For about five minutes this year the City of Toronto website had a page with an easy search for all the development proposals in various stages taking place. When I tried to use the same Advanced Search yesterday, it was useless: drop-down menus would let you take only one choice, mapping was non-functional, the entered address would send you to wrong parts of the city. It’s almost as if the city doesn’t really want you to have this information easily accessible (I’m sure the knee-jerk NIMBYsm, both of the well-off and ‘we are a humble community’ variety, is the major time sucker in the many ‘community consultations’ but the process itself is pure theatre: no amount of ‘community’ bellyaching will change one iota in development plans if you happen to live in one of the zoning areas in which the city chucks all the development with abandon - as I have been for the last 6 years).
This area, named by the real estate agents Upper Jarvis, already dense with <20-storey rental buildings and high condominium towers, is about to undergo a degree of intensification that I would describe, in highly technical terms, as fucking insane. This is a screen grab that I took when the City’s development search tool worked well: