The Kennedy Green Co-operative will feature three towers on land donated by the city near Kennedy subway station, and will bring 612 apartments to the rental market.Create-TO
The proponents of the most ambitious co-op building project to break ground in recent Canadian history hope the 612 affordable apartments will be the starting shot for a new era of co-op development in the country.
On Nov. 28, the federal government announced it was committing $289-million to finance the construction of Toronto’s Kennedy Green Co-operative, which aims to build three towers on land donated by the City of Toronto’s CreateTO housing agency (the land value is part of $35-million in grants and loans the city contributed to the project). The land is across from the Kennedy subway station at 2444 Eglinton Ave. E.
It’s the largest funding commitment to a co-op building in more than 30 years and it’s just part of the $1.5-billion Co-operative Housing Development Program administered by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation that was announced in 2022 but is now being implemented after Prime Minister Mark Carney’s first budget.
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“We’re back,” said Heather Tremain, executive director of the Co-operative Housing Federation of Toronto’s Development Society, which is a newly formed development arm of the federation, and aimed at leveraging its land trust and operational expertise to create more rental co-op projects.
“We’re talking to developers about a number of sites, we will put in a submission to Build Canada Homes. We think this is the kickoff,” she said.
The Co-operative Housing Federation of Toronto, or CHFT, represents 180 non-profit housing co-operatives in the Toronto region, with about 50,000 people living in them. A smaller set of 32 co-ops is contributing to CHFT’s land trust which aims to leverage developable land across the city to intensify existing sites.
When the Co-operative Housing Federation of Toronto added 24 units to an existing co-op, there were 6,000 applications. It helped make the case for the Kennedy Green project.Create-TO
Planning for the Kennedy Green project began years ago, prior to the creation of the federation’s Development Society, essentially anticipating that some sort of funding would soon be available.
“We’ve been trying to create this opportunity for a long time,” said Tom Clement, the executive director of CHFT, who said the demand for affordable housing was driven home when his organization recently completed a smaller co-op build.
“A year ago, we added 24 units of housing to an existing co-op. For those 24 units, we had 6,000 applications,” he said. “Behind the scenes, we’ve been working with the city, with CMHC, to do bigger projects.”
Co-op housing makes up less than 1 per cent of Canada’s total housing stock, much of it built between the 1970s and 1990s, with many of the 2,212 co-op sites across the country self-governed and managed by the residents. The problem was that when government funding went away, much of the new co-op building stopped.
“You ended up with a very disaggregated real estate asset base,” said Thom Armstrong, chief executive officer of the Co-operative Housing Federation of BC. “We created wonderful communities, but we never built an engine for growth into the sector.”
That’s where the land trust model comes in, by creating an organization funded by groups of co-ops banding together. The land trust serves as an asset manager and project co-ordinator that can oversee the trickier parts of building maintenance and development.
Mr. Armstrong has been advising the CHFT on turning its land trust into a non-profit developer based on his organization’s experience after a 2012 pilot project launched by then Vancouver mayor and now federal Housing Minister Gregor Robertson.
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“We built 358 homes on four sites,” in the initial pilot, Mr. Armstrong said, a proof of concept that it continues to expand today. “We started with one employee in 2015 and now have 44. … We’ve got three sites under construction right now, last year we completed four. It’s generated thousands of permanent affordable homes in partnership with municipalities.”
Costs to construct new multifamily projects have been rising dramatically in recent years but Ms. Tremain, who was previously the CEO of the non-profit developer Options for Homes for ten years, says those conditions are actually improving for co-op builders.
“We’re benefiting right now from the slowdown in construction in other areas of the housing world. We have actually seen a steady decrease in our construction costs, for which we’re grateful,” she said.
Recent changes to provincial law around development fees have made it easier for non-profit builders to get affordable housing built: “There are waivers of parkland contributions and development charges, some of the costs built into a market project are immediately removed,” she said.
The building is slated to be completed by 2029, and rents are intended to be geared to tenants’ incomes for half of the units and set at market rates for the other half. The unit mix is also aimed more at families than the typical condominium build, with 33.5 per cent of the apartments having two or three bedrooms, 9.5 per cent as studios, and the 57 per cent majority being one bedrooms.
Renderings of the Kennedy Green Co-operative project in east-end Toronto.Create-TO