City Council: "Public Art will solve the housing crisis!"
I mean, I'm always glad to see investment in public art, but when we're putting more money into that than affordable housing, it makes the city seem really out of touch.
The public art policy is linked below:
https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/9090-aoda-public-art-guidelines.pdf
It aims at 1% of estimated building value.
I think it's fair to ask whether that's the right formula; though, in fairness, the City has multiple, overlapping priorities all of which need funding.
While housing needs more money, I'm not really keen on tying that to developments in terms of cash-funding, as it's somewhat unpredictable/volatile and that makes planning/construction challenging.
Even within the context of funding art though (or parks, or housing) too much seems ad hoc. Such that when money does arrive, it's simply shifted off to a bank account to await being used to defray costs
on a project the City will otherwise undertake at some undetermined point in the future.
I think that's rather ass-backwards.
First you should decide what you need; then you should finance it and build it.
How do we know how much money to raise when we don't have a prescribed list of projects with a budget?
This is what leads to:
Under-sized parks that aren't very functional
Public Art that isn't particularly interesting or grand and has no maintenance fund
Housing money that may well be used to renovate existing TCHC stock that would have been renovated anyway, and these dollars simply reduce the City's debt or allow tax revenue to be spent elsewhere.