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It was anything but. And you hardly even need to go beyond the premise to see why.

“Everyone knows housing costs (are) through the roof and there’s no more property available to build housing in Toronto or the GTA,” Ford told reporters in Whitby on Monday. That’s just a silly thing to say, not least in Whitby. In a 2016 report, the Neptis Foundation pegged the amount of land set aside for development in Whitby at 2,740 hectares. That’s the equivalent of a 5.2-kilometre square. It’s one-and-a-half Pearson Airports. Brampton, Vaughn, Hamilton and Milton all have far more land available, and if GO service keeps improving as promised it’s all going to look ever more compelling as a place to call home.

“Neptis researchers have estimated that only about 10,800 of the 56,200 hectares (in the GTHA) was developed between 2006 and 2016; less than 20% of the total supply,” the report reads. “That leaves 80% of the designated land supply to accommodate another 15 years’ worth of growth to 2031 and possibly beyond.”

Even in Toronto proper, the idea that there’s no more room to build is laughable. There are huge neighbourhoods of single-family homes in this city that are served by two-or-three-storey retail on major roads, in some cases with subways running underneath them. (Hello, Danforth!) Everyone knows the city has to get denser, everyone knows where that density ought to go, and developers are lined up around the block to make it happen — to buy up low-rise retail and single family homes and replace them with something bigger. They don’t have to be behemoths, and density doesn’t have to mean Hong Kong or Tokyo: cities like Vancouver, Boston and San Francisco are considerably more densely populated than Toronto, and no one thinks of them as remotely unlivable. This is what needs to happen.