Canada

The downtown core of Toronto got denser and it got completely soulless. It’s tower after tower that block daylight from reaching street level, leaving no sunlight but for those living at the top, and endless stretches of shoebox apartments where you’re lucky if you get a balcony.

Sorry kid. You can't have space AND fit people as well. Since every rooftop needs to be a garden, at least that's a nice place to hang out.

You can't solve it by mid-ride or low-boys, either -- you need the economies of scale and minimal-density to save on infrastructure; and get better transit that is sufficient on property taxes before the user-pay system and road-tax ideas both die. Because no one's paying for the absolute shit Translink pulled these last few years. You need the high density to create and maintain the shared greenspace between the clusters, so it doesn't end up looking like Detroit or Jersey. You need the high densite to get that land BACK, as well as pull people out of the delta where we NEED that land for responsible local farming. (didn't think of that in your mid-rise plan, did you?)

Sorry. Towers are the reality if you want to live in the cities -- just, if we do it right, with greenways of sanity to break up the tower clusters and cool things down.. Kitimat's nice, though.