[URBAN NOTE] "Chow Channels De Blasio in Plans for Toronto Housing"

[rfmcdonald]

Oh, Olivia Chow. If only you were more likely to be our mayor. Katia Dmitrieva of Bloomberg tells the story from an international perspective.

Olivia Chow plans to emulate the affordable housing policies of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and the traffic-fighting strategies of Chicago if elected to run Canada’s largest city.

Chow said she’d seek to allocate 20 percent of each new residential tower to affordable housing in a push to add 15,000 low-income rental units in Toronto, reminiscent of De Blasio’s platform. She would also fight gridlock by raising the fee developers pay when blocking city streets during construction like Chicago does.

“I learned from New York,” Chow said in an interview at Bloomberg’s Toronto office yesterday. “We have similar challenges. We have a prosperous city, but we also have some neighborhoods where people are getting left behind. Bill de Blasio in New York said ‘No one should be left behind’ and a focus on investing in children is where I’m coming from.”

House prices in the city of 2.6 million residents soared 7.7 percent last month to a record and drivers face one of the longest rush-hour commutes in North America. Congestion costs the city and its surrounding area as much as C$11 billion ($9.9 billion) a year, according to the Toronto-based nonprofit research institute C.D. Howe Institute.

[. . .]

After a strong start at the beginning of the campaign Chow has fallen behind, garnering 22 percent of support in a Forum Research poll of 1,218 voters conducted yesterday. [Doug] Ford, who like his brother has emphasized tax cuts, surged to 37 percent support, according to the poll, which had a margin of error of 2.8 percentage points. [John] Tory is in the lead at 39 percent, the poll said.