9 Comments January 19, 2015 at 4:00 pm

Extra, Extra: Toronto’s Changing Skyline, the High Cost of Housing, and the Toronto Port Authority Changes Its Name

Every weekday’s end, we collect just about everything you ought to care about or ought not to miss.

These two photos will allow you to appreciate how much Toronto changed between 2001 and 2014. “The growth—the absolute transformation of the skyline before your very eyes from year to year, and decade to decade—is pretty powerful,” said former City planner Paul Bedford. U of T philosophy professor Mark Kingwell was somewhat more rhapsodic: “It may be partly, even largely, an illusion,” he said, “but when you see the skyline on a clear night, especially from the air, you can believe this is the right time and the right place to be alive.”

If appreciating the grandeur of Toronto’s skyline makes you less inclined to feel depressed on what some claim is the most depressing day of the year, consider the following: “The GTA is facing ‘growing structural challenges‘ to its housing stock that are pushing both renting and ownership out of reach of even higher-income residents, says TD Economics in a new report released Monday.” Follow that up with the news that “the globe’s 1-percenters will soon be richer than the rest of the world combined,” and you might find yourself appropriately disheartened once more.
If you’ve ever had issues with the controversial Toronto Port Authority (responsible for, among other things, the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport), you’ll be delighted to hear it’s completely changing its ways, in that it’s changed its name. As part of a rebranding effort, it will now be known as PortsToronto. The name—and associated “brand architecture”—was created by a strategic marketing agency, because that kind of thing can’t be left to laypeople (laypeople, after all, tend to like dinosaurs). Advocacy group NoJetsTO remains unswayed by the almost completely different name, “criticizing the announced rebranding of the Toronto Port Authority as a cheap marketing move, designed to obfuscate and distract from the TPA’s lack of accountability and independent Environmental Assessment.”