Every city should be repurposing every above ground parking lot.

Housing, open plazas, parks, transit systems, 5+1 housing everywhere.

If you want a parking lot in a city it should be below ground and taxed out the ying-yang.

You want to tax a city owned parking lot? Who would the city be paying that tax to?

On the one hand housing is good.

On the other hand, getting rid of on-street parking and moving those cars into off-street stacked lots is good as it provides space for dedicated bike and transit lanes. Plus, the faster it is to move throughout the city, the more effective space the city has to work with (i.e. a home 45m from a downtown job is a home 45m from a downtown job, regardless of whether that’s at Ossington because traffic is a nightmare or whether it’s at Jane because it’s not).

Ideally we’d bury the parking and build housing on top, though that’s not feasible for a bunch of the lots that are built on top of the subway (like along Bloor).

Very few of the pots in my city are city owned. They’re all private. They refuse to build anything else since using it as a parking lot has very low taxes so the profits are good, plus the land value goes up so just waiting makes them millions.

Tax them like crazy or all you get is downtown Houston in the 1980s.

Yeah, but in this case we’re talking about Green P lots which are owned by the City of Toronto, not privately owned lots.

So basically, they’re funneling tax money into holding lightly used parking lots right now. Yes, they should absolutely sell that land for someone to do something with, and then take the funds and put them into non-stupid programs.

More than $100 million in land value,

I know it’s Toronto, but that still seems like a very significant amount.

Deputants also said New Toronto needs the parking lots due to poor transit access.

I bet people say they don’t need public transit because there’s so much parking, too.

New Toronto resident Matt Lawrence criticized the city-owned land-use policy, saying that “ rich neighbourhoods get pools and community centers. Poor neighbourhoods get subsidized housing and shelters.”

I’m kind of interested in this quote. Is Matt implying these are both bad things, or that it should be the other way around? It seems to me the latter, at least, is a good thing.

There wouldnt be a housing crisis if there was no government zoning, zoning which is intended to increase property values and block new entrants. Its like a rhetorical question as to whether they should increase density to the people trying to decrease density, their answer will of course be no.

Honestly, just getting rid of policies that actively encourage or subsidise parking lots and road usage would do the trick, I think. Parking minimums, absence of toll roads or per-klick tax, density restrictions as a first resort to deal with excessive curbside parking…