Sixteen Volts

As a city boy whose heart is made of concrete, I just love skyscrapers and become a little happier and make a little woo-hoo dance each time the construction of a new one is announced. Toronto is, of course, far ahead of the adjoining Mississauga in this particular game, but there is quite a lot of construction going on here in the 905 area, especially near Square One mall in Mississauga, where there are five condo towers (by my knowledge) going up in the fifty-story range (even if two of those are those Absolute corkscrews that I despise), plus a whole bunch of new condominiums in the 30-35 story range. Eventually, my boyhood dream of getting to live in the city that was depicted in the movie "Bladerunner" will be realized! Video phones and a whole bunch of ethnic diversity we already have, so it's almost like we are halfway there.

In the big city, there is so much excellent construction going on in downtown and especially the waterfront area that I can't even begin to keep mentally track of it. From the viewpoint of stylishness, I especially admire the towering College Park condominiums that are currently being constructed. When you walk right past them along the Bay Street, the near-completed building looks tall and magnificient, because unlike the buildings such as the First Canadian Place (which in reality is about twenty stories taller than College Park will be) but whose shape is so flat and homogeneous, College Park just conveys a much better impression of being really tall, since you can look up it and trace its height with your own eyes. The building itself is also stylish to look at, so its very existence simply fills my heart with joy. It definitely is an improvement to whatever parking lot or homeless activist congregation spot there used to be in that plot of land.

In the big city, it seems to me that many little pieces of land that were used as parking areas are being converted to skyscrapers. Of course, this would make perfect sense from the economic standpoint. I can't imagine anyone possibly charging enough for parking so that it would bring in as much money as the profit of selling that land to somebody who builds a 40-story condo on it. The city is of course the city, but here in the Square One area there is still plenty of room so that it is not yet necessary to start building over parking lots. However, if somebody was smart, they would take the four huge parking areas that surround the Square One shopping mall, and perhaps build one five- or six-story parking tower on one of them, and once it is complete, filled the other three with productive condo skyscrapers.

Mississauga still has a plenty of room to grow, which it seriously needs to do once we remember that the Greater Toronto Area gains a hundred thousand new people every single year, thanks to immigration. Quite a few of these people seem to end up in Mississauga, making the city likely to reach the million-people status within ten years, and probably much sooner. Fortunately, these new immigrants also don't have an ingrained aversion towards condo living or feel the need to head out to suburbia, making them prime candidates for condo salesmen. But whenever I take a walk around here, I can still see plenty of land that is just sitting there, doing nothing but growing weeds. It would be no problem to find room for a dozen more skyscrapers that would be practically a stone's throw (or three) away from Square One and its adjoining buildings.

For creating an actual downtown for Mississauga, it would also be necessary that these new buildings offer plenty of commercial space in the street level to encourage pedestrian activity, and that some of these buildings are not residential but provide space for offices and other businesses. Currently, for some reason that I can't really comprehend, business and offices do not seem to prosper in the downtown Mississauga, since people just live here and then commute to work elsewhere. Right now I can count only five seven buildings (and I counted Executive Center as one building, even though I guess it is really four) that provide office space, and as far as I know, each one of these has plenty of space available for lease. One of these office buildings was actually built only halfway through, leaving it look somewhat humorously lopsided now that its obviously missing half serves as a parking lot.

There are also a couple of pieces of useless land that I just can't understand what is going on in them. First, once you head west along the main road Burnhamthorpe, after the main library you come to big flat meadow. The similar area on the other side of the road is slowly being filled with condos, but this particular meadow has, ever since we moved here five years ago, contained a boarded-up model house. You could not think of a better place to put up a whole row of condominium skyscrapers (by my estimate, about a dozen would fit in), but absolutely nothing has happened with this meadow ever since we moved here. Perhaps this meadow used to be some ancient and sacred First Nations burial ground so that the ghosts of warriors will come and harm all those who plan to build on it. Or that some environmentalists discovered some endangered beetle that lives there. Those are the only two explanations that I can come up with for this mystery.

A second area whose situation I can't comprehend is closer to home. It's actually on the street where I live, right across the road. Over there, there are four really old and crappy small houses, from the outside looking like they are falling apart. On the other side of the road from these houses, two new really nice-looking 35-story skyscraper condos stand looking all mighty, and if you walk half a block from these houses to the other direction, there are three such condo skyscrapers going up. Considering this prime location that sits next to the major artery, I just can't comprehend why these moldy pieces of decrepit crap haven't been sold and razed a long time ago to make room for construction similar to that has taken place around them. In fact, one of them was renovated and now works as a daycare center. I would certainly be interested to hear what the heck the story is here.

Oh yeah, and then there is that Sega video game arcade (by the way, I predict that all video game arcades will go the way of phone booths within about five years, bye bye) squeezed between the 403 highway and the Square One complex. Most of the land that it uses seems to be allocated for a little cart racing circuit that few people ever seem to actually use. I don't know how much this company charges for a couple of laps on a cart that essentially has a lawnmower engine, but I doubt that it brings in as much money as certain... other uses for this land that I could think of. Go on, crunch the numbers, accountants.

Of course, with a growing population that tends to commute to work elsewhere comes the question of traffic. Pretty soon, the central Mississauga might get to enjoy traffic and traffic jams that I hear are common in other large cities. Public transit will have to seriously pick up, which is of course nice for me as a longtime supporter of efficient and widespread public transit. I certainly don't advocate getting rid of cars altogether, but wherever public transit can work, it is the best way to go for many people, and even for twice the price it would be a superb deal. Even those who drive their cars benefit --- would you rather share the road and the parking facilities with a bus that has 40 passengers in it, or with 40 single-passenger cars?

A hundred bucks a month for public transit or a thousand bucks a month for a car, for many people like me that is a total no-brainer. Besides, it's so nice to just sit around on your ass when other people bring me money for me to allow them to continue to use my two parking spots. And whenever I want to go somewhere, I just catch the bus that comes every seven minutes or so during the weekdays at the stop right next to where we live. Maybe if there were even more people living around here, the bus would come every five minutes, making life even more convenient.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Wednesday, August 02, 2006 at 10:30 AM