Greetings from Yonge St.

On behalf of the neighbourhood, I’d like to welcome the tens of thousands of people who have moved here, are in the process of moving here or don’t yet know they’ll be moving here. Hello!

Last week our City Councillor, Kristyn Wong-Tam, tweeted out recent stats from the city’s planning department that showed nearly 17,000 residential units are proposed within 100 metres of Yonge St. between Davenport Rd. and Queens Quay, with more than 4,000 already built in the last four years. That’s a lot of people about to call Toronto’s — and maybe Canada’s — most famous street home.

And that’s not the end of it; there are many thousands more, both current and expected, in the two or three blocks east and west of Yonge. I live two blocks from Yonge, part of this string of continuous neighbourhoods that hug Yonge St. It’s a good place to live, you’ll like it, but there’s work to be done yet.

Toronto’s Chief Planner, Jennifer Keesmaat, added to the councillor’s tweet, writing that Yonge St. is “accommodating more new units than most Canadian provinces. Imagine!” Perhaps we should rebrand as the Prince Edward Island of Toronto, complete with an Anne of Green Gables themed condo. Her analogy underlined the heavy lifting this part of town is doing in accommodating all the people moving to our “You Belong Here” city.

What was most important about both Wong-Tam and Keesmaat’s statements is they both used the #YongeLove hashtag. Yonge Love is an initiative of, in part, the Ryerson City Building Institute that is looking into how Yonge St. will “accommodate more pedestrians, improve the public realm, and balance higher density with the public needs of the neighbourhood.” Last month they held a jam-packed meeting in Ryerson’s new student centre, the university’s first very public presence on Yonge itself, so it’s clear there’s a lot of enthusiasm to improve Toronto’s main street and make sure we’ve got the infrastructure to support the increased population.

Like so many Toronto streets, Yonge’s sidewalks are too narrow, sometimes uncomfortably so when crowded, as fast-moving traffic could be within half a metre from pedestrians. The street is ugly too. Not the buildings along it, they’re a great mélange of old and new styles, a quintessential Toronto architectural potpourri. But the actual road itself is ugly. Like nearly all Toronto roads, it’s built like a highway, not as a main street for many thousands of people who live by it.

You’ll find that out soon enough though when you walk it every day, but here are some other things to know about your new neighbourhood. First, it’s immune from Toronto’s mostly fun east vs. west rivalries: we are “the middle,” neutral territory for all to enjoy. Yonge has also not been the coolest or trendiest street in the city. It’s been good to be under the radar, but that may not last for long.

We are also not a NIMBY neighbourhood, and while there is grumbling sometimes, there is little of the overwrought opposition to new residential units as is the case elsewhere in the city, though there is somebody who spray paints “ENUF” on development proposal signs, even the rental buildings, which is a curious way to address a housing crisis.

Your new neighbourhood is comfortable being part of a big city. Two years ago the café at the corner of Isabella and Church Sts. applied for a liquor permit for their patio directly across the street from residences, and there was nary a peep about this kind of proposal that seems to freak out other parts of the city.

Some of the new buildings could be better though. At times the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) seems like the last defence against NIMBY forces in the city, but the results aren’t always pleasing. Take 365 Church St. going up between Gerrard and Carlton Sts. An “OMB special” says one planning friend of the hulking rectangle of a slab with no grace or beauty that was approved in a 2012 OMB decision. More residential buildings are needed, but why can’t they be beautiful instead the cheap, generic kind of thing going up here? We need an OMB that defends beauty.

As for the beautiful streetscape Yonge Love envisions, recent events suggest it might be a tough road ahead. Already Mayor Tory’s executive committee voted earlier this year to hack apart Yonge-Dundas Square’s original design and add around a dozen video screens to the public space. In North York, the REimagine Yonge project that would have urbanized the stretch of Yonge between Finch and Sheppard Aves. had its funding delayed by his executive committee as well.

Would-be Yonge newcomers, I hope you still want to move into our neighbourhood and are excited by the potential to make it a better place to live and work. But if that’s a vision you want, prepare to join the fight as the current administration in charge at city hall is indicating it is hostile to this kind of urban life.

Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef