Diversity : Development News

When columnists talk smack about Regent Park, they should be prepared to be smacked back.

After a series of columns by Sue Ann Levy appeared in the Toronto Sun last week, questioning the propriety of the revitalization of this originally ill-conceived low-rent neighbourhood, residents organized a press conference.

Mistress of ceremonies Debra Dineen, executive director of the Toronto Christian Resource Centre and a subsidized resident of the neighbourhood since 1989, introduced a string of speakers, including longtime residents and a new buyer of a market-priced condo, to speak on behalf of the neighbourhood and its current direction. (The physical aspects of the revitalization are being handled by Daniels Corporation.)

Dineen calls Levy's columns a "smear campaign" and an attempt to destroy the "good work" being done in Regent Park.

The event drew about 140 people to the as-yet-unlandscaped grounds in front of the Resource Centre at 40 Oak Street.

"Regent Park has gotten richer," Dineen told the crowd. "And we're worth it."

Kate Sellar, a young mother who recently bought a market-priced condo, spoke of the community feeling she's gotten since moving in.

"We all shop for bargains at Freshco," she said from the podium. "We all get our coffee from Tim Hortons," adding that "all the kids are going to swim in the new pool, all the kids will go to school together."


Writer: Bert Archer
Sources: Debra Dineen, Kate Sellar

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Weston Village is getting a little boost that may turn into a major uplift.

Last month, it was announced that a plan to brush up John Street, the current site of a weekly farmer's market, and the future site of a Metrolinx stop on the way from Union Station to the airport, would get a $23,750 grant to help with the costs of designing and then implementing a plan to possibly pedestrianize and otherwise revitalize the street.

The grant came from the Urban Land Institute, a US-based organization that "promotes good land use and sustainable communities," according to its district council chair for Toronto, lawyer Mark Noskiewicz.

Though the grant is small, it is intended to spur investment from public-private partnerships. "The grant was announced last month, as we've already leveraged the $23,000 into $75,000 to $80,000" from the city and Metrolinx, Noskiewicz says.

The plan now is to use that money to complete the design and, if funds continue to flow in for the project, possibly even get the construction done by June of next year.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Mark Noskiewicz

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One of the worst residential buildings in the city is finally getting a reno.

The slab tower, 1011 Lansdowne at the corner of Dupont, has long been recognized by the media, the police and neighbourhood residents as a bad place. With an absentee landlord (living in Montreal), it's given city workers a heck of a time, too.

"This building has been an issue for many, many years," says the ward's councillor, Ana Bailão. "It had a lot of orders to comply over the years."

With apartment doors that don't close and drug paraphernalia in the stairwell, 1011 Lansdowne has needed all manner of physical improvements. But protocols, apparently, are protocols, and they can't be rushed.

"Anything with MLS [Municipal Standards and Licensing] takes a long time," Bailão says. "MLS goes in, gives people the order, then takes people to court, then they do a little bit of work, then we have to go back. That's basically the process."

The councillor says she was especially interested in securing some improvements, since the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) rents several units for its patients.

Work on individual units started a couple of years ago, when the ward was represented by Adam Giambrone, but work has only recently started on the exterior.

According to Bailão, the cladding is being repaired, windows re-caulked.

Though there are still outstanding work orders relating to the inside of the building, the exterior work is meant to be done by the end of the year.

Bailão estimates the value of the exterior work at $1 million.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Ana Bailão

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The Salvation Army's much-awarded flagship downtown building has been recognized once again.

Ontario Wood Works has given the Diamond and Schmitt-designed structure, with its maple floors and red oak millwork and cabinetry, its annual prize for "outstanding use of wood."

"We are pleased to be recognized by Ontario Wood Works and especially gratified that the Salvation Army Harbour Light is the recipient of yet another award," said Donald Schmitt, a principal with the firm, in a released statement.

The $35-million building at Jarvis and Shuter opened its 85 residential treatment beds and its 98-unit transitional housing complex in 2009. It has already won the 2010 Brick in Architecture award, the Ontario Architecture Association Design Excellence award for 2011, and the Toronto Urban Design Award of Excellence, also for 2011.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Paul French

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West Toronto Collegiate has become the latest disused school to be bought up by the explosively expanding French system.

The three-storey building on Lansdowne Avenue was officially handed over last month, and will be split between the French public and the French Catholic school boards, who will be teaching 500 students each on the first and second floors respectively. The third storey will be used by the Toronto District School Board for adult education.

According to Claire Francoeur, communications and marketing director for the public board, known as the Conseil scolaire Viamonde, "We could open 10 schools in Toronto and fill them up very quickly."

The system caters to students for whom French is a first language.

West Toronto Collegiate is one of five schools in Southern Ontario currently being converted from English to French education. Schools in Scarborough, Richmond Hill and Pickering are also making the switch.

The renovation is expected to cost between $10 and $12 million and to be completed by the beginning of the fall term.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Claire Francoeur

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The Ontario government will help the city's public French school board buy a disused school in Etobicoke.

The announcement came as part of a three-year, $45-million commitment to French-language education in the province. The Etobicoke funding totals $5.2 million.

The former Parkview Public School will accommodate 200 students when it opens after renovations in 2013.

Local MPP Laurel Broten didn't return a call for comment, but said on her website that "I am proud to be part of a government that values French language education."

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Laurel Broten

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A community centre being expanded by a religious organization devoted to a recently deceased guru with millions of followers worldwide has received a big boost from the provincial government.

The Sai Baba Centre is an Indian-based operation organized around the teachings of Sathyanarayana Raju, aka Sri Sathya Sai Baba, who claimed to be the reincarnation of another spiritual leader who died 8 years before Raju was born.

The community centre, which received the $489,300 grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation's Community Capital Fund, is meant to serve the South Asian community in Scarborough with health, youth and various other social services programs.

According to the centre's president, Mohana Thirukesan, the building at 5321 Finch Avenue will be expanded by about 40 per cent from its current 28,000 square feet. The centre has no payroll, relying on about 500 volunteers, doing good works such as providing hot meals to shelters, visiting the elderly and teaching youth "human values based on Baba's teachings," says Thirukesan. The expansion will allow the volume of these free services to increase, offering lessons to 900 youth, for instance, instead of the current 700.

Sai Baba's teachings took principles from Hinduism and Islam, and its logo, which includes the motto "Love all, serve all, help ever, hurt never", also includes the Star of David.

Upon his death in April, Sai Baba, whose miracles involving conjuring had recently been debunked, was found to have been in possession of, among other things, 500 pairs of shoes, 750 robes and hundreds of kilograms of gold, silver and gems.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source:

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The city's first "sensory garden" opened in the Bathurst and Sheppard area on Sunday.

The result of a $1-million donation from Goldie Feldman and named in honour of her parents, the Sarah and Morris Feldman Sensory Garden and Accessible Water Playground is meant to be a play facility "for children and adults of all physical and cognitive skills and abilities," according to the city's press release on the subject.

The playground is in Earl Bales park.

Developer David Green, Ms Feldman's son, who is also an active fundraiser and philanthropist, spoke at the opening ceremony, highlighting the importance of this sort of facility in such a diverse city.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: City of Toronto

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There's a new kind of low-cost house in the GTA, thanks to Habitat for Humanity and Daniels.

Daniels -- which has worked with Habitat before, giving the housing alternative organization a packet of land around Islington and Lakeshore a little more than three years ago -- donated a constructed but unfinished house in their new FirstHome development at 3050 Erin Centre Blvd.

Habitat for Humanity's Mississauga branch then rustled up 3,312 hours of volunteer labour to finish the interior, before it was sold to a family of six whose income, which is below the designated poverty line of $50,000 for that size of family, at market value, but with no money down and an interest-free mortgage.

Doug Clark, president and chairman of the board for Habitat for Humanity Mississauga, hopes that the Daniels gift will serve as an example to other developers.

"Maybe one of the reasons there hasn't been more of this thing happening previously is that there's sort of a stigma attached to affordable housing," Clark says. "With this project, we've amply demonstrated that that stigma is not deserved. We've got a project where there's a habitat home that's going to be within an existing community and four months from now, people will drive down the street and they won't know which one's the Habitat home."

The house will be ready for its new owners by September.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Doug Clark

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The once controversial retail and residential complex at Queen West and Portland is now practically complete.

Derided at the time of its proposal for its scale and rumours that its lower floors would be home to a Home Depot or even a Wal-Mart, Queen and Portland, as it's known, with its 96 suites and two major retail anchors will be ready for residents and tenants in a couple of months.

The two major retail tenants will be Loblaws and Winners, which will be topped with five floors of recessive residential floors, which are some of the first in the city to include the so-called family suites, three-bedroom units now officially encouraged by the city.

"Part of the municipal approval process required 10 per cent of the building to have a larger number of bedrooms in the suites to encourage families," says Tony Whitaker, vice president of sales for Tribute Communities, the project's developer.

The architect for the project is Turner Fleischer.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Tony Whitaker

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In the future, let's hope all subsidized housing is as green as the Sackville-Dundas Apartments.

Architects Alliance has been nominated for a Toronto Green Award for their work on this first phase of the Regent Park overhaul.

Owned by the Toronto Community Housing Corporation, the complex was able to use 75% of the materials from the demolition of the public housing disaster whose place it's taking (saving 20% on construction costs). It has green roofs with cisterns to capture storm water that are connected to the irrigation system for the grounds. There's a heat reclamation system hooked up to the two hottest rooms in each apartment, the kitchen ad bathroom, to heat the building's water, there are motion sensors in the stairwells for lighting control and the exterior walls are half masonry, half glazing, to improve their thermal performance. There's also plenty of parking for bikes.

"It's important to have as many ways as possible of letting people know that the city is committed to sustainability," says  Mary K. McIntyre, Architects Alliance's director of business development, talking about the prize, "and it's important to highlight projects that are sustainable. In an ideal world sustainability is not a placard you wear around your neck, it's just the way you build. With a lot of these buildings that win, I think people will say, 'Wow, I didn't know that was a green building.' It's becoming not an exception that adds costs, but just a part of the building code, that's what we're aiming toward."

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Mary McIntyre

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The city's Persian community is getting its own community centre, thanks in part to a grant from the Trillium Foundation.

The Parya Trillium Foundation, started in 2002, has been operating since 2008 out of a rented 15,000 square foot space at 7171 Yonge Street. Thanks to the $439,000 grant, announced last month, Parya has started to renovate an old Canuck Kitchen manufacturers office building, 10,000 square feet at 344 John Street in Thornhill, on about 1.3 acres of land.

Work has already begun, and Parya founder and president Ahmad Tabrizi figures it will be ready in two or three months to serve their 800 registered members and, more generally, the larger community of approximately 100,000 Farsi-speaking Torontonians.

The building cost about $2 million, and the renovations are expected to clock in at about another million. The funds not provided by Trillium have been and continue to be raised through donations.

"The new one will be more efficient," Tabrizi says, speaking of the fact that they can do whatever they want with this space, but weren't able to make any physical changes to 7171 Yonge. "There's less space, but it will be more productive for us."

The contractor for the project is Pegah Construction Ltd., and the renovation was designed by Icon Architects.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source; Ahmad Tabrizi

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With the help of a $500,000 Trillium grant, announced last week, the Sanatan Mandir Cultural Centre is building a 10,000 square foot addition.

The new building, built on a vacant lot to the east of the current 33,000 square foot building, built in 1994, will cost a total of $3 million. The balance of the money will be coming from fundraising and bank financing.

According to Mike Mehta, a lifetime trustee with the Markham centre, which caters to Toronto's Hindu community, "space was very limited" in the old facility, and the new space will allow for five classrooms, a library, and a centre for youth and seniors.

Work will start in mid July, and be finished by March, 2012.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Mike Mehta

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Residents are moving in to 717 Broadview, a comprehensively renovated seniors building owned by Toronto Community Housing.

Originally slated for a December opening, the $10-million renovation and redesign has taken a 1970s building with 200 small rooms and transformed it into a 69-unit apartment building. The overhaul also turned part of the rear parking lot into a community garden.

In addition to being a more livable space for seniors in need of assisted housing, the new building is expected have its energy needs reduced by between 25 and 40 per cent.

Woodgreen Community Services will also be running programs out of the refurbished building's first floor.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Riva Finkelstein

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There was a symposium held last week on poverty and homelessness that could have substantial repercussions on how low-cost housing is handled in the city.

The symposium was attended by about 200 representatives of government and non-profit organizations. Its purpose was to discuss developments since the 2010 senate report, "In from the Margins: A Call to Action on Poverty, Housing and Homelessness," which was written by senators Art Eggleton and Hugh Segal.

Senator Eggleton, a former Toronto mayor, was at the symposium, as was the new chair of the city's affordable housing committee, Ana Bailao.

"This symposium keeps the momentum going as we work to strengthen the engagement of the federal government to adopt comprehensive strategies on poverty, housing and homelessness," Senator Eggleton said in a press release. "It also shows how important it is to have all the players working together."

"Neighbourhood decline and disinvestment is a great risk to the future prosperity of our city. And our efforts to address the most complex issues facing our communities will require collaboration and commitment from all of us," said United Way CEO Susan MacIsaac. "We all have a role to play to reverse the growing trend of concentrated poverty to ensure all of our neighbourhoods are vital and strong."

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Gil Hardy

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].