[URBAN NOTE] "Gifts shouldn't overshadow good city planning"

[rfmcdonald]

I agree almost entirely with Edward Keenan's argument in the Toronto Star that philantrophy should be used as a supplement, not as a replacement, for initiatives (and spending!) by governments.

Tuesday morning, Mayor John Tory announced that private donors had given the city $3.4 million to help continue to fashion a giant park out of parts of the Don River Valley. This comes just under a year after we learned Judy and Wilmot Matthews would donate $25 million to construct a new park and public space under a stretch of the Gardiner Expressway (the Matthews’ are among the list of donors to the Don Valley project, too).

At the announcement of both projects, Tory made sure to mention not just the city’s gratitude for the donations, but his hope that they would set examples for other wealthy donors.

Which rubs some people the wrong way. “I don’t understand why, in a democratic society, wealthy people get an extra vote about what we build in the city of Toronto,” Councillor Gord Perks told my colleague David Rider. “We elect governments to decide what our priorities are and it undermines the role of government when wealthy people decide instead.”

In a similar vein, city hall writer Neville Park of Torontoist tweeted, “It makes park creation/placement dependent on the whims of wealthy donors, not solid urban planning principles,” and, “I’m afraid this will continue to marginalize places that aren’t tourist hotspots or undergoing ‘revitalization.’”

And they do have a point, if we start to see private donations as a primary or even regular source of income that we can plan around — and further, if we set our city-building priority list based on which projects draw donations from rich folks, and put those that attract less capital on the back burner. It’s not a stray concern in a city that has solicited donations (and made public service decisions contingent on them) when weather in recent years made it possible to consider keeping outdoor ice rinks open longer, and the High Park Zoo was, for a time, kept open because of private donations.

Donations are good! But as city planner Danny Brown replied to Neville Park on Twitter, “Where are the wealthy private donors building affordable housing, donating to the TTC, etc.” They don’t typically pay for those things, and in a way it would be more of a problem if they did — no one wants to see decisions about which impoverished family’s housing is maintained or condemned based on the whims of a rich donor. We, collectively, need to decide our priorities based on our collective needs and wants. And we, collectively, pay for them based on collective resources, typically taxes and fees.