How the Star's Growing Pains series aims to offer solutions amid growing urban density

Density - and how the city deals with it - greatly impacts our quality of life in Toronto, says the team behind the Star's housing series.

Thestar.com
March 16, 2018
By Kenyon Wallace

A North York school that students can see from their apartment balconies but can't attend. A cluster of modern waterfront condos in Etobicoke surrounded by traffic-clogged roads. Cars, trucks, streetcars and buses competing for space along crawling downtown streets during rush hour.

These are just a few of the challenges of living in an increasingly crowded city that the Star has explored in its Growing Pains series - a weekly examination of the impacts density is having on our ability to live, work, play and get around in Toronto.

Spearheaded by Doug Cudmore, senior editor in beats, bureaus and columnists, the project grew out of a newsroom discussion involving several editors and reporters late last year about how the Star could highlight the city's housing issues. Common themes emerged from the discussion, such as affordability and livability. But the team decided to focus on density, and how the city deals with it, as it is one of the issues that most impacts our quality of life.

The team decided to highlight how various Toronto neighbourhoods were being affected by increasing density - and ways to make things better.

But where to start? Various beat reporters, namely Education Reporter Andrea Gordon, Transportation Reporter Ben Spurr, Real Estate Reporter Tess Kalinowski and City Hall Reporter Jennifer Pagliaro were asked to help map out potential areas of coverage.

Former intern reporter Alex McKeen (now a reporter for Metro News in Vancouver), helped kick off the series with a story that delved into census data to identify areas that were intensifying rapidly. She compared the number of people per hectare in each census tract between 2011 and 2016. What she found was some neighbourhoods, such as Liberty Village and Humber Bay Shores, were intensifying at rates many times the city's average. Her research culminated in a story earlier this month on how developments are popping up across the GTA, often without sufficient access to transit, parks and schools.

Cudmore says he believes a lot of the problems facing Toronto aren't due to density per se, but rather the fact that the city has a tendency to address density in "easy, profitable" ways, such as building more housing, while pushing the harder planning challenges further into the future.

"Think of the great upheaval we felt this winter as the city closed King St. W. to through traffic," Cudmore says. "We have to get those overstuffed streetcars through, in large part because we suddenly built a dense neighbourhood in Liberty Village, but we didn't quite build the transit capacity to deal with them. That's not likely just going to be a one-off."

When it comes to figuring out which services need to be addressed, the team relies on beat reporters who have spent months or years building contacts and observing changes in their areas of coverage.

To show how density is impacting how we educate our children, Education Reporter Andrea Gordon delved deeper into the Yonge and Sheppard area, where residents had been complaining for years about how their kids couldn't go to the most nearby school. She wanted to give a first-hand look at the situation, reporting earlier this month of children in a North York highrise condominium who can look out over McKee Public School next door but can't attend. That's because the school is at 110 per cent capacity (the school has doubled in size to almost 800 students in the last 10 years).

Transportation Reporter Ben Spurr knew residents of Etobicoke's Humber Bay Shores, made up of modern condo towers close to Lake Ontario, had been advocating for a new GO Train station nearby. He wrote a story published last weekend on the need to help alleviate its roadways that are clogged with traffic every weekday morning due to a poorly planned transportation network.

"Issues like municipal zoning bylaws and appeals at the Ontario Municipal Board may sound boring on their face, but they have a dramatic effect on the daily lives of citizens," Spurr says. "I think what we were trying to get at with this series is how small decisions taken - or not taken - by local leaders can snowball and create huge problems for residents years down the line. The local government then needs to go back in and try to fix a problem that wouldn't have been nearly as severe if collectively we'd exercised some forethought in the first place."

Cudmore echoes Spurr's assessment.

"One of the goals of this series is to tie together a few strands of urban frustration and to show readers that they were related," he said. "The other was to look for solutions and give them some air; for instance, Andrea's piece spelled out clearly how funding regulations meant that some kids might never get a chance to go to their neighbourhood school. There are changes that can be made on those fronts."

Cudmore stresses Growing Pains isn't about NIMBYism or fighting density.

"It's the opposite of that. But if we don't address the details of density, it's a change that might not last."