Last month I asked Paul Bedford for a summer beer to pick his brain about the emerging development of our city.

I was curious to get Paul’s perspective on the city’s downtown residential building boom against the City’s Official Plan he developed over a decade ago when he was the City’s Chief Planner.

When I suggested an urban walk before our drink, he asked me to pick a neighbourhood. I chose City Place and we toured Toronto’s dense condo-land between University and Spadina along the Gardiner expressway.

I recalled his vision (twenty years ago) of a Vancouver-style high density but liveable waterfront neighbourhood and wanted to understand what went wrong.

How was it that Vancouver could build world renowned high density but liveable communities that put people and families first, while Toronto could only build soulless concrete jungles that pushed its residents out as soon as they graduated to small families?

Our walk surprised me.

No doubt Toronto cannot boast to have replicated the more delicate urban fabric of Vancouver’s redevelopment of its old Expo lands, which was Paul’s vision for our downtown waterfront (pre-dating the Official Plan).  But what I experienced was a remarkably intimate and vibrant new community. Large footprint buildings that I felt overwhelmed, passing by on the Gardiner, seemed quite human scale at ground level.

The public realm feels open, green and inviting. Pedestrian connectivity to more established neighbouring communities felt natural (though the Gardiner still very much a barrier). Neigbourhood oriented retail plentiful and parkland both abundant and well utilized.

A new public school under development surprised me. Weren’t families moving away from such communities? Obviously the Toronto District School Board understands that the stroller boom in condo-land is a harbinger of young families choosing to stay downtown – not the last stand of a hip, urban Millennial couple before a move to more conventional residential pastures.

While seeing is believing, the true liveability test is, obviously, living it.

The seemingly abundant and well utilized parkland is in reality highly over-subscribed according to Dave Harvey, Executive Director of Park People, the city’s leading park advocate. Evidently we have not built enough basic playing field space, not withstanding the considerable parkland contributions associated with the condo construction.

Another liveability indicator that jumped at me on my walk with Paul was the fact the lovely and bright new public library at the foot of Bathurst Street was jammed to near capacity – and this was an August mid-afternoon! No doubt many would-be-users are being turned away now that school is back.

Hopefully this planned school will be large enough to accommodate student demand that may well have been under-estimated. Hopefully also the new school will lend itself to a multitude of community uses to accommodate ever increasing demands for public amenity space during evenings, weekends, and summertime.

Time will tell.

A recent planning report by the City of Toronto on the downtown precinct predicts that the meteoric growth of the past two decade – almost 50 percent since the early 1990’s – will keep pace for at least another 20 years. No city in North America is experiencing this level of downtown growth in relative or absolute terms.

This same planning report shows only modest growth of parkland and open space. Details of other long range investments libraries, recreation centres, and schools are not conveyed. But what is almost a certainty is that public infrastructure investments will need to be massive if we are going to make the “Manhattanization” of Toronto work.

Another unsolved planning matter is public transit. While the proximity to the central commercial district in the downtown allows over 40 percent of its residents to walk or cycle, nearly a third rely on public transit. Pressure to provide higher order transit access to the Go-transit corridor for these new waterfront communities will increase annually.

Toronto’s current Chief Planner, Jennifer Keesmaat, recently asked in a tweet whether we have reached “peak home” noting that the size of homes in North America have increased every decade for the past 70 years. Certainly Toronto’s downtown points to a new trend of a generation that is wanting to trade in personal living area for geography. For these Millennials, small is the new affordable.

But is small the new affordable for all?

As my conversation with Paul turned to the bigger, regional, picture, he noted that while the compact central lifestyle desired by many Millennials it is not the solution for all. Sustainable and affordable housing in a legislatively (Greenbelt Act) land constrained region must have us look to other innovative opportunities.

Paul noted the increasingly outmoded retail plazas across the Greater Toronto Area as prime opportunities to acquire lower cost properties for new transit oriented, mixed use development. Here larger but affordable family homes are still a possibility in ever expensive city.

Clearly an even broader land use discussion needs to also examine the future of the broadest mix of housing supply across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. The demand for more traditional neighbourhood housing is still strong. And this demand will not go away notwithstanding the urban transformation occurring on our central waterfront.

In the coming months the provincial government’s Growth Secretariat will be leading a review of the major regional planning reforms introduced nearly a decade ago – the Greenbelt Act and Places to Grow Act (Regional Growth Plan). The City of Toronto is also reviewing its Official Plan. The two obviously need to be aligned.

All of these reviews provide an opportunity to examine all of our future housing demands within the context of market forces and strong public policy. How do we ensure that all parts of our region develop into truly liveable, transit supportive and, very importantly, affordable family neighbourhoods? These are the elements of healthy communities that are at the forefront of the Urban Land Institute’s mission. The details are as important at the broad strokes.

My walk with Paul reminded me of the value of looking at the future of our city and our region from the street up to understand the intricacies that make neighbourhoods work.

As we confront the ongoing challenges of growth must never lose sight of this most basic truth.