Development News

Starting in August, you’ll be able to drink in the middle of Yonge Street. For a month, at least.

As part of the Yonge Street Planning Framework, a city blueprint on how to make the downtown stretch of Yonge Street a little more vibrant urban strip, Celebrate Yonge has gotten city approval to reduce the car lanes from four to two, and bars on the strip between Queen and Gerrard, will be licensed to serve alcohol on the temporary patio seating on the street.

"That's the first time in Toronto we'll be seeing that done," says councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam, in whose ward the month-long festival will be held.

The strip will have 235 planters, donated by the Carpenters Union and designed by Ken Greenberg and Maryanne McKenna of KPMB Architects.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Kristyn Wong-Tam

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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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This month's so-called "economic dashboard," released by the city's economic development committee, shows Toronto's development sector in fine fettle.

"This really shows that our economy is on the increase in a number of different sectors," says committee chair councillor Michael Thompson. "The housing start-up sector, according to the report, it's up 20 per cent ahead of last year, which is a good thing."

The report also makes note of the fact that Toronto continues to be the leader in high-rise development on the continent, and most of the world, with 189 projects under development right now, compared with runners-up Mexico City (88) and New York City (82).

The report also finds that "Toronto's overall office vacancy rate has been trending downward for the last two years and stands at 5.5 per cent (2012, first quarter), despite the recent completion of several large office buildings downtown. Vacancy rates downtown and along the Yonge Street corridor are below five per cent."

Thompson emphasized the fact that such indicators fluctuate, and pointed out that, amid all this frenzied growth, there is still at least one major problem with Toronto's economy: unemployment.

"It is still higher than the national average," he says. "That's an area we want to be mindful of. The national average is seven and change [per cent], and Toronto is 8.2."

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Michael Thompson

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The "passivhaus" for which Germany has become so famous was actually born in Canada in 1977, says Ross Elliott, the man looking to bring the idea back home.

"Europe took what the Canadians learned back in the early '80s and developed this passive house certification and sort of sent it back across the ocean to us," says Elliott, president and CEO of Homesol Building Solutions. The voluntary certification promotes ultra-low energy buildings with small carbon footprints.

Elliott, alongside Russell Richman, Ryan Abendroth and Graham Irwin, are bringing their own German certification training to Toronto in July to teach their first nine-day course on passive house construction.

The course, which will count for 32 credits, or two years' worth, of professional continuing education for architects and LEED professionals, will teach students how to build houses that use as little as 15 kilowatts per square metre per year for heating. The average house now uses between 150 and 160 kilowatts. The goal for the total energy load for the passive house, including heating, ventilation, lighting and other services is 120 kw. The standard for retrofit houses is 25 kw per square metre for heating annually.

"It's not pie-in-the-sky stuff," Elliott says, pointing out that there are about 25,000 such houses across Europe, and eight now on the drawing board in Ottawa, where he's based, with about 30 likely to be in the works by the end of the year.

The course runs July 31 to August 4 and August 20 to 23 and costs $2,250 plus HST, with an extra $250 charge to take a certification exam.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Ross Elliott

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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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The World’s Biggest Bookstore is, alas, not long for this world.

The current lease on the building, held by Indigo Books and Music, runs out at the end of 2013 and is not being renewed. The owners, the family of the late Jack Cole, co-founder, with his brother, Carl, of Coles Books, still own the 64,000-square-foot building they converted from a bowling alley in 1980.

According to Stuart Smith, a VP at CBRE Commercial Real Estate Services, who is handling the account, the owners would like to rent it to a single tenant. “It’s the rarity of an envelope of this size in an area this far downtown that makes it so unusual,” he says.

According to Smith, the space has been quietly on the market for a year.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Stuart Smith

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NOTE: This story has been edited to add the fact that, though it had gone unreported until now, the space at 20 Edward Street has been on the market for about a year.

The Toronto Dominion Centre has launched an online dashboard so tenants and the general public can track energy uses in its six towers.

"TDC has deployed a broad range of technologies," said the TD Centre's general manager, David Hoffman, in a press release, “but the engagement and participation of tenants is our most powerful environmental best practice."

Yesterday, the site, known as the green portal, showed that the biggest energy consumption, out of Tower 1, registered 909 kilowatt hours between midnight at noon, and the lowest, Tower 3, used 335.

The site was developed by TD Centre landlords, Cadillac Fairview. It does not allow public perusal of individual tenants' consumption, though the tenants themselves can access the information in real time using the Carma Smart Metering system.


Writer: Bert Archer
Source: David Hoffman

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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

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There's a small lawn in the middle of Olive Square Park, the city's newest public park because residents of the Yonge and Finch area wanted at least some green in the otherwise highly developed area.

"There was a series of two working groups meetings where we presented a couple of options," says David Nosella, a capital projects supervisor with the city. "The selected the concept on which the final design was based."

Nosella says there were between 20 and 25 residents in each group, who worked with designs provided by Michael Prusetti of MEP Design. "The planting is all irrigated," Nosella says. "There's a central, raised law area, which the community was adamant they wanted. They wanted at least some open lawn space."

The 1,600-square-metre park is otherwise designed as an urban square, fronting onto Yonge Street, with limestone from Owen Sound along the frontage, a bioswale to filter rainwater before it makes it into the sewer system, and LED lighting throughout.

There are also lots of benches.

"It's somewhere on Yonge Street to come and eat your lunch or sit and read your book," Nosella says.

Work began on the park in November, and was substantially completed in early May on a budget of $950,000. The park officially opened this week.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: David Nosella

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The TTC wants you to sit on their board.

That is, if you've got mad skills.

"Toronto deserves a TTC board with skilled citizen representation," says Mayor Rob Ford in the official invitation. "With the challenges facing transit, we need an experienced team of citizen commissioners."

TTC chair Karen Stintz is also looking for more than your average public minded citizen. In the same invitation, which went out on Monday, she says "There are many high profile capital projects and service improvement initiatives underway at the TTC that would greatly benefit from the experience and leadership of representatives of the population of Toronto."

The specific qualifications they're looking for, as outlined on the city's site, include experience in business management, financial management, marketing management, labour relations management, supply chain management and even public transit management.

At a rate of pay of $5,000 a year, plus $450 per meeting attended, it sounds like they're just looking for some very inexpensive managers.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Martin Herzog

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The first stage of what will be a comprehensive reconstruction of the Queen's Quay portion of the waterfront is beginning, and Waterfront Toronto is holding a public information session this week to make sure everything knows what's happening, and when.

In brief, the work will be done in three phases. Phase One will be infrastructural, upgrading utilities, performing maintenance work on the drainage system and re-laying streetcar tracks. As a result, streetcar service will be suspended for much of the year, replaced by buses. This phase will last until next summer.

The second phase will start next summer, when an extra lane will be added to Queen's Quay on the north side of the street. Work will also be done on the north sidewalk.

Phase three, which will begin in early 2014 and end in late 2014, will concentrate on the south side of the street, completing the promenade and improving Martin Goodman Trail.

According to Waterfront Toronto spokeswoman Samantha Gileno, the budget for the entire process is $110 million.

Each stage of work, Gileno says, will only shut down that section of the roadway, which will then re-open as soon as the next stage's work begins.

The June 6 meeting is in the Brigantine Room at York Quay from 7pm to 9pm.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Samantha Gileno

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Reclamation and preservation work on one of the city's most ecologically diverse habitats is now more or less complete.

Over the years, the ravine became a popular dog-walking spot, which caused a lot of damage to the plants, as well as considerable erosion of the sloping topography.

Work to shore up and reclaim the area began in September, and included the building of a 114-step staircase and a 120-metre boardwalk. A fenced in off-leash dog area has also been marked out, to contain both canine and human activity in the area.

The Glen Stewart Ravine, which runs from Kingston Road down to Pine Glen Road between Glen Manor Drive and Balsam, not only provides one of the city's most idyllically scenic post, it is also 11 hectares of tree canopy. Because of its combination of dry and very damp terrain, it is one of the only places in the GTA to be home to such a wide variety of flora.

"In this place, there's groundwater seepage," says Ruthanne Henry, an urban forestry planner with the city, "so there are a lot of plants that like saturated roots, plants that attract butterflies, which are a naturally deterrent to poison ivy, for example." She says there are four species of tree in the ravine that are considered rare, including white oak and red oak.

Once the groundwork is completed this week, 250 herbaceous plants will be planted in the retaining structure along the slopes to prevent further erosion, part of a total of 3,300 plants being put in this month which, Henry says, "need your protection from trampling."

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Ruthanne Henry

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The RCMI is dead. Long live the RCMI.

When the Royal Canadian Military Institute signed the deal with Tribute Communities to have a condo tower built on top of its HQ, the idea was that the original 1912 façade (upgraded from the 1907 version on the same spot) would remain as part of the building's design. The deal also stated that the institute would continue to operate out of the same address they have for the past century, sharing the space with the new tower.

Then came the demolition, and heritage architect ERA's decision that the façade on its own was not in any condition to stand or be incorporated into the new structure.

"It was in extremely poor repair," says Col. Gil Taylor, president of the RCMI, "and to be perfectly honest, we didn't have the money to bring it back to the state it should have been in."

So it came down as well, with a decision to reproduce it. But not only is the façade being reproduced, the RCMI's space and facilities are being greatly expanded, by about 100 per cent in Taylor's estimation, up to 36,000 square feet across six floors (the old structure was a three-storey building).

The RCMI will also own those six floors. "We aren't part of the condo corporation," Taylor says. "We do have some mutual areas, part of the lobby for example, and part of the exterior. There'll be some shared maintenance cost, but as far as the institute is concerned, it'll be freehold."

The Governor General will lay the cornerstone for the RCMI on Saturday at 4pm, following in the footsteps of predecessors Earl Grey, who laid the first cornerstone in 1907, and the Duke of Connaught, who laid the cornerstone for the fully renovated building in 1912.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Gil Taylor

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The Canary District is underway, and before you get riled about this being yet one more derivative place name, lionizing a foreign capital instead of affirming our own city, take heart that this particular Canary has nothing to do with the London wharf.

This new 20-acre neighbourhood, the first phase of which will be completed for the Pan Am Games in 2015, and that will ultimately include 2,300 residential units, 60,000 square feet of retail with its own new streetcar spur, is named for that little abandoned diner, The Canary on Cherry.

"We were playing around with a lot of different names internally," says Jason Lester, president of Dundee REIT. "It was where weary truck drivers what would come out of downtown Toronto, taking dirt from the [construction of] the financial core to to the Leslie Spit, this is where they'd stop for their morning coffee and breakfast. When the Distillery District became Hollywood North for about 12 years, it was filmmakers" who hung out there, he says, adding that ultimately it was his idea to name the huge development after the little diner.  

The renewed interest in the area has meant a renewed interest in the diner itself. They'll be fixing up the diner's exterior in the lead-up to the games, and Lester figures ultimately Waterfront Toronto will acquire it and give it a new purpose.

Phase II of the development will be marketed in 2014-15 and depending on sales, may begin construction as early as 2016, with potential occupancy by 2018.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Jason Lester

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The popular play castle in High Park that fell to arson on March 17 will soon be rebuilt, thanks in part to Michael Holmes.

"Toronto is his home town," says Rob Richardson of the city's parks department. "He's certainly done projects all over the place. He saw this as a community tragedy, as we all did. It seemed like a really good fit for him."

Holmes has signed up landscape architect Janet Rosenberg, who will also be donating her services in kind.

"We hope to be able to look at the design possibly by the end of the week," Richardson says.

In addition to Holmes and Rosenberg, the Sprott Foundation has offered to match community donations to the project up to $30,000.

With all the help, the plan is to have the work substantially completed by Saturday, July 7, when community members and other interested people are invited to show up at the Jamie Bell playground to help put finishing touches on the place, including staining and moving mulch.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Rob Richardson

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].