more kinds of businesses on major streets<\/a> \u2014 though this will not be seen all across the city, as some councillors want to keep residential areas that way. The city defines major streets as roads that may already have high traffic and are zoned for residential buildings. <\/p>\n\u201cSome people are saying, \u2018Oh, this is an urban, suburban divide.\u2019 That\u2019s just nonsense,\u201d Perks said, adding that what was passed in council Thursday will expand permissions throughout the city. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere aren\u2019t two Torontos, there are 200 Torontos, and what we are doing with this is trying to create access in all 200 Torontos.\u201d<\/p>\n
These types of neighbourhood shops are \u2018as old as Toronto\u2019<\/p>\n
Matti Siemiatycki, director of the University of Toronto\u2019s Infrastructure Institute, said it is likely to see an older mom-and-pop shop on a residential street as \u201cthat\u2019s how Toronto was built.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean, these types of neighbourhood shops, they\u2019re actually as old as Toronto,\u201d Siemiatycki said. <\/p>\n
So, why were new ones barred from setting up shop on a residential street? Siemiatycki says the answer is two-fold: economics and zoning rules. <\/p>\n
Economically speaking, Siemiatycki says they didn\u2019t generate as large of a consumer base as they served a hyper-local community and the dominance of big-box stores impacted local retail. <\/p>\n
\u201cThen the zoning in many parts of our city just made it illegal to have these types of shops,\u201d Siemiatycki said. \u201cSo, the neighbourhoods grew up without them and people got used to not having those types of stores, and in many cases, both didn\u2019t know what they were missing.\u201d<\/p>\n
While Perks said there has been three camps of views for this study \u2014 one who wanted dramatic expansion of retail permissions, a coalition of some residents associations against retail permissions, and the third an \u201coverwhelming majority of Torontonians who just sort of are shrugging and getting on with their daily lives\u201d \u2014 a founding director of the Centre for Urban Research and Land Development at Toronto Metropolitan University says there\u2019s only two sides to this. <\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019re looking at intensification, there\u2019s a need for a greater kind of community and service retail in areas and having it within these densified areas does make a lot of sense,\u201d David Amborski said. \u201cIt also creates a complete community because they have all the facilities within very close proximity and walking distance.\u201d <\/p>\n
On the other side of that coin, Amborski said, are those who are concerned about the impact on their property values as well as the implementation and scale of these new facilities. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou want to make sure that they truly are community benefit kind of services,\u201d Amborski said. Though based on what Amborski saw in the study, he says it appears city planners are implementing regulations to \u201csafeguard the community\u201d by mitigating the negative impacts. <\/p>\n
The City of Toronto is anticipating at least 700,000 new Torontonians to move to the city by 2051, and the implementation of these neighbourhood shops is just one of the ways the city is looking to support the daily needs of all residents, current and prospective. <\/p>\n
\u201cI think we\u2019re at a point where we\u2019ve become a big, busy city, and it\u2019s a city in transition,\u201d Siemiatycki said. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to decide which way we\u2019re going to go. Are we going to become more urban and more lively and more vibrant, and have these mixing of uses, or is it going to continue to have some of the aspects of its more suburban history?\u201d<\/p>\n
What kind of Toronto would you rather see? Share your thoughts by emailing us at torontonews@bellmedia.ca<\/a> with your name, general location and phone number in case we want to follow up. Your comments may be used in a future story. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cafes and corner stores can once again pop up in a handful of Toronto\u2019s neighbourhoods, after council voted…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":284887,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[712,43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-284886","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-apple-news","9":"tag-headlines","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-top-news","12":"tag-top-stories","13":"tag-topnews","14":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284886\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/284887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}