Raise the Hammer

I also wanted to apologize for smooshing the info into an unreadable block, but it was the only way I could get it past the spam filter.

I'm not sure how I feel about the density issue myself. What I do know is that the 6 story limit was determined by the Secondary Plan process, a consultative process that involved the work of numerous community members on various sub-committees. If a developer can just come in and overide that limit by 100%, it calls into question the validity of the whole process, and makes community members cynical about participating in any future planning. These types of decisions cannot be made arbitrarily and in a vaccuum. Also the fact that the developer is touting this as something that will allow for Mac's "future growth", when the Westdale campus is so clearly at capacity, should set off alarm bells.

As for your second point, oh if only it were that simple! This community has been begging Mac for years to look at private sector partnerships for building downtown residences and our efforts have been greeted with imperiousness and, at times, outright contempt. I'm thinking of one notorious community PACCR meeting (2003 I believe) where a number of community members offered well-thought out solutions based on examples in other near-campus communities. Some of them were real estate professionals who had given a great deal of thought to making residence construction profitable. Peter George got up at the end of the meeting and pronounced the ideas "rubbish" based on "myths". Well, I'll give him points for honesty. The city has also been begging Mac for years to do what you suggest, and has been continually stonewalled. It is no accident that the West Village condos and the Ewen Road developments are entirely private and only connected to Mac by geography. The question is, if the Valvasori brothers can figure out how to make residence construction profitable, why can't Mac? Maybe they could assign the problem to their students at the Michael DeGroote School of Business!