Diversity : Development News

In a further sign that Long Branch may finally be coming into its residential own, Minto has submitted an application to turn a former industrial site into a low-priced condo.

Minto Long Branch is proposed for the 11.81-acre site of the former Wilson Motor Bodies, and which was in industrial use until 2009. The 448-unit project, in one-, two- and three-bedroom townhouses, will start at 515 square feet and sell for about $340 per square foot, putting the low end in the low $200,000s.

The design is by Guthrie Muscovitch Architects.

"The planning report recommending rezoning approval will be heard at the community council in November, 2013 and then recommended for approval at the December city council," says Minto’s development manager Lee Koutsaris. "The site plan application will be submitted to the city before the end of the year."

If all goes well, construction will start next spring, with the first occupancies set for July, 2015.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Lee Koutsaris

Weston-Mt. Dennis has become known as a "priority neighbourhood" since Mayor Miller’s time in office. An industrial part of town that lost its industry, there’s not a lot of money, and according to the Toronto Community Foundation, not a lot of sense of belonging, of connectedness among its residents, and especially its kids.

"The recipe in Rosedale is to send your kids to summer camp," says Rahul Bhardwaj, president and CEO of the TCF. In summer camp, and at the cottage, or even on the street picking up a frozen yogurt and heading over to the Bloor Cinema, for instance: That’s where you get your sense of belonging, your sense of community, in many parts of this mostly quite functional city. "In Mt. Dennis, that’s not an option."

So the TCF, along with helpers like ING, Access Community Capital, Humber College, Urban Arts and the City of Toronto, are putting the finishing touches on the Bartonville Building, a disused city signage storehouse that’s being transformed into a community hub, offering local residents a place to enjoy each others’ company in.

"I wouldn’t say they lack a sense of community," Bhardwaj says, "but they may not have as much a sense of belonging to their community. People here weren’t feeling like they could come out in their community and interact with each other. We think people getting out into their community strengthens their ties with their community."

The building on Bartonville is being outfitted with what Bhardwaj describes as "a really upbeat kitchen," along with a dance studio, a recording studio, and programs to offer courses in food handling certification, bike repair and bike safety and small business development.

The budget for the building project is $350,000 in cash and kind.

Between now and the grand opening in October, the city’s installing planters and other street furniture to connect the two neighbourhoods of Weston and Mt. Dennis, and to lend them a unified sense of place.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Rahul Bhardwaj

A fire ejected Home Ownership Alternatives, along with its newly appointed CEO, from their Queen Street East offices over the Victoria Day weekend.

They’ve since relocated to 2300 Yonge Street until their old offices can be rehabilitated from the water damage. It’s an extra challenge for their newly appointed CEO, Jens Lohmueller, the Hamburg native and graduate of the University of Western Ontario who just took over the organization.

It’s a relatively small one compared to his larger brief, which is to expand HOA out of Ontario and into Vancouver and even Africa.

"We've already had to make little tweaks to accommodate partners -- cities, towns and regions -- so I think there will be an ability to change as we go along," he says. 

It will be a massive change for the organization, which has a staff of, in Lohmueller’s words, "four or five."

Though their focus will remain on families, Lohmueller says that could change in the future, implying that they might take up the Artscape model and get into making office and studio space affordable in similar ways to their current down payment-loan system for homeowners across southern Ontario.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Jens Lohmueller

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At a ceremony marking construction reaching the top floor, organizers announced that the city's newest YMCA would be formally known as the Cooper Koo YMCA in honour of Michael Cooper and Krystal Koo, who donated $2 million toward the $20 million Canary District project.

Cooper, the vice chair and CEO of Canary District developer Dundee REIT, and Koo, a marketing manager at the company, contributed the money needed to finish the project after the province kicked in $8 million and the YMCA the remaining $10 million.

The 82,000 square foot Y, which is being built by Ellis Don, will first be used as part of the Pan Am/Para Pan Games in 2015 before opening to the public as a community centre and athletic facility.

"We had been looking at different neigbourhoods and were very excited about the possibility of having this building built," says Judy McLeod, Greater Toronto’s chief development officer for the YMCA. "When the Pan Am games are over, it's an opportunity for us to help in the building of a community."

The last Y in the GTA was built in Markham in 2007.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Judy McLeod

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One of the most significant development projects in the city was announced on Monday when it was revealed that developer Context and builder Metropia will be working with Toronto Community Housing to overhaul Lawrence Heights.

The 100-acre neighbourhood, completed in 1962, is a suburban version of Regent Park tucked just south of Yorkdale Mall, and all three partners have expressed the intention of making the revitalization at least as successful as the much-lauded downtown Regent Park project.

"At this point in my career, it’s very important to do something that has social significance," says 30-year veteran and Metropia president Howard Sokolowski.

The entire project is expected to take 20 years, encompassing more than 1,000 low-cost units and more than 4,000 market-price units. Context and Metropia have been given the contract for the first phase, 25 acres on which they will build 225 rental homes and 950 condos and townhouses. Construction will begin next spring.

Sokolowski emphasizes the importance of community consultation as the project moves forward, sensitive perhaps to the initial opposition from residents.

"We’re not about to do anything until people know exactly what’s happening and have input into acceptable architecture, acceptable street furniture," he says. "That’s number one."

The plan has been a long time coming. It was first announced in 2007 by then city councilor Howard Moscoe.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Howard Sokolowski

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Artscape has a novel way of getting artists into studio spaces.

With its latest project, Young Place, 80 per cent of the 75,000 square feet of disused schoolhouse will be rented, and 20 per cent of it will be sold according to a scheme based on the Options for Homes model.

"The spaces were valued at $430 a square foot by an appraiser, and we provide prospective owners with a 25 per cent down payment interest- and payment-free," says Tim Jones, Artscape’s president and CEO. But unlike Options for Homes, Artscape retains that 25 per cent ownership, so when the original buyer sells, the next buyer will get the same deal.

When it opens in September, Young Place, located at 180 Shaw Street between Dundas and Queen, will be Artscape’s biggest, though at $16 million to renovate that old Givens Shaw Public School, it is only roughly half as expensive as the Daniels Spectrum in Regent Park.

Young Place, named for funder the Michael Young Family Foundation, will open on the old school’s centenary. Getting such an old building into shape to be a modern arts space has been difficult.

"It really is an overhaul of the building," Jones says, "bringing it up to building code, with all its mechanical, electrical and structural issues. It’s an old school, and there’s a reason the school board has such a challenge with all this aging infrastructure."

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Tim Jones

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There’s no solution to the absence of family-sized condos in the city yet, but it is on the radar.

The city’s conducting a series of public consultations on every aspect of condominium living, and according to Peter Moore, the city planning division project manager in charge of the project, the subject of raising families in condos came up last week's initial meeting held in the downtown core.

"We raise this issue with developers," he says. "They say you can’t sell these big units because they’re too expensive. I know there was a direction to require developers to provide larger units, but I don’t think the direction was finalized as a zoning requirement or a official plan policy."

Peter Langdon, citing manager of the community policy sector of the planning division, confirms in a report to City Council’s Planning and Growth Management Committee that the recommendation is working its way through the system. He also added that Councillor Adam Vaughan has already insisted knock-out panels be installed in towers in Ward 20, which includes City Place, reasoning that though buying multiple units may be prohibitively expensive now, in 20 years or so, the relative expense may be more manageable.

People at the first consultation brought up the notion of adaptable of flexible units, condos that start out with the usual complement of studios and one-bedroom units, that can evolve over time through concatenation into large units suitable for families without millions to spend on the current versions of large suites.

"I’m pretty sure not many buildings are amenable to that at this time," Moore says, "but I’m pretty sure that will be an issue going forward."

The other family-related subject that came up at the first meeting was the possibility that, instead of each tower having its own fief-like amenities, developers band together in neighbourhoods and contribute to community centres such as other, non-condo neighbourhoods across the city.

The next public meeting will be held at Scarborough Civic Centre tonight from 7-9 p.m. There will be another meeting tomorrow at the same time at All Saints Kingsway Anglican Church, and on Feb 27 in North York at Congregation Darchei Noam, at Allen and Sheppard.

Writer: Bert Archer
Sources: Peter Moore, Peter Langdon

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The city is starting work on figuring out whether there's a way to help the visually impaired better determine when they're approaching an intersection.

The Public Works and Infrastructure Committee is overseeing the installation of four trial surfaces at Victoria and Shuter.

"It is our goal to make pedestrian travel as safe as possible for all residents and visitors to the city—especially for those who are visually impaired," said councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, chair of the committee, in a prepared statement on the subject. "Testing different options at the same intersection will give us an opportunity to perform a side-by-side comparison of the cost, ease of installation, durability and effectiveness of each treatment."

In addition to textured surfaces, the city is experimenting with different colours, looking for high-contrast patterns that will be more easily detectable to people with low vision.

"We're very happy that the city is undertaking this consultation," says Chris McLean, the regional director for the GTA chapter of the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. "Generally, we feel that tactile walking surface indicators add an extra element of safety for blind and low-vision pedestrians."

Though the city chose Victoria/Shuter intersection because it's already slated for reconstruction at the end of next year, which is when the pilot project is scheduled for completion, McLean figures it's a better location than most, given its proximity to St. Michael's Hospital and its ophthalmological unit.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Chris McLean

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The $4-million donation for a Regent Park cultural centre from the Daniels Corporation—and the foundation set up by its CEO—is more significant than it may seem on the surface.

"Part of the donation has been to act as a long-term transition fund for the anchor tenants at the facility," says Daniels VP Martin Blake of the centre now known as Daniels Spectrum. "The Regent Park School of Music has now transitioned into this facility. It's a purpose-built facility for them, 2,000 or so square feet. They don't have the means to pay for market rent in the building."

A portion of the $4 million will fund a five-year transition for these tenants, part of a plan to ramp up their own fundraising and income generation to allow the organizations to ultimately pay the market rent themselves.

But perhaps more significantly, none of the donation had anything to do with Section 37, the municipal regulation that trades developer density for community benefits, the source for much of the charitable-seeming work developers do in the city.

Though it's a first for Daniels, which has in the past funnelled its donations to Second Harvest, Habitat for Humanity Canada and the Daniels School of Architecture at the University of Toronto, it may signal a shift in developers sense of economic responsibility to the neighbourhoods they’re making their money in.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Martin Blake

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The findings of the 2011 Census are finally trickling through, and the city has released its assessment of the demographic changes that may have a profound influence on Toronto's future development.

Despite the numbers having been collected in the full flush of the condo boom, the city of Toronto's demographic primacy within the GTA is actually slipping. In 2011, it accounted for 48.2 per cent of GTA households, down from 49.8 per cent at the time of the 2006 census.

Among those households, the number non-family households—households made up of roommates or singles—increased by 13.5 per cent, while the number of single-family households increased by only 3.9 per cent. The number of one-person households increased by 12.1 per cent to 331,180. The average number of people per Toronto household was also the lowest in the GTA, at 2.5.

There has also been a six per cent increase in the number of seniors living alone, up to 95,205.

"Those types of numbers affect the ways we look at the types of services we provide," says Harvey Low, manager of the social research and analysis unit of the city's social development finance and administration division, "from housing services and infrastructure to the delivery of social services, smaller household services means a different type of client."

In addition to, for example, deciding where to spend the city's childcare money (increasingly in the outer boroughs), the dwindling Toronto numbers within the context of the GTA imply either an overly optimistic condo development industry, a continuing and perhaps overshadowing development boom in the suburbs, or a possible evacuation of the suburbs for the core once an oversupply of housing forces a drop in Toronto prices.

More detailed census data, including how long people live in households and low long it takes to build them, have yet to be released.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Harvey Low

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Toronto now has a fully accessible playground for children of all levels of physical and mental abilities, right in the heart of Forest Hill.

The $1.3-million Neshama Playground in Oriole Park, just northwest of Upper Canada College, near the junction of Yonge and Chaplin Crescent, opened this week.

"The project was initially the brainchild of Thomas Caldwell [of Caldwell Financial] and Toronto lawyer Steven Skurka, who enlisted Theo and Brendan Caldwell and recruited friends and associates who became known as 'A Bunch of Guys,'" says Rob Richardson of the city's parks department. "A Bunch of Guys raised over $700,000 to create a state-of-the-art, inclusive playground experience for all children. The site was chosen for its central location, access to public transit and proximity to numerous organizations who cater to persons of various abilities."

According to an interview Caldwell gave to Metro Morning this week, the playground came about when Caldwell found himself seated next to Skurka on a flight eight years ago, after Skurka had read a magazine article about accessibility and playgrounds. They went to see then-mayor David Miller, who got his parks department on it.

The playground was designed by Beverly Ambler of PMA Landscape Architects. Work began in 2010 and the majority of it was completed last year, with finishing being added into this past spring.

Neshama is the Hebrew word for "spirit" or "soul."

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Rob Richardson, Manager of Partnership Development, Toronto Parks, Forestry and Recreation Department

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The suburban slabs are about to get prettier, and possibly happier.

Last year, the United Way issued a report called Poverty by Postal Code 2: Veritcal Poverty, in which they asserted that poverty is especially intransigent in the citys outer areas, and most particularly in the high-rise apartments there.

After interviewing 2,800 residents of such towers, the United Way determined that though most of these towers were solid structures and an asset to the city and its residents, there were both long- and short-term problems that needed to be resolved. Broader issues—like long-term housing strategies and neighbourhood-improving by-laws—take broader and longer-term approaches. But there were other complaints residents had that could be fixed pretty quickly.

"Residents told us they needed community space," says United Way president and CEO Susan McIsaac. "They wanted space where children could play, they wanted buildings that looked nicer, they wanted to reclaim some of the common space that had been lost to storage."

So they set aside $800,000 to make the slabs more livable, and this week, the costing is being figured out so that changes in the first two neighbourhoods in Rexdale (at a cluster of towers centred on 2667 Kipling) and Orton Park, can be completed within 12 months. Similar improvements to two other pilot areas, yet to be determined, could be done within 12 months of that.

An NFB production, called the Thousandth Tower, has also been produced in tandem with this tower renewal.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Susan McIsaac

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The French public school board broke ground this past weekend on yet another new school, this one in Scarborough.

"Finally after many talks and actions, we were able to put our hands on this lot that was separated from the TDSB," says Conseil Scolaire Viamonde's director of education Gyslaine Hunter-Perrault, referring to the 15-acre property that was divided into 10 acres for single-family home construction and about five acres for the French school board.

The design of the small, one-storey school, which will initially have about 200 students with a capacity of 300, is based on Carrefour des Jeunes, a school the board had built in Brampton about a decade ago. The architects are Robertson Simmons.

Like all its recently built schools, the new École élémentaire Laure-Rièse, named for the late Swiss-born professor at the University of Toronto's Victoria College, will include various ecologically conscientious elements. Hunter-Perrault says the question of whether they'll apply for LEED status has not been decided, since the application costs several thousand dollars, money which might be better spent elsewhere.

The school will replace the current Laure-Rièse on Morningside Drive, which had become over-crowded.

Construction started this week, and the school is scheduled to be ready for the beginning of the school year in 2013.

The lot is on Alton Towers Circle, near McCowan, just south of Steeles.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Gyslaine Hunter-Perrault

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It started with a fundraising lake cruise in 2006, and it finished just last week, with the official opening of the therapeutic terrace for the residents of the Lakeshore Lodge.

With the help of landscape architect Viive Kittask of Vertechs Design, the municipally owned long-term care home now has a lake view, a gazebo and a raised garden, part pre-planted, and part left fallow for those of the home's 150 residents to plan themselves.

The lodge also invested in a floor specially designed for its residents.

"For people who may be shuffling, it's a perfectly level floor," says Rob Price, the lodge's administrator, speaking of the Buzon system. "It's a technology that was borrowed from Belgium. It's like little piano stools underneath each corner of the floor slabs. They're raised and lowered as needed to make the floor level."

The budget for the project, Price says, was in the neighbourhood of $30,000.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Rob Price

Do you know of a new building going up, a business expanding or being renovated, a park in the works or even a new house being built in the neighbourhood? Please send your development news tips to [email protected].

The committee tasked with figuring out what to do about the enormous backlog of repairs to Toronto's subsidized housing met for the first time last week, beginning a process that it hopes will resolve the $751-million problem.

Their deadline, tight for such committees, is to submit a final report by September 10.

"It's obviously a challenging task," says councillor Ana Bailão. "We're going to be ensuring that we have a concerned and open process, that we engage tenants, that we engage stakeholders, and I'm sure we're going to be able to bring something to the table in September."

The initial meeting, held April 16, was organizational in nature, setting interim goals and laying out how the committee will operate. Its first task will be to send out a questionnaire to all Toronto Community Housing tenants. One of the chief challenges there is to get the questionnaire translated into as many languages as that may require.

The committee is scheduled to release an interim report on May 28, likely before responses to the questionnaire are received.

In the meantime, community consultations are being organized to include tenants and other stakeholders.

According to city staff, almost every TCH property requires repair of some sort, whether major or simply fresh coats of paint. One of the committee's jobs is to perform a sort of triage, applying what funds are available to the most urgently needed repairs.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Ana Bailão

Do you know of a new building going up, a business expanding or being renovated, a park in the works or even a new house being built in the neighbourhood? Please send your development news tips to [email protected].