Tag: redevelopment

• We’re hosting a pre-design community meeting in Hamilton

  This fall Slate acquired a retail center in Hamilton called Corktown Plaza. It is the block bounded by John Street South, Young Street, Catharine Street South, and Forest Avenue. It is just south of the Hamilton GO Centre in downtown.

  It is currently a much used single storey retail plaza with a large surface parking lot facing John Street South. It’s still early days, but the long-term plan is to redevelop it into a mixed-use retail and residential complex.

  Before putting pen to paper, the team is hosting a “pre-design community meeting” this Tuesday, December 12, 2017 at 7pm at the Church of Ascension down the street. Address is 64 Forest Avenue (accessible entrance at 258 John Street South).

  Here is the invite (embedded tweet):

  Kudos @SlateAssetMgmt for hosting a “pre-design” community meeting before “putting pen to paper” … a best practise in meaningful public engagement pic.twitter.com/w07paBeoyp

  — Jason Thorne (@JasonThorne_RPP)

  November 30, 2017

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  The purpose of the meeting is to gather feedback from the community before beginning design. We want to know what’s working today, what’s not working today, and what would be ideal for the future. 

  CORE Architects and GSP Group (planning) will be in attendance along with the Slate team. The format will be brief presentations followed by interactive breakout sessions. There will be trace paper on hand so that we can all put pen to paper.

  If you live and/or work in the area or are simply interested in the future of Hamilton, please feel free to join us on Tuesday evening. If you can, send a quick email to rsvp@kga-inc.com letting us know you’ll be coming. But just showing up is also perfectly fine.

  2017.12.09

• An Honest Farewell

  

  I spent Saturday evening at Honest Ed’s for An Honest Farewell. It was a lot of fun. There were many familiar faces. And it felt very Toronto. See above photo.

  But part of me felt a bit phony pretending to celebrate the end of 68 years of operations. Truth be told, I’m not sure I ever bought anything from Honest Ed’s. Had it turned into a 3 floor super club sooner, perhaps I would have spent a bit more time there over the years.

  To me, Honest Ed’s was great big signage. 

  When I was a kid, my mom used to work on Bathurst Street just north of Bloor and I would go downtown with her early in the morning before school. It would still be dark out and I remember being so captivated by the bright lights of Honest Ed’s. That’s what the city meant to me. Lights. Flash. Excitement. It was where I wanted to be.

  A portion of the signage is being preserved and moved to Yonge and Dundas. But otherwise, this past weekend was the official end of an era. What matters now is the future of Mirvish Village. And the future is exciting.

  I’ll end with an excerpt from a recent Globe and Mail article by Alex Bozikovic:

  “The new development at Mirvish Village, after two years of conversation between developers Westbank, locals and the city, is inching closer to approval, with a new proposal submitted in January to the city. Westbank paid $72-million for the site, a big number, and yet the result is as good as private development gets in Toronto. It features meaningful preservation of heritage buildings, a serious sustainability agenda, and affordable housing – not to mention an architectural and leasing strategy geared at making the place as lively as possible, even a bit weird.”

  2017.02.27

• Dashilar Platform

  I am reading about the Dashilar Platform this evening. I am sure that some of you are already familiar with what’s happening in this Beijing neighborhood since the platform was founded in 2011. But I am just turning my attention to it.

  The Dashilar Platform is an approach to urban regeneration that grew out of a perceived failure, namely the redevelopment of Beijing’s historic Qianmen neighborhood in the lead up to the 2008 Summer Olympics.

  In this latter case, a top-down tabula rasa approach was adopted and the entire precinct was demolished to make way for what – I am told – is now a kitschy tourist area that has lost most, if not all, of its urban authenticity.

  The Dashilar approach runs counter to this and is trying to work bottom-up. Below is a description of their strategy from the Dashilar Platform website. (It feels like it was written using Google Translate.)

  Dashilar Platform is an open platform founded by Beijing Dashilar Investment Limited. As opposed to the conventional concept of blanket development, Dashilar Platform will utilize key nodes which act as catalysts for change in the area. Through research and design investigation, Dashilar Platform will promote certain archetypes, modules, and best-practice examples for both residents and outside investors. The aim is to encourage the community to move independently yet coherently towards the strong yet flexible goal of creating a sustainable community with increasing depth and diversity. All parties are welcome to join Dashilar Platform and participate in our [progressive] Dashilar Project.

  Some view this “urban acupuncture” strategy as simply a way to promote gentrification through small injections of culture and design. But gentrification, without displacement, strikes me as being the point given that the area was in decline. It was also probably one of the only sensible approaches given the fragmented ownership and illegal structures in the area.

  What stands out for me as I read up on the Dashilar Platform, is the acknowledgement that the market alone will not preserve all of which is thought to be currently desirable in the neighborhood.

  Here is an excerpt from a Medium article written by Masha Borak – a journalist and translator based in Beijing:

  Collaboration is not the only interesting thing about the [Dashilar] project. In the words of their representative, the platform wants to take on the role of a “urban curator" that would decide which kind of businesses could get cheaper rent so they wouldn’t be left to the market.

  Given the discussion that is going on in Toronto right now about 401 Richmond Street West – a non-profit and cultural hub in an area of the city seeing significant development pressures – this struck me as being particularly timely and relevant.

  Markets are not perfect.

  If any of you have any familiarity with the Dashilar Platform and what has been happening in this neighborhood, I would love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below.

  2016.12.27

• Belval: From Luxembourg’s largest steelworks to mixed-use community

  Early this morning, before the sun even came up here in Toronto, I had a video conference call with a sharp and talented entrepreneur in Luxembourg. His name is Fräntz Miccoli and he’s working on an interesting startup called KonnectR.

  The idea is to create a platform to connect with new people at any point in time and wherever you might happen to be. It may sound like a “hook-up” app, but that’s not the intent. He came about the idea while traveling and looking for other smart and engaging people to hang out with.

  When we started the video conference call this morning, I showed him my window so that he could see the sun just starting to rise. He then showed me his coworking space, which made it seem like he is working out of an old industrial steel mill. Turns out, he is.

  The area of Luxembourg he’s working out of is called Belval, which is a neighborhood in the west end of the country’s second largest city, Esch-sur-Alzette. The neighborhood used to consist of the largest steelworks in the country. But with the decline of steel production in Luxembourg, the area fell into decline. Today, it’s being reborn as a 21st century mixed-use community.

  The developer behind the project is called Agora. And the site – equal to about 120 soccer fields – will house everything from residences and offices to shopping and cultural institutions. The University of Luxembourg has also centralized their campus in the new neighborhood. Having institutions “anchor” a community is becoming quite common for urban renewal programs. Here in Toronto, we did a similar thing with George Brown College along the waterfront.

  To give you a better sense of the transformation taking place in Belval, here’s a streetview photo from 2009:

  

  Here’s another one from the same intersection in 2013 (notice the same tower in the background):

  

  And here’s an aerial view from 2010:

  

  I’m always fascinated by urban renewal projects of this scale because it so clearly speaks to the evolutionary nature of cities. Industries die. Businesses disappear. And new uses need to be found. In this case, the area has gone from steel production to tech startups. That’s not surprising.

  But at the same time, I think it’s important that we don’t completely erase the past. Here, I think it’s great that they’re preserving some of the blast furnaces and other industrial structures. It gives the area character and a sense of place – which is oftentimes hard to manufacture and always better when it’s authentic.

  2014.11.18

• London garage to sell for £550,000

  

  The garage shown above (with the pseudo green roof) is located in the Chelsea neighborhood of London. It measures about 11’ x 7’ and it – along with the site it sits on – is about to go up for auction.

  It’s expected to go for more than £550,000 according to the DailyMail UK, which would make it the most expensive garage ever sold in the UK. The site area is 535 square foot – about the size of an average 1 bedroom condo in Toronto.

  Below is an aerial view of the site. It basically looks to be residual land.

  

  But as awkward as this site might appear, the expected value is being driven by the fact that planning permissions were granted to turn it into this:

  

  It’s a 2 bedroom house that feels a lot like a laneway house. It certainly fits the description of “a house behind a house”, which is often how laneway housing gets described here in Toronto.

  I wanted to share it because it supports my belief that, sooner or later, Toronto will come around to laneway housing. As property prices rise and affordability continues to erode, people will – quite justifiably – start looking in all sorts of new places for a decent urban home.

  Many thanks to my friend Adrian for sending me the link.

  2014.10.17

• Rise of rental

  

  Last month Oxford Properties submitted a site plan application for the redevelopment of the rundown Cumberland Terrace in Toronto’s Yorkville neighborhood. If you’d like to browse the full application (including all the drawings), you can do that here.

  The proposal is a departure from previous plans and now includes 3 buildings: a 4.5 storey building, a 2.5 storey building, and a midblock 54 storey residential tower (the lobby is shown above). There will be both retail and residential uses.

  For those of you familiar with the mall, it should go without saying that Cumberland Terrace is in desperate need of redevelopment. So I’m not going to talk about that today. Instead, I’d like to mention 2 other points that stood out to me about the application.

  The first is the 2 midblock connections on either side of the tower, running from Cumberland Street to Mayfair Mews in the rear (see below). Yorkville has a history of intimate laneways, and so it’s nice to see some of this being carried through in a new development. It also opens up the opportunity for an improved Mayfair Mews.

  

  Secondly, it’s somewhat surprising to see that the 54 storey residential tower is being proposed as rental. Toronto doesn’t build a lot of purpose-built rental apartment buildings. There are some (from the likes of Morguard and Concert Properties), but we haven’t done it at scale for decades. And that’s largely because the demand for condos has been so great.

  But recently I’ve been noticing a renewed interest from the real estate community in multi-family rental assets. Cadillac Fairview also proposed a 65 storey rental building at the north west corner of Yonge Street & Queen Street last year – though they later withdrew their application.

  

  In the US, rental apartments as a share of all new housing is also at record highs – over 30%. And that’s partly because credit remains tight (certainly compared to pre-2008) and economic growth has been tepid. But also because of demographic changes. People are having fewer children, later in life, and so many are putting off buying.

  So I think we’re going to see even more rental apartments being built in Toronto in the coming years.

  2014.09.16