What kind of a city tells young people to leave?

Toronto, apparently.

Radio host Matt Gurney received a considerable amount of scorn after he wrote a column last week suggesting young people should consider leaving Toronto because it’s too expensive to live here. His was a response to a blog post by a millennial who said she was moving “north” because she was priced out of the Toronto market.

Gurney is not a heartless goon, and as he explained subsequently on Twitter, the column came out of place of frustration and pessimism around the lack of political action on affordable housing and public transit, issues he’s written about in the past. His was a realist’s take, but to many it was shocking and infuriating.

I’m frustrated too, but where I fundamentally disagree is telling people to leave the city as an option. If all of Canada suddenly became too expensive, would we tell folks to leave? Rich, poor or somewhere in between, we have the right to live anywhere in Canada. That’s enshrined in the Charter. What if we extend that right to cities too?

Today many of our cities have become near city-states, juggernauts of economy and culture that attract people to them. Many of us here in Toronto are economic migrants too; some of the journeys here were relatively easy — just up the 401 from Windsor for me — and others fraught with all manner of risk and peril.

Over at TVO, John McGrath wrote a response to Gurney’s column and pointed out the GTA would actually be losing people if it wasn’t for international immigration, as more people leave the region than arrive from the rest of Canada. Though the housing crisis is most acute in big cities such as Toronto and Vancouver, other cities, Halifax, Calgary and Ottawa for example, experience similar problems of high home prices and rents. Friends and relatives in Windsor are even complaining of “Toronto style” bidding wars. This is increasingly a Canadian problem.

Of course other Canadian cities are worth living in, with robust cultures and economies, but there are still an awful lot of reasons, jobs or otherwise, that draw people to Toronto. Should millennials or anybody else seeking a job in a particular industry here be penalized because this is the system and structure they’ve been given? It seems like an economic bait and switch: here’s the carrot you need to thrive, but the restaurant’s cover charge is too expensive to get in.

One of Toronto’s slogans is “You belong here.” Just a Mel Lastman-era bumper sticker to some, but there’s considerable philosophical and political thought that supports such a notion. In his influential 1968 book Le droit à la ville (or “Right to the City”) French philosopher Henri Lefebvre recognized just how urban-centric modern life had become. To fully participate in it everyone must have a right to it, all of it including the culture, economy, public spaces and the very “life rhythms” cities provide. He examined the structures that made that participation unequal.

More recently, urban theorist and geographer David Harvey has expanded on the notion of Right to the City: it isn’t just the right to be in the city, but the right to transform the city itself and reshape the processes of urbanization. Further, since cities are where so much opportunity lay, it’s a human right.

Both Lefebvre and Harvey present radical (to some) ideas from the left of the spectrum, but even if you don’t buy into their arguments, it’s just dumb to ignore the fact that people are forced to leave your city because of economics. If people, even those with “good” jobs, feel they must leave, then you’re driving away talent and creating a brain drain. Only a completely foolish city would tell its young people to leave instead of tackling the problem. Mayors around the world are actively trying to do this.

Last week London’s mayor Sadiq Khan announced a $2.9 billion (Cdn) deal to build affordable homes, some rental, some shared ownership. It’s part of his commitment to build 90,000 new homes in London. Across Europe and beyond, much higher percentages of urban populations, both working and middle classes, live in some form of social housing, giving them a foothold in expensive cities. It isn’t stigmatized the way it is here, perhaps a reason why we’re so slow to create a national housing policy.

Building more housing is a way out of this, making sure a large amount of it is truly affordable, but in his column McGrath mentioned another Toronto truth that gets at the root of the kind of pessimism many feel here. “If you don’t currently own a house in Toronto, preferably a detached one, the city’s political class doesn’t care about you and doesn’t even really want you,” he wrote. “They rail against nearly every new tower; even timid attempts to make tower-induced density work better, like the King streetcar pilot council approved last week, are watered down so as not to offend home-owning motorists.”

This truth was made explicitly clear to me last week at a screening of Citizen Jane at the Revue Cinema, the documentary on urban activist and thinker Jane Jacobs. Though ostensibly filled with progressive-minded, Jane Jacobs fans, during the Q & A session after the film the sneering at the new residential buildings along the Mimico waterfront came fast and easy.

“A slum in the making,” an epithet tossed at so many housing clusters, was used, almost wishing for failure. The new buildings in Mimico certainly aren’t what we would call affordable housing, but they’re a lot cheaper than the single family houses we venerate so much and they give thousands of people the chance to live near the lake. Yet, we sneer at and resist apartment housing across the city, even when it’s a rental building rather than a condo.

Anti-housing sentiment isn’t a right or left thing, it’s a Toronto thing. Everybody can find some way to justify why they’re against new housing going into their neighbourhood. Make no mistake, if Toronto rolled out a genuine affordable housing plan, this city’s anti-housing sentiment would target it.

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You belong here? Maybe. Maybe not.

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