Development News

A new LCBO opened in at the Parkway Mall on Ellesmere Road in Scarborough, roughly 50 per cent larger than the one it's replacing.

At 12,000 square feet, the new shop will have 1,875 drinks of various sorts, including 300 Ontario wines, and the walk-in beer fridges, with 650 linear feet of shelved beer. These fridges are becoming standard in the new shops to compete with the foreign-owned Beer Stores.

According to LCBO spokeswoman Lisa Murray, the store serves a population of about 60,000 in the Ellesmere/Victoria Park area, a number that the LCBO expects to grow by about 3 per cent in the next decade.

The LCBO, which turns more than a billion and a half dollars in profit annually, bases its decision to add or expand stores on extensive demographic research, which makes new and expanded shops good bellwethers of change, growth and often economic iprovements in a neighbourhood.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Lisa Murray

The nation’s tallest condo is slowly filling out.

Madonna’s gym, Hard Candy, was the big news in November, and the woman herself will be showing up in February to give it her four minutes or so. In the meantime, the first two restaurants opened in the food court underground, Sushi BBbop and Kaiju, with several more in the offing, joining the 50 or so vendors that have moved into the 130-shop space downstairs from Bed, Bath and Beyond and Marshalls, and the 300 residents who have already moved into the lower levels of the 78-storey tower while work continues up above.

"We have poured the top residential floor, and now we're working on the mechanical rooftop, which is going to take a little while because there's about four or five floors of that," says Riz Dhanji, vice president of sales and marketing for developer Canderel Residential.

That top residential floor is going for $18.3 million for the, five-bedroom, 11,370 square foot unit.

According to Dhanji, work is just starting on the park Canderel is collaborating with the city on, and giving $3.5 million towards the development of under the city’s Section 37 stipulations.

Dhanji expects the building, with its 985 condos and 180,000 square feet of retail, will be completed by June or July.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Riz Dhanji

Photos by Bert Archer.

Last year did not do much for Toronto’s image as an intelligent city. But Waterfront Toronto is looking to turn that all around in 2014.

For the second time in as many years, Waterfront is spearheading Toronto’s application to the Intelligent Community Foundation in the hopes of being named the world’s most intelligent city. Out of more than 400 applications, we’ve already made it to the top 21, and at the end of this month, we’ll find out if we made the final seven, as we did in 2005 and again last year.

Cities are judged by the foundation on criteria such as digital inclusion strategies and the status of their knowledge-based workforce. The 2011 winner, Eindhoven, Netherlands, is known for its Brainport, a public-private project that’s controibuted 55,000 jobs over the past decade. Last year’s winner, Taichung City, Taiwan, is known for its environmental friendliness.

According to Kristina Verner, Waterfront Toronto’s director of intelligent communities, Toronto is already becoming known in global circles for building the only community in which the principles of intelligent communities are, in the words of people who speak of such things, baked in.

"We're serving as a catalyst for the city of Toronto," Verner says of the work going on at the Waterfront. "We're a living lab, not just for the city, but for other cities in North America."

According to Verner, winning the competition would drastically increase the city's so-called brand recognition in the community of site selectors – corporate types who decide where in the world facilities will be built – as well as governments looking to collaborate on large projects, as Eindhoven did with Waterloo, which won the title in 2007.

If Toronto makes it to the final seven, it moves on to the final phase, the results of which are to be announced in New York in June.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Kristina Verner

Photos courtesy of Waterfront Toronto.

After the ice, and the branches and wires and crushed cars, things looked bad. The city didn’t make it any better by saying as much as 20 per cent of the city's tree canopy had been destroyed and that people wouldn't have to apply for licenses to take down damaged trees.

"I was concerned," says Councillor Sarah Doucette (Ward 13 Parkdale-High Park), the city's tree advocate. She called in to the city, and was assured that people would have to take pictures of the damaged tree to prove it needed to be taken down. How effective this will be remains to be seen, though the councillor, who lost half of one tree and the entirety of another in her own yard, says if you take the city's hasty announcement as a license for arborcide, "We will come after you."

That 20 per cent figure also concerns her.

"I think that was a very quick ballpark," she says. "We need arborists to go out and look at these. Can we prune this tree and will it come back? But we’re really not going to know for another few years."

And as far as Doucette is concerned, those years should be spent taking a sylvan lesson or two from High Park.

"I drove through High Park after the storm," Doucette says of the park that forms a large part of her ward, "because I wanted to see what sort of devastation we had in the park. There wasn’t any devastation. Some of the branches came down, but for the size of the park, we didn’t have that much damage, and that’s because they maintain and prune the trees. If the city can put more money into pruning our city trees, we wouldn’t be losing branches like this during storms."

She also suggests there should be some education available for residents on the importance of tree maintenance to avoid the mess, damage and potential injury after storms like December’s.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source; Sarah Doucette

A selection of the best development stories we published this year. All stories written by development editor Bert Archer.

After 12 years on the back shelf, the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus is going ahead with a new "innovation complex."

"The Innovation Complex is a new facility that will house UTM's signature Institute for Management and Innovation (IMI)," says Deep Saini, principal of UTM. "The Institute is taking a novel approach to management education by offering sector-specific management education. IMI will be focused on educating mission-oriented graduates whose skills are aligned to specific sectors of industry and commerce, and who are deft at translating novel ideas into innovative applications for the society’s benefit.

"In addition to strong undergraduate programs in commerce and business administration, IMI also offers established and new professional graduate degrees in key economic sectors such as biotechnology, health care, professional accounting and environmental sustainability. UTM plans to grow student enrolment in IMI by 35 per cent – or by 700 – and hire approximately 30 new professors from around the world. Some space in the new building will be also occupied by administrative and academic offices, especially those involved in enrolment management."

The project is being funded by $25 million from U of T and a newly announced $10 million from the city of Mississauga.

The centre, which is being built on an open space behind the existing Kaneff Centre, will be headed up by Professor Hugh Ganz.

Writer: Bert Archer    
Source: Deep Saini

The first building on Waterfront's East Bayfront isn't going to break ground until next year, but before the condos comes the infrastructure, and East Bayfront's going to need a lot of it.

The13-acre site, being developed by Tridel and Hines under the name Bayside, will require a continuation of the water's edge promenade, new public streets and stormwater management.

In the fall, crews began reinforcing the dockwall I preparation for the promenade, and demolition and various other forms of site preparation began.

"Over the next few months, crews will begin the stormwater management facility for the development, continue with the construction of municipal services -- watermain, Hydro -- and dockwall reinforcemen," says Samantha Gileno of Waterfront Toronto. "Promenade construction will begin March, 2014."

East Bayfront is part of the massive effort by the city to rehabilitate its waterfront, which has not served the city at all well since its industrial days.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Samantha Gileno

Building is always harder than destroying, but rebuilding may be harder still.

According to Carl Blanchaer, principal architect at WZMH, though it may be tempting for developers and other investors to tear down and start fresh, rebuilding, in the form known as adaptive re-use, may be the best bet for all concerned.

He gave his talk at the recent Construct Canada conference at the Metro Convention Centre, trying to convince builders, developers and others in the trades to think twice before knocking down.

One of the main examples he used were two projects he and his firm worked on in Toronto, 111 Richmond Street and 222 Jarvis.

With its brutalist style, the latter -- the Ontario government building formerly known as the Sears Building -- was not an obvious candidate for reclamation. But with every developer looking to at least appear green, nothing says “sustainable” like not wasting building material, or the carbon needed to demolish.

"The project has become a flagship for government initiatives in the use of sustainable building and planning approaches in the reconstruction of downtown office buildings," says the WZMH site, "and a catalyst for neighbourhood revitalization."

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Carl Blanchaer

Despite its fatal business model, Bixi will survive, but it won’t be Bixi anymore.

The city has decided to take it over, handing the management of the troubled Montreal-based bike-sharing program to the Toronto Parking Authority until they can find a suitable management company with expertise in this area.

"One of the primary reasons Bixi is having trouble in Toronto is their business model was based on covering both the capital costs and the operating costs from operating revenue," says Daniel Egan, the city’s manager of cycling infrastructure. "It became pretty clear after a year that it wasn’t feasible."

As of Dec. 2, Bixi no is no longer connected to its parent company, and is wholly owned by the City of Toronto, which assumed its costs. The Parking Authority will run it until April when it hopes to have found a new manager, and when it will likely take a new name.

There is still a plan to expand the system by 22 stations net year, though moving north of Bloor is unlikely.

The handover is being funded, oddly, with $5 million that would have gone to paying for several public toilets pledged by a city media partner. This will cover a $3.6-million capital loan, with the extra $1.4 million being used for interim operating costs, and to contribute to a reserve fund that will pay for capital costs. The fund will also receive $70,000 annually from the city's transportation budget, and will be a recipient of so-called Section 37 money gathered by the city from property developers to fund city projects in the public interest.

Though Egan believes the program can be run better than it has been, he does not believe it can ever be profitable. "The goal is to break even," he says. "There's no illusion that it’s a money-maker. But we’re looking to make this program sustainable in the long term."

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Daniel Egan

It turns out when you ask the business community to cut their energy use, and they find out that it also saves them money, they go green like gangbusters.

Civic Action announced last week that the Race to Reduce, a voluntary campaign among Toronto’s commercial landlords and their clients to shave their energy use by 10 per cent in four years, was two years ahead of schedule, with consumption to the end of 2012 - figures that have just been compiled and analyzed -- down nine per cent ahead of their end-of-2014 schedule.

Brad Henderson, a senior managing regional director for CBRE and Race co-chair, is proud of what they’ve been able to collectively do so far.

"There was a lot of heavy lifting in the early days," he says. "We needed to establish process, we needed to get consensus on how information on energy reduction would be collected, measures and reported.  We also determined that it was important to collect and document case studies and tools used by participants as a way to help accelerate achievement by other companies.  While this work has been completed, there is a lot more work to be done."

The fact that they were able to do as much as they were is largely attributable to the fact that in the first few years of what's expected to be an ongoing program, Race participants were mostly large landlords and large tenants with, Henderson says, "considerable resources to mount significant energy reduction programs."

Programs included switching to LED lamps, converting to 100 per cent daytime cleaning to reduce lights used after hours, and decommissioning inefficient transformers.

(The Commercial Building Energy Leadership Council, made up of landlords and tenants representing 175 buildings and 67 million square feet, set their own reduction goals.)

The big challenge now, Henderson says, is that they've started recruiting smaller players. "As a result," he says, "achieving success of energy reduction will get harder and harder. Notwithstanding, the Race to Reduce participants are dedicated to persevere."

The Council is scheduled to set its new goals in January.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Brad Henderson

City Hall sent out a press release last week that sounded like it might be big news. If you’re renovating your home, and can’t reasonably use it for at least three months, you don’t have to pay property tax on it.

Sounds like a good deal.

But it's also an old deal.

"This provision has always been there," says Casey Brendon, the city's director of revenue services. And by always, he means since way back before amalgamation.

So why the press release?

"It's partially related to the fact that these applications are heard routinely by the government management committee, which has had at least two changes in chairs," he says, "and we had these new councillors coming in, saying 'I didn’t realize there was a process where we did this. Is the public appropriately aware of this program?'"

So working on the assumption that if the councillors didn't know about it, there's a good chance the public didn't either, they decided to make some noise about it.

So, if this is news to you, and you have a property, residential or otherwise, that you're not going to be able to use for the purpose for which it is intended for at least three months, you may want to look into it.

And if you knew all about this already, well, you may want to have a word with your councillor about keeping up on the news.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Casey Brendon
Photo: B. Sutherland

Just before 1:30 on Monday morning, the 101-year-old Dufferin Bridge ceased to be. After alarming inspectors enough with its pendulous concrete to order an immediate closure in June, the bridge over the GO Transit railway line ended up proving a little more stalwart than city workers expected.

"A couple of things surprised us, given the age of the structure," says Michael d'Andrea, the city's executive director for engineering and construction services. "The concrete was much harder, and adhered to the girders far better than we could ever have envisioned, … and the physical connection between these very large steel beams and the girders were in much better shape than expected."

He made clear that this does not mean they tore the thing down when they didn't have to. "We were surprised by how strong the concrete was in some areas, but in other areas, it was pretty weak."

The result was 48 hours of round-the-clock destruction, using 12-hour shifts of 15-20 workers, and another 15-20 engineers, general contractors and GO and Metrolinx advisors. It took two cranes, seven Bobcats, nine jackhappmers and five trucks running continuously to haul away the 1,000 tonnes of concrete, 120 tonnes of asphalt, and 100-150 tonnes of steel. D'Andrea says more than 90 per cent of all that will be recycled.

Within the next week or 10 days, a temporary pedestrian bridge will be erected, and by early 2014 there will be two temporary vehicle bridges joining it, all of which will be replaced by permanent structures by 2016 and should – assuming we’re at least as good at our jobs as our great grandparents -- last till about 2117.

Writer: Bert Archer
Sources: Michael d’Andrea, Jodie Atkins

According to David Amborski, Toronto could stand to look a little more closely at what it's doing.

"One of the things that often seems to be missing is economic analysis of urban policies."

Amborski, a professor at Ryerson's School of Urban and Regional Planning, is heading up a new research operation, the Centre for Urban Research and Land Development (CURLD), at Ryerson whose mission it is to tease out the economic implications of the decisions being made at Queen's Park and City Hall, with the hope that their papers will not only contribute to the general debate, but will occasionally land on the desk of some decision-making desks.

The centre is part of the Faculty of Community Services.

"One example I often point out: When the Greenbelt was put in place, they figured it wouldn't have an effect on property prices," Amborski says. "But as every economist knows, you can't effect supply without also affecting price. It’s not that we would have changed the Greenbelt policy but we could have done some things to mitigate the price impacts."

A more recent example was the talks a few years ago about dramatically increasing development charges. At the time, Amborski says, though it would have worked and improved revenue for projects in the downtown core, it would have seriously hampered development along current and future transit lines as described by Mayor Miller's Transit City plan.

The plan is for the centre to conduct seminars, hold public debates, and put out calls for proposals to do work related to various topics of compelling interest.

"We're looking to be part of the city-building initiative," Amborski says, "part of that base that provides information for decision making."

Though they’re still getting settled in at Ryerson and don't have any official areas of focus yet, Amborski did say that one likely area of study would be how to get the most out of Section 37, the regulation that ensures money flows from developers into areas of communal interest, such as park-making and public art.

"Some of the issues involve the way it's determined, who negotiates it," Amborski says. "Ward councillors have a major hand in it now. Can there be a more transparent approach? Can we be sure the money collected is being used in the best interests of the community involved?"

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: David Amborski

At Monday’s meeting of the Chief Planner’s Roundtable, consultant Jane Farrow announced to the 200 attendees that 60 per cent of the people living in eight so-called tower neighbourhoods in the inner suburbs do not have drivers' licenses.
This is big news.

These suburbs, built at a time when cars seemed the natural tools for urban expansion, are no longer inhabited by car people. They are, in fact, decreasingly suburbs at all, but rather less dense cities of their own, and as Vaughan and Markham, among others, seek to redress the change in various ways, the Chief Planner’s Roundtable is looking into how people do, can and should move around.

"A tremendous number of them walk," Chief Planner Jennifer Keesmaat says, "even when walking conditions aren’t that good."

So one of the ways Keesmaat would like to address that is by studying how and where people are getting around now, and adapting the now outmoded infrastructure to accommodate them.

Some aspects of this could be relatively easy, like making sure paths are shoveled, taking down fences that obstruct natural routes, and keeping them well lit after dark. But there are more profound ways to address the issue as well.

"It's about how we can re-adapt very suburban, car-oriented environments," Keesmaat says, "by getting a much finer street network, and adding development parcels, recognizing the importance of land-use planning and infrastructure changes in order to increase the options."

In other words, as these suburbs expand, they expand with these more reasonable, responsive forms of transportation and mobility in mind.

By the end of the roundtable, which was open to the public but attended mostly by those in related professions, they came up with a list of seven things that, Keesmaat says, need to happen now, including improving the walking infrastructure where people walk already, ensuring walking and cycling infrastructure links up with transit, improving data collection so future decisions can be made on solid ground, improving signage, loosening land-use controls to allow for more organic change as it is warranted, develop to allow people to live closer to where they work, and encourage individual "champions" to get behind significant infrastructure investments in these suburbans and push them through.

Video records of this and previous roundtables are available on the chief planner’s website.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Jennifer Keesmaat

The city’s approach to heritage conservation has won it recognition from the Canadian Association of Heritage Professionals.

Guided by the planning department, in concert with a consortium headed by Taylor Hazel Architects, the city's policy, as embodied by a new amendment to the Official Plan, tries to treat heritage in a broader way than usual.

"We identify that conserving heritage buildings is not just a physical act," says Scott Barrett, the city's senior coordinator for heritage preservation services. They concentrate, he says, "on why it's important, on heritage values. They're not just an assemblage of buildings; they create a sense of place, places people can experience."

This is best exemplified in the city's Heritage District initiative, which looks into preserving entire neighbourhoods, rather than individual buildings.

"It's a significant change to our old policy," Barrett says.

The new approach calls for, among other things, archeological finds to "remain in place where possible," Barrett says, but according to the city's supervisor of archeology, Susan Hughes, "possible" is a frangible term.

Sometimes it works, like with the Norr Architects project for HK Hotels at Exhibition Place, where the remains of some barracks from the War of 1812 are being preserved where they lie, under glass. For the oldest house in the old City of York, the foundations for which were destroyed in the construction of the building that will house the Globe and Mail, or the remains of the 1830s Bishops Block, discovered then destroyed in the building of the Shangri-La Hotel, not so much.

In both instances, according to Hughes, it would have been "prohibitively costly" for the developers to incorporate the archeological finds into their new buildings.

But as the new and now award-winning amendment takes root, both Hughes and Barrett hope that more and better preservation of significant aspects of the city's history, early and recent, will be possible.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Scott Barrett, Susan Hughes