Thomas Jeffrey

[Thomas Jeffrey @RealThomasJeffr]

@DorothyNoronha Dorothy you support the liberal party. When they were in power people actually went to jail.

[Thomas Jeffrey @RealThomasJeffr]

@GraphicMatt @TorontoStar Now compare Toronto to cities with proper subways and no safe injection sites🤣

[Thomas Jeffrey @RealThomasJeffr]

The more you learn about housing and gov’t housing policy, the more you realize Ron the mortgage guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It seems recently he has given into rage farming/engagement.

[Maxwell Tabarrok @MTabarrok]

Half the land area of Boston, a quarter of NYC, and 15% of San Francisco were raised from the sea before 1970.

Since then, land values have grown by 30x but land reclamation has ground to a halt.

This failure follows the spread environmental law around the world rather than any geographic, technological, or economic constraint.

Thus, our lack of land reclamation and the severe land constraints in our most important cities are self-imposed and avoidable. We should make more land!
https://t.co/J9zghvLkz2

Land reclamation was common practice in American cities in the 19th and 20th centuries. Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Charleston, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, Norfolk, DC, Oakland, and LA all had major land reclamation projects that extended residential living space or infrastructure or both.

The Bay Area alone reclaimed an area of land equivalent to ten Manhattans between 1850 and 1957, at an inflation-adjusted cost of $330,000 per acre. Today, an acre of single-family-zoned land in San Francisco County averages $24 million. Even if the cost of land reclamation grew faster than inflation, despite technological leaps in dredging and construction technology, there should be plenty of room for profitable arbitrage.

And yet, land reclamation is extinct in the Bay Area as well as in every other American city. This isn’t because we ran out of good spots to reclaim: Two thirds of the San Francisco Bay is shallower than Boston’s Back Bay was when it was reclaimed in the 1860s. Nor is it because of better transportation: We’ve used up all of the easy suburban expansions enabled by the train and the automobile so prices are rising even in outlying suburbs.

Instead, land reclamation’s death is due to environmental law. Evidence for this claim shows up in the coincident timing of land reclamation’s demise across dozens of cities in the US and in the environmental compliance process of the few reclamation projects still inching along today, but the best evidence is found internationally.

No country has more experience or more reason to reclaim land than the Netherlands. The Dutch built 5% of their country out of the sea over the first half of the 20th century and by 1975 they had another artificial lake in the Zuiderzee ready to drain at the flip of a switch, which would have made tens of thousands of acres of land just east of Amsterdam. But a 1969 environmental review law, similar to NEPA in the US, stopped the project before it was finished and the site is now a protected bird sanctuary. Their one major reclamation since, the Maasvlakte 2 extension of the port of Rotterdam, took 11 years and 6,000 pages of environmental review before construction began.

Inversely, countries without these laws, like China, Singapore, and Japan have continued major land reclamation projects into the 21st century. China has reclaimed over 5,000 square kilometers since 2000, including a city of half a million outside Shanghai and Singapore has grown by a quarter since 1975.

Every major American city has a land shortage. But we have more than enough shallow water, dredging capacity, and market incentive to make more land, just like we did 150 years ago. The only obstacle is our own choice to make making land illegal. The benefits of more land in our most productive cities are large enough to justify the effort of reforming the laws that currently prevent it. Let’s make more land!

[Thomas Jeffrey @RealThomasJeffr]

@JBudzeyko She was a shit journalist and got caught reporting lies and false information.

[Toronto Star @TorontoStar]

Why Billy Bishop airport is destined for expansion https://t.co/7fw5Dqdv5Y

[Thomas Jeffrey @RealThomasJeffr]

@l3v1at4an @TorontoPearson @TorontoPearson fire this person. @CIJAinfo

[Thomas Jeffrey @RealThomasJeffr]

@TheFrankDomenic There is no development happening for the next 2 years. You’re not losing anything.

[Thomas Jeffrey @RealThomasJeffr]

@radiogirl985 @OntarioNature @fordnation @mayorbriansmith @MarkCarney @juliedabrusin God forbid we ever build anything or do something cool with what we’ve got, to the benefit of tens of thousands of people, because of a few fucking birds.

[Thomas Jeffrey @RealThomasJeffr]

@CanadaGray This is disingenuous. The increase in taxes is a result of the peel transition, not the 413. If anything, the growth the highway will bring will support the tax base but that doesn't make for a good rage-bait post does it?

[Thomas Jeffrey @RealThomasJeffr]

@OrbitStudios Lmao this is a non partisan statement. Ok bud.

[Thomas Jeffrey @RealThomasJeffr]

@BlairScorgie Did they speed run it to capture the 6 IZ units before the province pauses the requirement?

[Thomas Jeffrey @RealThomasJeffr]

@univrsle @JoshMatlow Garbage and green bin are still the responsibility of the city of Toronto.

[Thomas Jeffrey @RealThomasJeffr]

@OrbitStudios This is the city’s problem. Only blue box has transferred, garbage and green bin are still run by the CoT

[Thomas Jeffrey @RealThomasJeffr]

@JoshMatlow what about the hundreds of millions of dollars this saves the city of toronto by getting the recycling costs off the books?

[Thomas Jeffrey @RealThomasJeffr]

@OrbitStudios This is just murder cases, which make up a small percentage of violent crime. According to the Toronto Police, Major Crime Indicators are up a staggering 30% since 2020, and up 39% from 2015.

[Thomas Jeffrey @RealThomasJeffr]

@ShaziGoalie There’s a lot of inventory coming online yea. 2028 they will skyrocket again as new building has been dead with no projects coming online in the next 18 months.

[Thomas Jeffrey @RealThomasJeffr]

@alexbrown17 What’s the value of a ‘Real conservative’ if you can’t win a general? Conservative lite is better than no conservative.

[Ontario PC Press @PCPressOffice]

But wait, there's more!

[Thomas Jeffrey @RealThomasJeffr]

@PCPressOffice This woman shouldn't be anywhere near public service. Let alone a teacher at a University. Yeesh.