Some Great Idea

by Edward Keenan

  Indeed, although I say Miller did these things, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that council did them under his leadership. But for all of Miller’s time as mayor, the two concepts seemed synonymous. He never lost a single major vote at city council in his entire two terms as mayor, an accomplishment that in retrospect seems like a masterwork of negotiation and persuasion – and a tribute, perhaps, to his incremental approach.

  And incremental or not, the city’s real estate prices continued to soar, its streetscapes gentrified and a new category of youngish people seemed ascendant: you could say Toronto experienced a rise of the creative class.

  Richard Florida relocated to Toronto in 2007, a year into Miller’s second term. In his book The Rise of the Creative Class, Florida theorized that ‘creative workers’ – not just artists and poets but digital tech, media, academic, finance, health care and legal professionals – defined economic success for cities in the post-industrial age. Cities that could attract these professionals would thrive, and those that could not would struggle. The headline-grabbing element of his work – including the much-discussed Bohemian Index and Gay Index – was the idea that a city could reverse-engineer this economic success by becoming the kind of place in which those workers wanted to live. Tolerance of ethnic diversity and pansexual freedom. Walkable, livable neighbourhoods filled with bike lanes. Great mass transit and cool coffee shops. A thriving music and arts scene and brick-and-beam converted warehouse office spaces. If you built cool neighbourhoods, you would attract cool workers, and those cool workers would attract cool companies.

  Florida’s work, and the enthusiasm with which it was received in the mainstream press, provoked vivid debate about cause and effect, and those who thought he was merely describing the process of gentrification at a city-wide scale – and possibly celebrating and encouraging it through his consulting business – made angry accusations of both a neo-liberal agenda and snake-oil salesmanship. Florida strenuously objected to those criticisms, citing his personal philosophical grounding in Marxism, the detailed numbers in his studies and his own advocacy for ensuring the creative city was one where prosperity was both created and shared by an ever-wider spectrum of the population.

  Either way, Florida’s landing in Toronto was symbolic, because the first decade of the millennium was most noteworthy for the increased dominance of the creative class in the downtown mainstream of Toronto life. The skyline was transformed, and continues to be transformed, by the construction of hundreds of condominium buildings. New office-tower construction in the core broadened the geography occupied by institutional businesses working in finance and telecommunications. When Telus relocated its offices from the Scarborough Town Centre to the new ‘SouthCore’ extension of the Financial District in 2009 – the beginning of a rush of large employers moving from the suburbs to the city’s heart, paying higher rents to attract the condo-dwellers living nearby – it sounded a chord of Floridian resonance.

  Downtown was the place to be. There were new boutique luxury hotels and a new boutique luxury airline at the Island Airport, and a new designer park in condoland with sculptures by zeitgeist-surfer Douglas Coupland. Whole swaths of previously gritty Toronto gentrified rapidly; the spread of high-end espresso shops, artisanal restaurants and ‘curated’ quirk emporia spread like a contagion east and west, lifting the economic prospects, property values and rents ever higher.

  All the creative energy that appeared to be bubbling up in the city just before Miller was first elected exploded onto the street – but now with official civic approval and support. Major landmarks and institutions unveiled a series of new architectural showpieces; the Nuit Blanche and Luminato festivals took over the streets in the name of the arts; Pedestrian Sundays in Kensington Market saw face-painted dancers celebrating environmental themes on closed roadways; Drake, Feist, the Weeknd, K’naan and Fucked Up spearheaded a local dominance of the world pop music scene; the Evergreen Brick Works turned an industrial site in the Don Valley into a massive environmental laboratory/think tank/playground; seemingly a million farmers’ markets took over parking lots on summer weekends.

  The easiest gig I’ve ever had was as the Innovation and Job News reporter for the online Toronto economy publication Yonge Street toward the end of Miller’s second term in office. I had to find three to six innovative, creative-class companies who were hiring or expanding each week. I could have found ten times that many to write about in the digital media and app development industries alone, as Toronto emerged as a global start-up powerhouse behind only New York, London and Silicon Valley. Indeed, the business sector as a whole in Toronto did well under Miller, as GDP grew by more than 10 per cent over the course of the decade, even as the world outside Canada collapsed into recession. According to various surveys released in 2010 and 2011, Toronto had become the ‘lowest risk city in the world for employers’ (Aon Consulting); the world’s sixth ‘most business competitive global city’ (KPMG); the most livable city in the world (Price­waterhouseCoopers); one of the world’s Top 10 on the Global Financial Centres Index; and twelfth in the world on the Global Economic Power Index.

  I visited Florida at his office in 2009, and he told me that, in part, he’d been attracted to Toronto precisely because of David Miller’s understanding of urbanism. ‘Whether you’re a civil engineer or a historian, or even a biologist,’ Florida said, ‘I’ve never talked to so many people who care about urban systems and urban ecology from so many walks of life. It’s like Austin and Nashville are places that have music, L.A. has film, Toronto has urbanism. It’s what everybody cares about. And I think there’s a Toronto school of urbanism that has a lot to say.’

  And, he told me, sitting on the couch in the lobby of his think tank’s offices, Toronto was maybe the best example of successful urbanism in the world: ‘Toronto is a very good example of a city that has a balance between young people and families – and not just wealthy families. It has wealthy families and low-income families and immigrant families and gay and lesbian families.’ When he wrote about the Creative City, he said, Toronto was close to ‘an ideal of what I had in mind.’ Although Florida didn’t think the great global Alpha Cities such as New York and London would lose their dominance, Toronto had an opportunity to be a world leader in defining what a great city could look like: ‘We have a continuous city; we don’t have a hole in the doughnut, so to speak. Yes, we have segregation and segmentation, but we have a broad-based diversity that is inclusive across gender, race, gay and lesbian, class lines. Yes, it could be better; yes, it’s becoming more segmented; but we have to understand how much of an asset that is. The fact that our major universities are in the core is a big deal. Our ravine system – and I think what the folks at the Brick Works are trying to achieve – is a big, big, big deal.’

  His comments dovetailed with a boom that appeared to be transforming downtown into a never-ending street festival for the wealthy and the upwardly mobile. But Florida didn’t think Toronto was a city without problems, and he told me the growing segregation between the suburbs and the city core as enclaves of low- and high-income people was the No. 1 problem we faced, and that Hulchanski’s Three Cities report was ‘the single most important document written about Toronto.’ Following that, the affordability of housing and expanding transit to deal with the ‘nightmarish’ traffic were at the top of the agenda.

  But he had no solutions to those problems. And didn’t think the solutions were for him to come up with. ‘I learned that from Jane Jacobs,’ he said. ‘I asked Jane Jacobs what she would do to help after 9/11 in Manhattan, what would be her plan. And she said, “You’re asking the wrong question.” And I kept asking her, “Well, what would be your plan? What would you do?” She said, “I don’t know. It’s what the people who live in that neighbourhood would do, what the shop owners who have shops in that neighbourhood would do, what the people who work in that neighbourhood would do, and it has to be a more collective, organic response.�
� So that’s what I would say, that to solve these problems we have to empower the groups – immigrant groups, worker groups, labour groups, agricultural groups – and we have to bring them together in a framework that enables all of us to use our creativity to solve those problems.’

  4

  One of the counter-narratives to David Miller’s 2003 victory was the story of Karen Stintz, a thirty-something professional civil servant from Yonge and Eglinton who had two master’s degrees and no political experience. Long-serving ward incumbent Anne Johnston had angered a local residents’ group when she approved a new high-rise tower, and in response the group put a gimmicky ‘Councillor Wanted’ advertisement in the local paper. Stintz answered the ad and decided to run, though the angry residents turned out to have no money to put behind her candidacy. She recruited her husband to serve as campaign manager, set up shop in her living room and started campaigning.

  Stintz lost money on her first fundraiser, and over the course of the campaign managed to raise only $17,000 – roughly 30 per cent of the spending limit. It was enough, though, to fund some flyers bearing her photo and signature, and she told me she took those flyers to every single door in the ward. Even though her story of answering the help-wanted ad generated some publicity in the daily papers – hard to come by for an unknown candidate facing a popular incumbent – Johnston never really took Stintz’s campaign seriously.

  On election day, Stintz won a surprise victory. That night, in his own victory speech, David Miller lamented the loss from council of his political mentor, Johnston, who had been the first councillor to endorse his candidacy. Stintz, a Progressive Conservative party member who had endorsed John Tory in the mayor’s race, gave birth just days after the election, but still gamely showed up for work, bringing her baby in tow. She found her council colleagues supportive of her maternity situation, but got a chilly reception from the new mayor. ‘He wouldn’t even talk to me,’ she said.

  While Lastman’s agenda was set by lobbyists and he governed through horse-trading and intimidation, he also shrewdly kept his enemies as close as his friends. (Even Miller himself, when a councillor in the Lastman administration, served on the transit commission and chaired the city’s working group on immigrant and refugee issues.) Vocal opponents of Miller’s got no such quarter in his administration. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t work with conservatives – he appointed card-carrying Tory David Soknaki as his first-term budget chief, for example – but he assembled a coalition to govern and maintained that coalition rather than seeking support outside of it. In his office, I once asked Miller about this and he saw it a bit differently. Councillors like Denzil Minnan-Wong only wanted to oppose him, he said, and weren’t interested in working productively: ‘I can propose something Denzil himself proposed last week and suddenly he’ll be against it.’

  In any event, he didn’t need the support of Stintz and the hardcore right-wing. Miller’s opponents flailed around ineffectively, unable to even adequately present a competing argument in public against his proposals, never mind defeat them. During Miller’s second term, Stintz and Case Ootes tried to bring some coherence to the opposition and formed the Responsible Government Group. That organization was no more effective. And in retrospect, the most interesting fact of the group’s existence was the conspicuous absence among its members of city hall’s most visible conservative: Rob Ford, city council’s angry, blustering loner, out pounding the pavement in the suburbs.

  5

  When Richard Florida and Rob Ford agree on something, it’s wise to pay attention. Both men, in their various ways, were aware that the inner suburbs dramatically upended Toronto’s narrative of growth and prosperity. Florida saw them as one of the city’s greatest challenges and Ford talked about how the very diverse, mostly low-income neighbourhoods of his ward were crying out for attention, that they were alienated from the downtown chatter about bike lanes and the waterfront. And by the end of Miller’s first term, Hulchanski’s Three Cities report and the United Way’s Strong Neighbourhoods Task Force had provided the data to fuel the concerns, both insisting that the city needed to pay attention to its peripheral regions.

  I had some sense of the challenge the suburbs presented, because, off and on, I’d lived in the heart of Scarborough for fifteen years. It was the place I became an adult. My parents still live out there, near Markham and Lawrence. Five years ago, I went back, to study exactly what we talk about when we talked about the suburbs as the new inner city. I stood on the sidewalk, watching the blur of twelve lanes of cars and trucks cruising past at eighty kilometres an hour. I noted the vast parking lots that dominated three of the corners (the fourth was home to a gas station and a drive-through Tim Horton’s), expanses of asphalt larger than most downtown city blocks. There were almost no other pedestrians in sight. The scale of the neighbourhood, as I knew well from my youth, was alienating.

  I reminded myself that 73 per cent of people in Toronto live in the inner suburbs, very many of them at places like Markham and Lawrence. At David Miller’s city hall, people spoke often – at practically every press conference – of Toronto as a ‘city of neighbourhoods.’ But for a majority of Torontonians, this is what their neighbourhood looked like. And according to the 2006 census, about 30 per cent of households in the neighbourhood were classified as low-income (15 per cent were high-income). Slightly less than 60 per cent of residents were immigrants, and more than half of those had arrived in Canada after 1980; 68.5 per cent were visible minorities (with substantial Indian, Sri Lankan, Chinese, Filipino, Jamaican and African populations); more than a fifth of the population was under age fifteen. Just by way of comparison, the Annex, Jane Jacobs’ former neighbourhood and one of the celebrated examples of Toronto’s village-within-a-city utopianism, had about 30 per cent fewer low-income residents, was 70 per cent Canadian-born and 80 per cent white, and only 7.6 per cent of its residents were children under fifteen.

  This contrast was increasingly evident in the reports comparing Toronto’s central area to its inner suburbs. According to the United Way’s Poverty by Postal Code, based on the 2001 census, the former municipality of Toronto – what we now call downtown – had gotten richer in the decade between 1991 and 2001, while every one of the other former municipalities had grown poorer: ‘By 2001, the former cities of York, North York and Scarborough all had poverty levels where more than one in every five of their families were living in poverty.’ Using 2006 census data, David Hulchanski made the same point all the more vivid in an update of Three Cities Within Toronto. From 1970 to 2006, the number of areas considered ‘middle-income’ – which we might think of as mixed-income neighbourhoods – had shrunk dramatically, from 66 per cent to only 29 per cent. Hulchanski put his finger on why this posed a problem for the city’s vulnerable residents: ‘In the 1970s, most of the city’s low-income neighbourhoods were in the inner city. This meant that low-income households had good access to transit and services. Some of these neighbourhoods have gentrified and are now home to affluent households, while low-income households are concentrated in the northeastern and northwestern parts of the city (the inner suburbs), with relatively poor access to transit and services.’ I got to see first-hand, in my own life, what that difference in access looked like.

  I always say my parents live at Markham and Lawrence. But, really, I mean near Markham and Lawrence – near in the sense that people in Scarborough mean it. Markham and Lawrence is the closest major intersection to where my folks live – though it’s roughly a two-kilometre trip from their house to that corner. (For downtown-dwellers, approximately the distance from the ferry docks to Ryerson University.) In Scarborough, that distance is considered very close. It’s a place where you’re tempted to – and often do – take a bus to the nearest major intersection (and even at that, the walk from my parents’ house to the bus stop is greater than the distance between King and Queen subway stations). The sprawling scale of the neighbourhood is hard to overstate, and the q
uestion of distance is not insignificant to the discussion of Markham and Lawrence or of Scarborough or the inner suburbs more generally. When you’re discussing proximity in Scarborough, you can take one measuring stick of neighbourhood livability – how much is within a ten-minute walk of one’s home? – and replace the word walk with drive.

  We moved to Markham and Lawrence from the not-yet-gentrifying neighbourhood of South Riverdale – now known as Riverside – in 1986, when I was fourteen. At the time, our three-bedroom, two-storey Victorian row house at Broadview and Gerrard was pretty much a straight-up swap, price-wise, for our four-bedroom Scarborough bungalow. (We moved from the neighbourhood my father and I spent our entire lives in mostly because we couldn’t afford a bigger house in Riverdale.) Since Scarborough has been virtually left out of the real estate booms of the past two decades, an offer to trade back would not be accepted today.

  In South Riverdale, my parents had been active members of the community at St. Ann’s Catholic Church, the doors of which were exactly 176 twelve-year-old paces from our front porch. I walked with my siblings to school about five minutes south on Boulton Avenue. My dad worked, for a long while, as a department store manager a ten-minute walk east at Carlaw. My paternal grandfather and three of his siblings (and therefore many of my cousins) lived in various houses within a few blocks of our place, and we’d often wander around visiting. In the winter, we’d go tobogganing at Riverdale Park at the end of the block. On the way home from school, we’d ride the swings at a tiny parkette in the middle of Boulton Avenue, and later in the evening my brother and I would walk to Pape Recreation Centre for swimming lessons. For a long time my parents didn’t own a car, so we’d take the streetcar for fifteen minutes to get to hockey games or to go to the movies at Yonge and Dundas. We knew many, many people within a five- or ten-minute walk of our house, and our social life existed almost entirely in the neighbourhood.