Why so down on fourplexes, Doug?
Ontario Premier Doug Ford, eternal friend of developers, has flipped a switch. A man whose claim to fame will always be his mad passion for building anywhere, everywhere and the bigger the better, now opposes allowing builders to put up fourplexes without municipal approval.
It’s “off the table,” he said Thursday in the course of talking about housing in Richmond Hill, a freerange suburban area with more room to build infill than you could swing a cat, a slingshot, a kettlebell. As transit stations pop up, even urbanites would happily live there if prices were smaller and sweeter.
“We are not going to go into communities and build four-storey or six-storey buildings beside residents … we’re going to build homes, single-dwelling homes, townhomes,” Ford said.
As reported by Global News, Ford got quite enthusiastic, as he tends to do. “I can assure you 1,000 per cent, you go into communities and start putting up four-storey, six-storey, eight-storey buildings right deep into communities, there’s going to be a lot of shouting and screaming.”
This is true. It’s true of everything now, from taxes to the rising cost of food and haircuts, to bike lanes and parking lot closures, to international warfare.
This is a time for quarrels. What puzzles me is that people still find a way to argue publicly, often over minor matters, at a time when journalism is shrinking. If you thought people had less landscape for foul bellowing, it now turns out they have more.
No one is happy. In the case of fourplexes, they are arguing against their own interests. As someone who panicked at the prospect of slowly vegetating in the not unattractive but enervating Beaches and moved right downtown, nothing adds to life’s pleasures more than density.
As a child, the travel writer Bill Bryson was desperate to leave Des Moines, Iowa. “I wanted to be a European boy,” he wrote. “I wanted to live in an apartment across from a park in the heart of a city. I wanted friends named Werner and Marco who played soccer in the street and owned toys made of wood. I wanted to step outside my front door and be somewhere.”
Bill is me. Wouldn’t Ontario like that too? A few thousand plexes — four, six, eight — and that could be your beautiful life, Richmond Hill. No?
Density offers more people to watch, stuff to do, smaller domestic acreage to maintain, more services like corner coffee shops and bars, more takeout food, more pleasure and interest. Pair that with transit and you will live happily, urban and urbane. Choose life, I say. Have a better life for you and even your children.
I once argued against a mansion being built near me, although it was an improvement on the previous degenerate shack housing the fattest raccoons I’ve ever seen, the size of Duroc hogs. Although it would have angered my neighbours, I would have backed a fourplex.
The builder won, and the mansion turned out to be beautiful but now stands, empty and incomplete, stalled by interest rates. It’s symbolic. That’s Ontario now, a half-built house.
Still, after a shaming incident with the posh kettle — it has levers, multi-buttons and five temperatures but why? — I can leave my front door and immediately buy barista coffee with 48 per cent more caffeine, the kind speeding this very column.
It’s the best.
So now we will see more car-dependent single-family homes and townhomes, all because Ford got sick of arguing with voters about their falling property values if nightmare quadruple nogoodniks moved next door.
I have a plan. Age in place and die there too. Your conscience is clear, your offspring will inherit a fine sum, and the purchaser will add on plexes and laneway suites for the next generation. Ford will be long gone, living happily at his cottage.
And at some point, Ontarians will leave their front door and be somewhere.