Go forth and multiply ... somewhere else

To be clear: Bad Buildings means not to harp on the private condo developer community exclusively. We might as well haul out a big ol' barrel full o' fish and start firing with our AK-47. The point: Easy target. Too easy, some might say.

But damned if it's not an appropriate one, too. Thanks to the OMB, that Death Star-like, shadowy "oversight" development body that has a habit of greenlighting any and everything the city says 'no' to -- like all the junk planned for the Queen West Triangle, for example, none of which the city's planning department approved, and all of which the OMB over-freakin'-ruled -- private developers are runnign roughshod over the delicate urban ecosystems that make the city something we love: A collection of closely knit communities and neighbourhoods.

Have a look-see at (shudder) Liberty Village, say -- a tower thrown here (that's Liberty Towers, above, utterly out of proportion with its surroundings), 'lofts' over there, a field of numbingly identical, cheap 'rowhouses' -- none of which have more than two bedrooms, and none of which, consequently, are likely to be 'home' to anyone for more than a few years.

Why? The aggressive lifestyle marketing campaign is aimed almost exclusively at young breeders, yet to breed (hence the teensy spaces); when they do breed, in a few years, they gotta move. That means a transient collection of residents holed up in shoddy buildings, cycling through every 3 to 5 years. Sound like a community to you? Hmm. us neither.

"It's a neighbourhood," CanAlfa, the LV developer declares on its homepage front. Yeah. And an AMC Gremlin was a car, technically, too. But we don't want anything to do with that, either.