It's not great that these places aren't celebrated more widely while professional planners and councils reinforce stereotypical forms. We are hemming in new ideas that could be driving novel suburban innovation. #urbanism #urbanism+ 🚶‍♀️🌇 www.thestar.com/news/gta/rid...

We miss the beauty in the nuance of how places (appearing as any other suburban place) may in fact be utilized very, very differently. Ridgeway is one example. Another is the Chinese Restaurant Awards tapping a density of truly delicious restaurants spread among non-descript plazas in the 905.

Canadian cities are composed of people from a diversity of cultures and nations, and they have been remaking Canadian suburban form and suburban life in ways that are supportive of this. I struggle because the narrative from urbanists can be a little flat, painting all suburbs with a broad brush.

Ridgeway should be viewed as an important prototype. It is the answer to so many of our calls for suburban vibrancy. The task now is to innovate on this model and take its challenges seriously.

Internationally, this vitality is usually paired with transit. In the Canadian suburbs, we have to innovate on this model by perhaps accepting a greater dimension of automobility. We need to figure out how to support this social intensity in a car-oriented & transit supported context.

It succeeds in spite of our regulations, resembling (from my limited intl experience) Asian suburban retail. In my experience in Asia, these "interstitial" spaces are where people group between work and home. They are destinations to see friends, to be seen, and to relax.

Ridgeway is far from perfect, but the behavior of its patrons sends a massive signal... It proves that suburban outdoor spaces can be heavily utilized well beyond typical business hours. People are voting with their feet for spaces where they can eat, socialize, and linger late into the evening.

North American cities have spent years terrified of the "retail apocalypse." Yet, in Ridgeway Plaza, we see the opposite: the emergence of a new suburban retail typology. It delivers exactly what we claim to want: public space, public life, and genuine vitality.

I’ve also known several older close friends and family who made similar moves in their own communities, into purpose-built rentals or equity co-ops. People will downsize when they can do so comfortably nearby. But costs + planning rules make local mid-rise hard and push the opportunity cost high.

Surplus bedrooms point to policy failure. I’ve lived in a couple of new purpose-built mid-rise rentals on Toronto main streets. Many neighbours were older adults from the area who sold or passed homes to kids and downsized into the building. People need local options to not disrupt their lives.

Occupancy standards define deprivation in context. It is a human rights issue when a person or family is forced to live with many more people per bedroom, and when right-sized homes in the same area are unaffordable for them. That is a part of core housing need. Not density per se but it overlaps.

If we're talking about suitability, it's really about bedrooms. We haven’t built multi-bedroom units (TO and Van particularly) because they’re expensive and the most motivated buyers over the last 15 years were investors, not families, so the market never shifted toward delivering larger units.