Aside from the privacy concerns, condos in this area are currently selling for $1000+/sqft. All renderings I have viewed from Google's proposal show some assortment of low rise buildings. You will need to be a multimillionaire to live in a low rise style building if the units are sold at market rates. That type of development doesn't represent the interest of the majority of the citizens (the avg salary in the city is ~45k USD). The city should only be approving 100+ story structures in the downtown core until there is enough supply to meet demand and bring RE prices down to reflect local salaries.
Absolutely. One of the reasons the real estate prices are so detached from local salaries is that there is a lot of suspected money laundering and Chinese speculators buying up properties and leaving them empty.
It’s not, but Google/A came in with great fanfare and seemed to get more leeway than other constructions do due to their name and their sci fi promises.
But it’s important for people outside of Toronto to understand that this isn’t what most people would call “downtown” either. It’s in one of the least accessible parts of the city, that for that reason has historically only been used by industry. Transit is improving there, but it’s not somewhere I’d want to live. So maybe low rise is all that can be sold there? I don’t know but there are other high rises going up now in that area. How are their sales?
The lack of transit is bit of a misdirection. It's very easy to run bus routes once there is an residential population. Setting up transit in advance doesn't make much sense.
Also it's been primarily used by industry because it was zoned as industry, because industry needed access to the docs for shipping.
Look, It's a 15 minute bike ride to union station. You can walk to the financial district. People will buy whatever units they build there.
Because they should be a small fraction of your market. If they have outsides weight like this, then you’ve been constraining your housing for decades.
I'm not familiar with Toronto but foreign speculators are reportedly about 10% of real estate transactions in Vancouver. Just how much more housing were they supposed to have built?
