Jane Jacobs's great ideas have morphed into pettiness
Christie Blatchford
Globe and Mail [Toronto]
I don't know Ondina or Nancy Pereira Carvalho. I am sure they are delightful people, but to my knowledge, I've never clamped eyes upon either one of them.
Yet I am one of those whose opinion is being sought as to whether they should be allowed to build a second-floor addition at the back of their house and a third-floor addition and deck on the front.
I live one street over from the Pereira Carvalhos in a downtown Toronto neighbourhood which, if it was not where the late influential writer Jane Jacobs actually lived, would qualify as one of her spiritual homes. And the neighbourhood is close enough to hers that I sometimes saw Ms. Jacobs, who famously wrote a book that was for years the Bible of urban planners, The Death and Life of Great American Cities , walking about in the area in her later years.
In any case, there is no way on God's green earth that the Pereira Carvalho house or what goes on in it or what they do to it ought to be any of my business.
But apparently their proposed renovation will increase the size of their house such that they must be granted variances to the zoning bylaw. This is why the City of Toronto recently mailed out to me and my neighbours notice of a committee of adjustment meeting and invited our collective views about whether said renovation is right, good and moral.
The notice doesn't actually say the latter, of course, but I have lived here long enough now that I know very well how to read between the lines.
While the committee of adjustment must be satisfied only that proposed variances are minor and appropriate and in character with the street, I have no doubt that if my neighbours vehemently oppose the additions, the committee will find a way to stop the project. In this city, and I suspect in others, if enough residents are shrill and determined, they can stop such projects in their tracks, or delay them such that they die.
There are all sorts of examples that come to mind, but the most egregious illustration of how Ms. Jacobs's mostly magnificent ideas and spirit ? she believed dense, tightly packed cities, with clubs-businesses-homes cheek-by-jowl so that streets were always busy, were the liveliest and safest ? have morphed into an unrecognizably mean, small-minded business.
Where Ms. Jacobs, for instance, was instrumental in stopping a highway which would have torn apart some lovely parts of the old city ? the Spadina Expressway ? on my street her successors have succeeded in stopping a daycare.
There's a school on the street, an inner-city school struggling, as are many of them, to maintain enrolment in the face of the flood of families either moving to the suburbs or signing up their kids at private schools. School closings are now such a regular feature of discussions at the city's board of education that only the imaginative ones will survive.
Thus did a small alternative school, run by the board, a year or two ago open up in the same building, a good step toward filling the place with children and using the empty spaces.
Another innovative addition ? and step to putting the school on a successful foundation ? came along this year, when the board suggested putting in a daycare. Most downtown schools already have them, a nod to the practical reality of modern families where both parents are working or headed by a single parent. If you had two youngsters, one school-aged and one a toddler, and had a choice of making one pit stop for the two, or two drives and stops, which would you pick?
But the area in front of the school is designated a no-parking zone (well, I think it is, there are so many conflicting signs it's hard to tell and I've lived here for 13 years), and so it was that the board came to ask me and my neighbours about whether we were willing to allow the designation to be changed to allow parents a proper drop-off zone.
A public meeting was called. I stayed long enough only to say I was all for the change, but later learned that it had been revealed there that the proposed daycare was a Mandarin one.
I found this development completely unremarkable: The school is on the fringe of Toronto's original Chinatown, many of the existing students appear to be Chinese, and a bilingual daycare, with Mandarin as the second language, only made sense to me. (As it turns out, the daycare would have been operated by a private company which was even willing to fork out some cold hard money toward renovation of the building, not a bad thing for a cash-strapped school board.)
But my neighbours now had their knickers in a knot, e-mails flew back and forth, complaints were lodged about the lack of public consultation, the shortness of notice of the public meeting and the ?Mandarin nature? of the daycare, and soon, we were all being asked to vote in a poll.
You can guess at the results: Those concerned with the ?Mandarin nature? of the daycare had the numbers, and though it's not official yet, it now looks as though the daycare will be located in another school.
My hunch is Jane Jacobs would be appalled to see how civic engagement has become ? and in a good solid socialist ward in one of the country's most diverse cities too ? civic entitlement, wherein everyone expects to be notified and consulted about every single thing that everyone else is doing.
I fear for Ondina and Nancy and their addition, even as I now, very, very badly, want them to build it.
