Some Great Idea by Edward Keenan

Author:Edward Keenan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coach House Books
Published: 2013-10-22T04:00:00+00:00

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Even if it would take a generation or two, bringing vitality and prosperity to the inner suburbs was much on David Miller’s mind while he was mayor. In fact, he considered the inner suburbs the forefront of his agenda. Miller’s critics always accused him of harbouring a secret plan to implement road tolls (and his loudest supporters often hoped he did), but he said that it would be unfair to implement road pricing. Many of the city’s most vulnerable people lived in the suburbs, he said, and they depended on cars because public transit did not serve them well. To ask those people to start paying a premium to drive without first giving them the viable option of using the TTC would be an injustice.

Bringing the TTC to those far corners of the city was behind the Transit City plan Miller introduced at Downsview Station that afternoon on the campaign trail in 2006. Though the plan changed by the time it was given funding by the province in 2007 and became more of a building plan than a campaign platform, the emphasis behind the LRT plan remained bringing rapid transit to the northeastern and northwestern corners of the city. LRT was affordable enough that we could build a lot of it relatively quickly, and a lot of fast transit, as soon as possible, was what the suburbs desperately needed.

Miller also introduced a strategy that focused on putting both community and specialized police resources into thirteen so-called priority neighbourhoods located in the inner suburbs. Grants for youth programs and anti-poverty programs flowed into these areas. Parks and public facilities were built. Miller always called the program one of his ‘core values.’ The East Scarborough Storefront in the Kingston-Galloway neighbourhood of Scarborough is one example of the policy in action. Housed in a former police station, the space acts as a social-service hub for the area, providing job-search help, immigrant landing services, a boys and girls club, and food programs. It coordinates the services of more than thirty-five non-profit and government agencies, and administers the local Tower Renewal project. That initiative harnesses over four hundred local volunteers in an effort to rebuild the community in a tower block along Lawrence, making tenants partners with their landlords and converting local stretches of asphalt into green space, and challenging local youth to work with professional architects to create ‘spectacular architecture’ to develop the neighbourhood. ‘The idea is that if residents have ideas to improve their neighbourhood,’ Storefront director Anne Gloger told the Toronto Observer in 2012, ‘we work with them. We work with anyone and everyone who wants to improve the economic well-being of the neighbourhood. Our vision is to create a thriving community economically, socially and environmentally.’

Anyone who spoke regularly to Miller at any point in his term would have heard of his Tower Renewal program. Toronto’s immense building boom in the 1960s generated more than a thousand concrete-slab apartment towers, more than any other city except New York. St. Jamestown, on the

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