Local Development

Flipping through The Star today, my eye stopped on one of the City Clerk's notices for development applications, and saw there were two in our area:

Ward 15
Dufferin St. W/S at McAdam

Proposal for a terraced 11-storey residential condominium with ground floor

retail fronting on Dufferin St, and a separate block of 3-storey townhouses for a

total of 101 residential units.
(as far as I can tell, this is the vacant lot beside the offramp that takes SB traffic into the Yorkdale parking lot; there's an elevated billboard there now)

Ward 16
439, 441, 443 and 445 Duplex Avenue; 58, 60, 64 and 68 Orchard View Blvd.

(no further info listed)

(this would cover the houses at that corner that have been boarded up for some time now; it will be interested to see what's going there - whether townhouses or something higher)

Of interest to me, besides the details of these projects, is the sheer frustrating effort it took to try and go from the newspaper ad to try and get further information on these. There are application numbers published in the notice. Why in land's end is there no way to track these at the city's website? Why isn't there an online database where I can plug in that reference number and get all the information? (And going in the other direction, why isn't there an interactive map that indicates where in the city there are pending development applications?) I did manage the dig out the descriptive blurb for the first of these from a PDF of development applications, but this wasn't something I found through the search function.

There are contact names, numbers and email addresses listed, but why do we need gatekeepers for this information?

(And, also interestingly, tackling this problem from another direction, this ad doesn't seem to exist at the Star's website, at least not in any reasonably simple-to-find way. What's going to happen to public and statutory notices like this once the pulpy versions of our newspapers cease to exist?)