City Council meets today! Housing Plan: The Next Generation will be the first item up for discussion, followed by a debate on expanding the non-police crisis response line.
Streaming live here. I’ll recap in a big thread, starting… now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbot51QKLok
But, well, then there’s the matter of the bill. All this is expensive.
City needs between $33 billion and $36 billion. Report includes major requests for money from Queen’s Park and Ottawa in form of both financing and direct funding.
Councillor Dianne Saxe asks if staff have looked at building tiny houses on vacant/transitional lots. Bond says they’re reviewing information about doing that. More to come.
See this week’s City Hall Watcher for more on what’s happening behind the scenes https://toronto.cityhallwatcher.com/p/chw252
Mayor Olivia Chow is the first speaker on the next-gen housing plan.
“At council here, over the years, we’ve talked — and talked — about building housing … we’ve built condominiums, but are they affordable? No. Not to ordinary people.”
“Knowing the constraints of the budget, what will be cut?” asks Holyday, arguing that City Hall will need to cut something from the budget to pay for housing plan.
Chow invites Holyday to upcoming budget consultations.
He says he just wants money for mechanical leaf collection.
@mcc @GraphicMatt before 1998, Toronto used to be a federation of municipalities, which then got amalgamated into a singular entity;
not every municipality was run the same way, and some services got grandfathered in during amalgamation.
suburban etobicoke has many Big Lots with Big Leafy Trees that shed literal tons of plant matter, and right up until this season they and they alone got a bespoke city-run program where a city worker would collect your leaves for you
the irony here is that Holyday is also Council’s Scrooge, a man who will pinch every penny and squeeze a dollar til the loonie cries, who is happy to cut services and question the value of everything the city does
unless of course it directly benefits his constituents, even if (especially if?) they get a benefit no one else gets.
especially galling during the debate on city run snow plowing, where iirc he happily defended this inequality
Matt Elliott
mcc
filipa mv