whose city is this?

So what do we do about all this violence? As I write these words, I feel as saddened and burned out by the week, and its subsequent reportage, as any other Torontonian. Do we round up the gang-bangers and send them away forever? Boot them out of our precious city?

Certainly, this kind of political talk plays into people’s feelings of helplessness and anger. And in a world where people are hungry for quick fixes and sound bites, for instant gratification, there’s no patience for the long, slow rebuilding process: implementing after-school programs, hiring more community workers to act as mentors, adding more job training programs in marginalized areas.

However, if we don’t invest now, in so-called priority neighbourhoods, with music classes, athletic facilities, and skills training and mentoring, we will all pay more in the long run.

We now know young Ernest Hemingway was a sensitive soul but, beneath the machismo for which he became known, the iconic author seemed to have maintained his soft core into his final years. One testament to this was his well-documented love of his cats — he had 23 by 1945. (His first cat, named Snowball, was given to him by a ship’s captain and was six-toed; his former home in Key West, Florida, currently houses nearly a hundred descendants of Snowball, about half of whom are polydactyl — an inadvertent lab for inbred genetic mutation.) Hemingway’s niece, Hilary Hemingway, writes in the foreword to Hemingway’s Cats: An Illustrated Biography that the author and his fourth wife, Mary, called the cats “purr factories” and “love sponges.”

On February 22, 1953, one of Hemingway’s cats, Uncle Willie, was hit by a car. Following the accident, Hemingway sent his close friend Gianfranco Ivancich the following distraught letter:

Dear Gianfranco:

Just after I finished writing you and was putting the letter in the envelope Mary came down from the Torre and said, ‘Something terrible has happened to Willie.’ I went out and found Willie with both his right legs broken: one at the hip, the other below the knee. A car must have run over him or somebody hit him with a club. He had come all the way home on the two feet of one side. It was a multiple compound fracture with much dirt in the wound and fragments protruding. But he purred and seemed sure that I could fix it.

I had René get a bowl of milk for him and René held him and caressed him and Willie was drinking the milk while I shot him through the head. I don’t think he could have suffered and the nerves had been crushed so his legs had not begun to really hurt. Monstruo wished to shoot him for me, but I could not delegate the responsibility or leave a chance of Will knowing anybody was killing him…

Have had to shoot people but never anyone I knew and loved for eleven years. Nor anyone that purred with two broken legs.

For more on the literary legend’s tender side, see Young Hemingway’s Letters.

One almost feels sorry for Doug Holyday; but not as sorry as one does for the city of which he is deputy mayor.

Not only is the poor man hopelessly out of touch with 21st-century Toronto, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. (Is it coincidence that three of city council’s most visible dinosaurs — Holyday and the Ford Brothers — all come from Etobicoke?)

Holyday became a laughingstock last week when he declared downtown a bad place to raise a family. His ignorance and anti-urban prejudice help explain why Toronto is fast falling behind other North American cities.

In fact, new research confirms what Holyday should have known — more families than ever dowant to live downtown, and most of those who live in suburbs want their neighbourhoods to be more walkable, better connected to transit, more mixed-use, in short, more urban.

The report, prepared by the Pembina Institute and the Royal Bank, found an overwhelming majority of GTA residents would rather live in a city or a suburb with city-like attributes.

“This is not a city versus suburbs thing,” says Pembina’s Ontario policy director, Cherise Burda. “We surveyed GTA residents and found that if you held housing prices equal house, lot size and house size aren’t as important as walkability, access to transit and length of commute. They would give up the large house and yard in order to get those features.”

Even more revealing was the fact that given a choice, only 18 per cent said they’d opt to live in a traditional sprawl subdivision, what Burda calls a “car-dependent neighbourhood.”

Of course, once cost is factored into the equation; everything changes. Though most would prefer the city, they can only afford the suburbs.

“What’s missing,” Burda explains, “is affordable family-oriented housing in transit-oriented, mixed-use, walkable areas. This isn’t the case just downtown, but also in other communities in the GTA. It turns out that most people do want to live in dense neighbourhoods, not distant places. They don’t want any more of those sprawling greenfield developments. Government needs to do more to make it more attractive for developers to build compact, family-friendly homes. A lot of politicians are still encouraging developers to build sprawl.”

Look no further than York Region, which, desperately in debt, hopes to fast-track more of the sprawl that got it into trouble in the first place.

For Claude DeMone, RBC director of home equity financing strategy, the report “reinforces” what he’s already seeing.

“The interesting thing for us,” he says, “is that it validates how important a walkable community is not just in downtown Toronto but places like Mississauga, Markham and Whitby. Toronto is a great city to have kids, but lifestyle plays a huge role in where people live.”

As much as anything, the Pembina document, which will be released Monday, also highlights the growing gap between the inhabitants of the GTA and their elected leaders. While the population grows ever more urban-minded, politicians are stuck in a discredited past that has brought jurisdictions like York Region to the brink.

Given our leaders’ flimsy grasp on reality, it’s not hard to understand why we have not kept pace with the rest of the world. But clearly, people in the GTA have embraced the very changes the elected would either deny or stop.

But the forces of urbanization have been unleashed and there’s no looking back. Before they were elected, Holyday, the Fords and their antediluvian allies were merely relics; now they’re obstacles