Bauhaus, a condo building at 284 King St. East, in Toronto on Tuesday.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Most people don’t want to think about garbage too much, but new residents in a downtown Toronto condominium have been forced to do exactly that.
For Mary Rizvi, the discussion about entering into a preconstruction purchase agreement to buy an apartment at 284 King St. E. (a condo building known as Bauhaus) in 2022 was about typical topics: size, location and cost.
One thing Ms. Rizvi didn’t think about was garbage, junk, waste and how to dispose of it. She’d lived in apartments before and assumed there would be a garbage chute to conveniently whisk away any trash from the 18th-floor apartment. Now the building is almost complete, some folks are moving in ahead of registration, which is due to begin in weeks, and it’s become clear that there are no garbage disposal chutes on any of the floors of the 33-storey building.
Garbage was “the last thing on my mind,” Ms. Rizvi said. “If you’re paying the kind of money they’re asking for – like a million-dollar apartment – and you don’t have a garbage chute?”
Lamb Development Corp. is behind the project (its principal Brad Lamb may be familiar from his series of “This Lamb Sells Condos” billboards advertising his real estate brokerage). Mr. Lamb and other principals at his company didn’t respond to requests for comment about the decision not to include garbage chutes.
“We have a number of buildings where we haven’t provided garbage chutes on the floors,” said Adam Feldmann, an associate at architects-Alliance, the company that designed Bauhaus. He said garbage chutes are not universally employed in tall buildings across Canada, and several of the company’s Toronto clients have asked for buildings without one.
There are no garbage disposal chutes on any of the floors of the 33-storey building.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
“We’re designing a 17-storey building that doesn’t have one right now,” Mr. Feldmann said, adding that most of his projects that don’t have chutes are mid-rises. He said each decision is client-driven and architects-Alliance has done buildings with as many as three chutes (one for each waste stream) and as few as none, but the taller a building is, the more issues they can have with damage, jamming and cross contamination.
As industry experts point out, garbage chutes may be commonplace, but they are not a requirement in the building code in Ontario for any size of multifamily building.
“It’s like having in-suite laundry. That’s an amenity, but that’s something people expect in their buildings,” said Blair Scorgie, a professional planner and principal of Scorgie Planning, who said that while it’s not unheard of to have residents haul their own trash-bags down elevators or stairs in mid-rise, multifamily buildings – even in those closer to 20 storeys – it’s rare among newer high rises and high-end condominiums. He speculates that a mix of cost-cutting and site constraints could have informed the decision.
Installing chutes is not a major cost when compared with high-rise budgets, which can easily soar above $100-million in Toronto, according to Elliot Steiner, president of ELM Development Corp. “The whole thing is under $10,000 per floor. You’re probably saving yourself $300,000,” he said. However, while not criticizing the decision, he said the architectural drawings suggested the somewhat tight space for each floor of the Bauhaus – which has only eight apartments per floor on the upper levels – could have meant losing valuable living space to carve out a couple square metres for the garbage rooms.
In the disclosure documents that came with Ms. Rizvi’s purchase, there’s no explicit mention of garbage chutes.
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“The condominium has a garbage room on level 1 of the condominium which can be accessed and used by the residents of the condominium for its garbage. … Owners or their tenants are responsible for recycling of paper, glass, plastic and metal refuse in the garbage room,” the document reads.
“As a real estate lawyer, I would never have thought to look for chutes. You can’t think of every single thing,” said David Feld, a partner in Feld Kalia Professional Corp., who says buyers are usually more focused on deposit terms and delivery timelines. That said, in recent years, he has begun checking for some potential lifestyle-cramping issues, such as whether the building will ban large pets.
“It would have been good if they had disclosed it cleanly, so that the buyer is aware. It may have turned some people away; I don’t think I would have bought it,” Mr. Feld said. He has spoken with some clients in the building who hoped the failure to disclose the chute-less garbage situation might be material enough to dispute the purchase contracts, but as of now, he’s not hopeful there are sufficient grounds.
As a planner, Mr. Scorgie has run into building sites that make it difficult to manage garbage disposal, such as awkwardly shaped land that was snapped up and redeveloped during the condo boom. And there are issues associated with chutes: They can get blocked. If they have automated sorting systems, those can break down. And there’s even a City of Toronto program aimed at convincing buildings to close the old-style single-chamber chutes, which would mix and cross-contaminate organic, recyclable and solid waste streams. For all those reasons, Mr. Scorgie wouldn’t be surprised to see more buildings under construction without garbage chutes.
He also warns anyone buying into a chute-less high-rise has to think about potential future costs associated with the extra wear and tear on elevators all those intra-building garbage runs could create. That’s especially true when a building has the minimum two elevators, such as at Bauhaus.
“It’s like a recipe for putting more strain on vertical circulation,” he said. “And now you’ve got garbage in the elevators. It’s not a perfect solution,” he said.
Mr. Steiner of ELM has built a building without garbage chutes before, in Halifax, but doesn’t think that choice is a great fit for his company’s projects in Toronto.
“I don’t like it for me, I’ll never do the non-garbage chute thing again,” he said. “I want to build something I want to live in.”