LONDON, ONT. A massive new development that will help fill the city’s housing affordability gap is taking shape in London’s SoHo neigbourhood. London city council has approved the sale of the remaining former Victoria Hospital Lands on South Street to a newly formed group of non-profit housing developers called Vision SoHo Alliance. Just over 2.5 hectares on the north side of South Street will be transformed into a mixed-use housing complex. More than 600 units in total will include 300 at affordable rates, the remainder at market rates. Affordable housing is not what it used to be said Greg Playford, of the London Community Foundation’s Housing Action Committee.
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Corey Johnson (Getty, iStock)
Corey Johnson’s comprehensive planning bill will never pass, for the same reason all such bills never pass: It dilutes the power of neighborhood cranks and naive ideologues to stop new housing.
Predictably, a coalition of the city’s leading NIMBY groups blasted the City Council speaker’s proposal Thursday as a “top-down approach that would leave communities with even less democratic control over massive city rezonings” than they have now.
Well, yes. That is exactly the point.
Not to be anal, but this is not a direct democracy. It’s a republic. We elect leaders, who in turn run the government. We don’t let people with pitchforks decide what can be built where.