An early rendering of some of the condo towers proposed for the former industrial and retail sites along Toronto's Eglinton Avenue East, known as the Golden Mile.Choice Properties REIT
Over the past six years, the City of Toronto has blazed through what amounts to a revolution in land use and zoning changes, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the mid-1990s. These include allowing multiplexes in house neighbourhoods, intensification along a broad swath of major streets and an ambitious reform, imposed by the provincial government, to drive high-density development to areas immediately around dozens of rapid transit stations.
Indeed, given the often ponderous pace of planning reform in a cautious city with a long history of NIMBY politics, this period could be described as radical.
Yet a nagging question now hangs heavily over a sustained attempt at change that was a response to climate change, population growth and the need for more equitable housing: Can all these shiny new planning rules revive a development industry that has nearly collapsed due to the bursting of a speculative condo bubble?
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“The assumptions around which many of the plans have been written are now changed,” says Pino Di Mascio, a partner at SvN Architects + Planners. “How do we make sure these places don’t remain half-developed or undeveloped for two decades?”
He’s not the only one wondering.
Mr. Di Mascio cites a notorious incident dating to the early 1990s, when the half-finished stub of a planned two-tower Bay-Adelaide Centre languished for almost 20 years after the buzzy commercial office tower market cratered.
The unfinished Bay Adelaide Centre sat in Toronto's financial district from 1993 to 2006 and became known as ‘the stump.' The new Bay Adelaide Centre was completed in 2009.
With the recent cancellation of dozens of high-rise projects and some builders abandoning the apartment tower sector altogether, the prospect of a half-realized long-term growth plan for the city – 2050 is the current horizon – seems like a very real risk, especially given the unspoken assumption that the condo business model would have attracted the capital and driven much of the intensification.
City and provincial planners currently anticipate adding 700,000 residents and 450,000 jobs over the next 25 years – a pace of growth that is, in fact, faster than what Toronto experienced over the heady expansion period since the beginning of the millennium.
The current stagnation raises doubts about those targets because the market, when it comes back, won’t rebound immediately to the heady condo-driven levels of the late 2010s.
Planners, however, don’t think in those terms. The first principle of Ontario land use regulation is that municipal zoning is agnostic about what’s known as “tenure”: municipalities prescribe form, such as height and density, but they aren’t in the business of telling developers whether their projects should be rentals, condos, co-ops or any other variation on the theme.
However, Mr. Di Mascio and other planners worry that some of the city’s intensification goals, especially those focused on adding lots of high-rise density within 800-metre radii of all rapid transit stations, were premised on attracting condo investors, who have now vanished. Typically, purpose-built rental projects are shorter, squatter and more difficult to finance than soaring condo towers.
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The nodes targeted for intensification, known as “major transit station areas” (MTSAs), include not just long-established subway stops but also all the new ones along the Finch West, Eglinton Crosstown and Ontario lines – for example, several on Eglinton Avenue East in the Golden Mile, which was slated for more than 45,000 new apartments, all of which are on hold at the moment.
University of Toronto associate architecture professor Michael Piper points out that the planning policies aren’t written with economic cycles in mind. Case in point: The high-density development clusters around Yonge and Eglinton or Yonge north of Sheppard took decades to grow up. “It’s reasonable to say that, even before the bust, this was all going to take a long time. Any one of those MTSAs is going to take a long time.”
The wrinkle is that when the condo market eventually begins to recover, it will likely take years for demand to return to the levels seen in the past decade; indeed, until the mid-2010s, the pace of growth was steady but not overwhelming.
Mr. Di Mascio wonders if the current plans envision far more intensification than the current market can absorb any time soon. He cites one client’s waterfront project, The Bend (Castlepoint Numa, Cityzen and Continental Ventures), on Lakeshore Boulevard East near Cherry Street, where the development team has consciously taken a decision to offer up smaller phases initially in order to manage expectations.
Rendering of The Bend on Lakeshore East near Cherry Street in Toronto.Castlepoint Numa
Elsewhere, as in upper Oakville, he says provincial intensification goals aren’t realistic.
“There’s only so much density that these places could have,” he says. “There’s a world in which there are slightly smaller buildings and more of them spread around the transit hub [would] actually make for a much better neighbourhood, and then give you the ability to provide the parks and neighbourhoods and community centres and other things that these places need.”
Mr. Piper wonders whether the existing planning policies on their own can bring back investment. “I guess the question would be is if there needs to be incentives or other kinds of policy reforms in place in order to realize those ambitions.”
Certainly, the accelerating spate of multiplex projects in low-rise neighbourhoods has provided a bit of ballast. But they can’t, or haven’t so far, deliver the numbers envisioned in the city’s long-term projections. Likewise, there’s a bit of a boom in purpose-built rental across the GTHA, but this segment is an entirely different type of business from condos. Unlike condo builders, rental developers have to be ready to own and operate their projects for decades.
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The building lobby has also pushed for relaxed regulations on everything from green roofs to site plan approvals and development charges.
Others argue that council could ease up on so-called “urban design” guidelines – which are quite prescriptive but fall short of formal regulation – for both mid-rise and tall buildings. The city has, in fact, recently loosened up the mid-rise guidelines, which produced fussy and difficult-to-construct pyramid-shaped buildings.
Planning consultant Robert Freedman, the city’s former head of urban design, oversaw the original tall-building guidelines, approved 20 years ago, which featured retail podiums, maximum 750-square-metre floor plates and specified allocations of multibedroom units. He says these policies are worth revisiting after years of feverish high-rise growth, aspects of which have come in for criticism for incenting small, dark flats and inadequate elevator service.
“I don’t think you need to throw everything out and start new,” he says, “but I think there should be a refresh.”
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the original tall-building guidelines called for a maximum footprint of 750 square feet; the specification was 750 square metres.