Thread by @BramRecorder

1/ A thread on redevelopment and older post-war suburbs in #Brampton.

When an older suburb is experiencing neighbourhood changeover due to long time residents dying or downsizing, many of these buildings will need serious work, enough that tearing it down might be preferable.

https://twitter.com/g_meslin/status/1315829506985398273

2/ this isn't necessarily the fault of the long time owners, it gets hard to maintain stuff when you get older, and major renovations are disruptive.

3/ depending on the lot size, subdivision of the lot probably makes the most sense, you reduce the land cost per unit, but in most of these areas, this is banned, but that won't necessarily stop a teardown.

4/ Blocking land subdivision changes the highest and best use, what happens instead in those older and smaller houses get torn down, and much bigger houses get put up instead (see quote tweet in the top tweet).

5/ So then you get disruptive construction, but no net new housing gets added, so there is no societal gain. #Brampton though decided it wanted to ban that kind of redevelopment, which again, changes the feasible highest and best use. What happens instead?

6/ Now the highest and best use of these buildings is rooming houses.

Anyone want to guess what happened after #Brampton implemented the mature neighbourhood zoning policy, to block the ability to teardown and replace with much bigger houses?

7/ Now we've got rooming house issues springing up in those areas. While replacement with bigger houses resulted in temporary construction problems, but no new households, rooming houses have long construction impact, but add a ton of people.

8/ In practical terms, this means the City gets more people it needs to provide services for, but no new tax revenue to pay for it, and in #Brampton, that can be a dozen or even two dozen in one house (record is 27). You get noise, parking, and trash issues.

9/ those can cause neighbourhood decline issues. The best part is since the City of #Brampton de facto bans rooming houses, these aren't licenced, so the city has to go through lengthy court proceedings to deal with them. If they were licenced, the City would have leverage.

10/ Best part is after it has been used for a rooming house, it has probably been subject to all sorts of shoddy and undocumented modifications, which means now it needs a ton of work, and since these a post war suburbs are so common, there isn't much value to fix them up.

11/ If enough spring up in one area, it can drive out existing residents, see what's happening near Sheridan College. We keep adding demand from more international students, & if we keep down supply, prices shoot up, enabling rooming houses to spread into even more neighbourhoods

12/ congratulations #Brampton, to avoid redevelopment, you created a lose lose situation, where everyone suffers. This is what you get when you implement policies that completely ignore economics.

13/ so the City of #Brampton has now successfully destabilized neighbourhoods, causing growing blight, vulnerable populations being packed in inhumane conditions, how do we get off this miserable ride?

14/ Demand is too high for redeveloping malls to satiate it, and we don't have enough spare employment land to convert, which means we need to redevelop residential areas, and add a whole lot of units.

15/ so how do we do that? Take Toronto's basic R (residential) zone and rezone the older suburbs in #Brampton to that, plus remove minimum parking requirements by good transit; this isn't that complicated, but it does take actual leadership.