted with someone who moved to Toronto from Chicago for work, with much of that work requiring time at the Scotiabank Arena. She knew almost nothing about Toronto, so decided the best option was to rent a place as close to the arena as possible, which wound up being one of the ICE towers. She says the building would be totally dead and empty on Mondays to Wednesdays. The elevators empty with no stops from a 30-something floor to the ground level, no one but a security guard in the lobby, and the whole building silent. Then on Thursday evenings it would start to change; there's suddenly more people around she had never seen before; and it would reach a peak on Saturday nights where there would suddenly be music blasting from every suite on her floor at max volume, parties that spilled out into the hallways and would go on until 3 a.m., or later; and the police were in the building too many times to count. She was thankful her job occasionally required travel out of town for the weekend, and would dread the weekends she had to actually stay in Toronto. She moved out as soon as the 12-month lease was over.
 
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I have never been in the building, but I am acquainted with someone who moved to Toronto from Chicago for work, with much of that work requiring time at the Scotiabank Arena. She knew almost nothing about Toronto, so decided the best option was to rent a place as close to the arena as possible, which wound up being one of the ICE towers. She says the building would be totally dead and empty on Mondays to Wednesdays. The elevators empty with no stops from a 30-something floor to the ground level, no one but a security guard in the lobby, and the whole building silent. Then on Thursday evenings it would start to change; there's suddenly more people around she had never seen before; and it would reach a peak on Saturday nights where there would suddenly be music blasting from every suite on her floor at max volume, parties that spilled out into the hallways and would go on until 3 a.m., or later; and the police were in the building too many times to count. She was thankful her job occasionally required travel out of town for the weekend, and would dread the weekends she had to actually stay in Toronto. She moved out as soon as the 12-month lease was over.

Sounds like a nightmare.
 
Not healthy for our economy or any other quality-of-life measure:

GTA rents hit record $3,000, creating a ‘very alarming’ situation​

The tighter rental market is pushing tenants into smaller units at the same time development of purpose-built units is stalling out, says Urbanation.

By Tess Kalinowski
Fri., April 21, 2023

 
We are already seeing the effects. Nurses, teachers, middle class workers, are either a-leaving the city, or b- changing careers , moving to investment banking or real estate spec - why contribute to society and the fabric of communities when you can make much more doing much less. Want to be a cop? Now you just need to pass Grade 12. Go into any Toronto school, you will see how many unqualified teachers are in roles, nursing shortages in all hospitals. The salary indexed to cost of living is absolutely insane, there is no way to live in Toronto unless you have access to generational (ie. parent real estate) wealth. Why isn't this a bigger issue?
 
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What is a reasonable way to allow quicker development of new units? Because clearly it's something the City is not going to do willingly.
 
What is a reasonable way to allow quicker development of new units? Because clearly it's something the City is not going to do willingly.
Steamlining and legislating to encourage and ensure that low-complexity densification developments are built quickly in the Yellow Belt + fixing the LTB system. I said in another thread that if we can divert at least some of the process of small-developer mansionization into low-rise multi-unit housing within the pre-cul-de-sac era Yellow Belt (i.e. along the Yonge Line from Bloor-Sheppard), we would have a steady stream of new housing units entering the marketplace.

By my terms- low-complexity is a project that is simpler in terms of materials required, code requirements, time required to build, manpower, etc.- which mostly encompasses low-rise typologies and renovations within the current housing typologies.
 

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