The city of Toronto is doing a community meeting on its plan for Danforth Avenue tonight, and it's some incredibly backward policy. A subway, a second subway line coming, and this is the future. 1/

The province is requiring the city to add density around these stations. This is the city's response: Allow for four houses to become eight townhouses, on each of about a dozen sites. 2/

In other words, basically nothing. And planners explicitly are not touching the sea of single-family houses on either side, which have ~zero population growth. 3/

They are, however, ready to add affordable-housing requirements; heritage retention and special heritage-related setbacks (etc.) on potential development 4/

Q from the public: Why are you restricting growth so heavily? Lynda Macdonald: "We have decided that this is a midrise area" for "moderate growth." And if the province asks, they "may find exceptions" where a tall building is possible. 5/

Local councillor @PaulaFletcherTO: "When development comes forward, want to have a rulebook... not be fighting" [with the province] all the time. 6/

But they will be fighting with the province, because this non-plan de facto allows nearly zero growth. Even though the area, Macdonald says "is very blessed with amenities" 7/

This is -- though planning claims the opposite -- a concerted effort to stall "intensification" in a neighbourhood that should have had it 40 years ago. 8/

On a high level, it's telling that Keele-Finch, a poorer and less white and less lawyer-heavy neighbourhood, is getting zoned for apartment buildings before transit is even built. 9/

(The new LRT is even built, to be precise.)