Gifts shouldn't overshadow good city planning
While philanthropy directed at the public realm is welcome, it shouldn’t come at the expense at solid urban planning.

thestar.com
By Edward Keenan
Oct. 22, 2016

If you’re really broke, it is nice to have a friend who likes to take you out to fancy dinners every now and then.

They can afford it, and they enjoy sharing the experience with you, and you appreciate the treat, and the relief it brings from the grind of trying to figure out how to make ends meet. It can lift your spirits - doing something you could never afford or justify, when you have so many other desperate essentials you need, but for a few hours you’ve got the relief of the wine in your glass and something amazing on the end of your fork and a friend across the table. The experience can be restorative, even motivating. It’s certainly an occasion for gratitude.

But what it is not is a solution to your money problems. How could it be? It doesn’t pay your rent or put food in your fridge or keep the lights on or settle your kid’s dentist bill. You can’t really ask your friend to pay for all those things for you - if they did you’d no longer be a friend accepting a gift and sharing an experience, you’d be a dependent living at the mercy of a patron’s whims.

The nice dinners out, and your friend’s willingness to make a gift of them, don’t fundamentally change what you need, nor what you need to do: find a source of income that covers your basic necessities, and beyond.

I was considering this recently, as a former broke-guy-with-some-generous-friends, because it seems like a pretty close analogy to how philanthropy applies to public works projects and public services. Tuesday morning, Mayor John Tory announced that private donors had given the city $3.4 million to help continue to fashion a giant park out of parts of the Don River Valley. This comes just under a year after we learned Judy and Wilmot Matthews would donate $25 million to construct a new park and public space under a stretch of the Gardiner Expressway (the Matthews’ are among the list of donors to the Don Valley project, too).

At the announcement of both projects, Tory made sure to mention not just the city’s gratitude for the donations, but his hope that they would set examples for other wealthy donors.

Which rubs some people the wrong way. “I don’t understand why, in a democratic society, wealthy people get an extra vote about what we build in the city of Toronto,” Councillor Gord Perks told my colleague David Rider. “We elect governments to decide what our priorities are and it undermines the role of government when wealthy people decide instead.”

In a similar vein, city hall writer Neville Park of Torontoist tweeted, “It makes park creation/placement dependent on the whims of wealthy donors, not solid urban planning principles,” and, “I’m afraid this will continue to marginalize places that aren’t tourist hotspots or undergoing ‘revitalization.’”

And they do have a point, if we start to see private donations as a primary or even regular source of income that we can plan around - and further, if we set our city-building priority list based on which projects draw donations from rich folks, and put those that attract less capital on the back burner. It’s not a stray concern in a city that has solicited donations (and made public service decisions contingent on them) when weather in recent years made it possible to consider keeping outdoor ice rinks open longer, and the High Park Zoo was, for a time, kept open because of private donations.

Donations are good! But as city planner Danny Brown replied to Neville Park on Twitter, “Where are the wealthy private donors building affordable housing, donating to the TTC, etc.” They don’t typically pay for those things, and in a way it would be more of a problem if they did - no one wants to see decisions about which impoverished family’s housing is maintained or condemned based on the whims of a rich donor. We, collectively, need to decide our priorities based on our collective needs and wants. And we, collectively, pay for them based on collective resources, typically taxes and fees.

It’s nice if for some reason some people start chipping in extra - it gives us more to work with, and theoretically allows us to get more done. But not if it makes us reshape our plans to move the priorities of specific people of means to the top of the list. In this country, we have long recoiled in shock whenever the phrase “two tier healthcare” is brought up, because it’s considered important to the premise of our universal system that people not be able to jump the line by paying extra. Surely the same premise applies to government policy.

Which is not to say that philanthropy directed at the public realm should not be welcome, in my opinion. And though less pronounced than in the U.S., there is a tradition of it here. High Park was a gift to the city from John George Howard, who imposed conditions (including that access to it always be free of charge), and it is impossible to imagine the west end without it. Our public library system, today the largest and most used in the world, was built up partly on the generosity of American rich dude Andrew Carnegie, whose donations built 10 library branches (seven of them still in operation) between 1907 and 1916. Dentonia Park, in the Crescent Town neighbourhood north of Danforth, was given to the city by Susan Denton Massey in memory of her husband Walter Massey.

It’s important to note here that I do not actually think parks or libraries are the direct municipal equivalent of a fancy dinner - look at High Park or the Riverdale library and they do not appear, in retrospect, to be frills: they are basic, necessary building blocks of great neighbourhoods. But before they were there, the wish for them might have appeared a luxury, hard to justify spending scarce dollars on when compared to the desperate need for a basic sewage system the city suffered in the early 1900s, or the 80,000-unit-long social housing backlog we face today. And so, in the past, some of these things have been given as gifts by philanthropists - useful things, inspiring things, motivating things it likely would not have been willing to prioritize itself.

Like an invitation from a well-off friend, they are gifts we should feel free to accept, and to appreciate and enjoy. We should be grateful for them, and for the generosity of spirit of those who gave them. But we cannot mistake them for methods of dealing with our biggest priorities, by finding our own resources, and fulfilling our own needs.