Current Today is bcdW Magazine's daily newsletter — one story, one city, read through the eyes of the world.

We launch today in test flight. Each edition takes a single real story from one of our cities and asks: what does this mean for someone living somewhere else entirely? What ideas travel? What collaborations become possible?
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This week, Canada made a big bet on housing. The federal government and Ontario's provincial government announced they will cut development charges on new homes in half — a direct attempt to lower the cost of building and unlock more supply in a market where median prices have been running far ahead of median incomes for years.

The logic is straightforward: if you make it cheaper to build, developers build more, supply increases, prices moderate. It is the same argument that cities from Singapore to Seoul to Austin have been making about their own housing markets, with varying degrees of success.

But Toronto has a problem that the development charge cut does not solve. On the same week that Ottawa and Queen's Park announced their housing push, the TTC — the Toronto Transit Commission, the city's primary public transit system — published a warning: costs are higher than in 2019, ridership is lower than in 2019, and the financial trajectory is not sustainable without significant intervention.

This is the housing paradox Toronto has built for itself. The city needs to add tens of thousands of new housing units to meaningfully address affordability. Those units need to be connected to jobs, schools, and services. That connection is the transit system. And the transit system is in financial trouble.

You cannot solve a housing crisis by building homes that aren't connected to anything. A cheaper development charge doesn't build a subway extension. It doesn't restore TTC service frequencies. It doesn't solve the last-mile problem for the outer neighborhoods where new supply is most likely to be added.

Toronto is not unique in this bind. But it is experiencing the bind in a particularly concentrated form right now — a week when the housing solution and the transit problem arrived in the same news cycle, almost as if the city wanted to make the contradiction visible.

The question Toronto should be asking is not whether to cut development charges. The answer to that is yes. The question is what comes next — and whether the transit system will be funded in time to make the new housing worth building.

(Sources: UrbanToronto, The Star, Ontario Government — March–April 2026)

New York — New York has been running this same experiment for decades, and the results are instructive. The city has added housing in outer boroughs and transit-adjacent neighborhoods, but the transit system that was supposed to connect that housing to the city's core has chronically underfunded maintenance, expansion, and operations. The Second Avenue Subway took 50 years from proposal to first phase. The Interborough Express is still in planning. Every new unit built in a neighborhood without adequate transit is a unit that adds a car to the road and a commuter to a system already at its limits. Toronto is watching New York's future arrive on schedule.

Seoul — Seoul solved this problem — partially — by building transit before the housing. The Bundang Line, the Shinbundang Line, the GTX corridors: each one was built in advance of or alongside major residential development, creating the connectivity that made the housing viable. South Korea's development model is not transferable wholesale to Canada's political and fiscal environment, but the sequencing lesson is clear: transit infrastructure that arrives after housing is always playing catch-up. Toronto's development charge cut will speed housing. The question is whether transit funding can keep pace.

Bogotá — Bogotá's experience with TransMilenio is a direct case study in what happens when transit investment leads urban development. The BRT corridors that were built through low-income neighborhoods in the early 2000s didn't just move people — they catalyzed investment, raised property values, and created the connective tissue that made the city more navigable. Bogotá didn't have a housing crisis solved by transit, but it had a mobility crisis partially solved by bold infrastructure investment. Toronto's current moment — a housing push without a transit funding commitment — is the mirror image of what Bogotá did right.

Austin — Austin is making Toronto's mistake in real time. The city is adding population and housing faster than almost any major North American city, but Project Connect — its ambitious light rail program — is under financial pressure and behind schedule. The result is a city adding density in neighborhoods that will be transit-deserts for years. Austin's development community is watching Toronto's development charge cut with interest. Toronto's transit community is watching Austin's Project Connect delays with recognition.

Dallas — Dallas built itself around the car and spent decades trying to retrofit transit into a city that wasn't designed for it. DART has made progress, but the fundamental challenge remains: a city where housing was built without transit in mind is very hard to reconnect. Dallas's FIFA World Cup moment this summer is forcing the city to think about transit capacity in a concentrated way — for a few weeks in July. Toronto is facing the same question for the next 30 years. The development charge cut is the easy part. The transit funding is the hard part. Dallas learned this the hard way.

Singapore — Singapore planned its transit and housing together from the beginning. The HDB (Housing Development Board) estates were built around MRT stations before the stations were even open. The city-state's housing affordability — which, while imperfect, is dramatically better than Toronto's relative to income — is partly the result of this integrated planning. Singapore doesn't offer a direct model for a Canadian democratic context, but it offers a proof of concept: when transit and housing are planned as a single system, the outcome is better than when they are planned separately and funded independently.

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We are getting older. All of us. Faster than we planned, longer than we expected, in cities that were never designed for this. Climate is changing everything — heat, water, food, safety. And at the same time, the oldest generation in human history is growing larger, living longer, and asking a question no city has fully answered yet: where do we belong in all of this? Sim Eternal is the project building that story — not as a warning, not as a policy paper, but as a living narrative about the future city told by the people who will live in it the longest. The olds are not the problem. They are the point. And this city is theirs.

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Current runs on one city, one story, every day. But the map is still being drawn.

We are looking for contributors who live and work inside the cities they write about — one story from your city, told the way only a local can tell it. We are also looking for readers who want to add their voice to other cities' stories — benchmarking, similar cases, collaboration ideas, a connection worth making. If a story from Medellín reminds you of something happening in your city, tell us. That response is the whole point.

Right now we are building across the Americas and Asia. But the dream is longer than that — from America to Afro-Eurasia, local to local, city to city, one real connection at a time.

More stories. More cities. More continents.

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