Thorncliffe Park Drive (TORONTO) by Jenver Rosales on 500px
Between the 1950s and 1980s, Toronto built a lot of towers. A 2010 report by the Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal identified 1,925 rental apartment towers of 8 storeys or more across the Greater Toronto Area.
That’s the second largest inventory of apartment towers in North America – many or most of which are in car-oriented suburban neighborhoods.
Of course, Toronto continues to build a lot of towers. But this second and current wave of towers is quite different than the last. Virtually all of them are now condo (as opposed to rental) and most are concentrated in central neighborhoods that are generally well-serviced by transit.
This has created a lot of positives for the city. It brought more people into the core to live, which in turn brought more retailers and employers into the city. It has created what I believe is a more vibrant and exciting 24/7 city.
But this return to city centers (as well as the economic spikiness it has created) is now well established both in Toronto, as well as in other cities all around the world. Every real estate conference or panel you go to now talks about Millennials and their desire to be in walkable communities. We got it.
And relatively speaking, those kinds of communities aren’t that difficult to create when you’re infilling city centers. Certainly not at this point. The street grid and bones are usually all in place. And the urban form is often conducive to transit.
The real challenge – and thus opportunity – for Toronto and lots of other cities is how to urbanize the (inner) suburbs and in particular these “towers in a park”. If you follow this space, you’ll know that there’s a lot more that we could be doing.
How do we rethink their relationship to the rest of the city? How do we better connect them through transit? How do we plug them in economically? In my opinion, these are far more difficult tasks. But they’re important ones for the long-term success of our cities.
This will probably be my last Gardiner East post before the decision goes to City Council next week on June 10th. But I have such good news that I need to share it with you all.
This morning 14 “CityBuilders” came together for the first time in support of removing the elevated Gardiner East and replacing it with a surface boulevard. They are real estate developers, investors, and other prominent business leaders in the city. And they sent a letter this morning to every single Toronto City Councillor outlining their position.
I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to see this happen, so I’d like to call out each and every member of the CityBuilders. They are (in alphabetical order):
Castlepoint Numa
Cityzen Development Corporation
Context Development
Continental Ventures
Daniels Corporation
Distillery Historical District
Dream Unlimited Corporation
Greybrook Capital and Greybrook Realty Partners
Kerbel Group Inc.
Manulife Real Estate
QQE 162
Streetcar Developments
TAS
Tridel Group of Corporations
These are some of Toronto’s most important city builders and I am sure this will get the attention of both Mayor John Tory and the rest of City Council.
If you haven’t yet signed the Gardiner East petition that Stephen and I started, please do so by clicking here.
Happy Friday :)
Yesterday Lloyd Alter of Treehugger wrote a great rebuttal to my post about homes for families. His argument was that I missed a whole world of building typologies between single family homes and apartments. (Something that architect and urban planner Daniel Parolek calls “The Missing Middle”.)
Now he’s absolutely right. I didn’t mention it – other than provide an option in the survey for townhomes. And he’s right that it’s a tremendous opportunity for cities looking to increase housing supply and improve affordability.
But the reason I didn’t mention it in my survey is because, here in Toronto, we’re not very good at that middle scale.
I previously wrote a post talking about Toronto’s 3 stages of intensification. It went from high-rise to mid-rise, and then to low-rise intensification. And my argument was that we’re still in and figuring out the mid-rise scale. (There are challenges at this scale, but that deserves a separate post.)
Eventually though, I think we will get to low-rise intensification. And that will cover off many of the building typologies that Lloyd is talking about: duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and, my personal favorite, laneway houses.
This, of course, isn’t the case in every city. Many cities, such as Montreal, have a strong history of neighborhood-scaled apartments. Lloyd points that out in his article. But that’s not the case here in Toronto.
In fact, Toronto’s Official Plan explicitly designates these low-rise “Neighborhoods” as areas that are stable and should not see much intensification. And it was a great selling point for the Places to Grow Act: intensification here, but not there.
But I think this will change. Not because I’m a real estate developer and I think it should change, but because our current arrangement is causing a dramatic erosion of affordability at the low-rise/ground-related housing scale.
If it were up to me, and it most certainly is not, I would start with laneway housing. It’s a great way to intensify low-rise neighbourhoods without altering the character of the streets.
If you live in a single family neighborhood, I would especially love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.