A good point: neighborhoods that agree to add denser housing, deserve to get infrastructure improvements in return

 So says Toronto Star columnist Shawn Micaleff, "If Toronto fails to deliver this one piece of infrastructure, it will reveal an ugly truth."

There should be a grand bargain: If our leaders are going to stuff so many people into the same places, they ought to be provided with fantastic infrastructure. Theoretically, anyway.

Liberty Village is often vilified by people in single-family homes as being a “slum in the making” but it’s one of Toronto’s hero neighbourhoods, helping the city live up to its self-congratulatory “You Belong Here” motto while it whispers, “stay out,” writes Shawn Micallef. Rene Johnston / Toronto Star

He's writing about the Liberty Village neighborhood, which unlike most of Toronto's neighborhoods has agreed to a number of dense housing developments ("Toronto’s grudge against apartments," Star), but has substandard access to transit, lacks parks, etc.

So warped are perceptions in Toronto that even progressive folks consider tiny condo apartments, the first rung of the property ladder that people claw their way into, as “luxury,” but homes in the million dollar range or more are somehow not. There’s also a perception that those homeowners “contribute” to the neighbourhood and, in this case, the 900 apartment dwellers somehow wouldn’t. ...

The stakes are high. Old Toronto missed out on building apartments when it could, now we’ve conspired to make apartment living a bad thing in much of the city. Don’t like tall buildings? Then fight for density to be spread across the city. Inclusive ratepayer and historic preservation groups that do this will be the new civic heroes. 

 “Everyone complains about tall towers downtown, and everyone wants mid-rise, but part of the problem is an inability to unlock additional small-scale intensification in existing neighbourhoods,” says Galbraith. “Affordable housing is always a hot-button issue, and combined with both the inability to create and resistance to infill, I think the answer is obvious: we should provide more smaller scale housing options everywhere in the city.”