They bought the land at a heavy discount, continued to stretch their proposal far beyond the scope of the original RFP, demanded further city investment into transit/land development in order to facilitate their idea, and proposed low-income housing that was frankly a crap deal. In the end Google would've been reaping all the profits of the development deal while the city pays to clean up the mess.
It basically boiled down to somewhere between a mediocre and a pretty bad deal for the local economy, instead of letting a local developer do their thing. I wouldn't have been surprised if it ended up costing (especially if you add in the land discount and subsidies) taxpayers well over a billion dollars. The whole thing reeked of a PR stunt for the Gov working with Big Tech, but I don't know of a single citizen who thought it was a good idea.
Next time, follow a fair RFP process. I'd rather have Amazon try and develop the waterfront.
The only difference here is that is has Google's name on it instead of AvalonBay, Greystar, Hines, Simon, Westfield, ProLogis, etc.
People have an opinion about Google, but they have never heard of any of the other companies that would have done the exact same thing, just with shittier neighborhood wifi.
They all get discounted land from the city, modify the original RFP scope to fit their vision, push the city to create an attractive level of services, drop in a token number of low income houses, and flip the houses for a profit.
I am acutely aware of active REITs/development firms in Toronto, and I have a lot more respect for their process than for what Sidewalk did.
We don't need neighborhood WiFi -- Fiber is widely available within the city and it's a lot cheaper than what I saw in the US.
Due to COVID-19, there has been far more innovation in the city, mostly top-down from the government, than what we saw with Sidewalk. Who cares if they can reconfigure the street? Let people ride their bikes, build community spaces, etc.
Sidewalk garnered negative public opinion because they tried to overreach what people are comfortable with from a real estate developer. Look at what Amazon did in Seattle over the last decade, and maybe take a page out of their book, instead of hand-waving about self-driving cars you're dreaming of sprinkling around the neighbourhood.
This is like complaining that the city sold a chunk of land to a theme park and you didn't like any of the rides they put in.
For the most part the experiment was confined to the land they legally purchased. At no point did they represent the project as anything other than an experiment. If the land was sold below market, you should have spoken up at the time about that.
That would be a fair assessment, but did you miss the part where Google got a discount based on an agreement, then changed the agreement and started demanding additional concessions?
It is perfectly fair for the people of Toronto to push back and re-evaluate the value proposition of the deal if the other party is attempting to renegotiate.
It basically boiled down to somewhere between a mediocre and a pretty bad deal for the local economy, instead of letting a local developer do their thing. I wouldn't have been surprised if it ended up costing (especially if you add in the land discount and subsidies) taxpayers well over a billion dollars. The whole thing reeked of a PR stunt for the Gov working with Big Tech, but I don't know of a single citizen who thought it was a good idea.
Next time, follow a fair RFP process. I'd rather have Amazon try and develop the waterfront.