The arterial roads of Toronto, like those of nearly every other North American city, are not generally showpieces. Though Toronto arteries carry substantial vehicular traffic, including buses and in some cases streetcars, many of their corridors are underbuilt — “lined with two- to three-story, mixed-use buildings in older areas and a jumbled assortment of single-story commercial buildings, strip malls, and apartments in new areas,” says Robert Freedman, the city’s urban design director.
That may change. The government of the amalgamated city of 2.5 million sees an opportunity to transform these roads in coming decades. The municipality’s “Avenues Initiative” foresees as many as 120,000 housing units — accommodating 260,000 residents — cropping up along approximately 100 miles of arteries if the program realizes its full potential. Employment in the corridors would also increase.
Properties along the Avenues would fill in and grow upward, creating mid-rise corridors composed of buildings an average of six stories high. Ground floors in many of them would contain shops, restaurants, and public uses — enhancing the quality of life of the surrounding neighborhoods and acting as a counterpoint to the metropolitan area’s voracious sprawl.
In the next 25 years, the city is projected to grow substantially —conservative estimates say by 500,000 people, while other estimates say more than a million. The city’s goal is to house a major portion of its growth in mixed-use, mid-rise buildings along the transportation grid.
Since adopting its Official Plan in November 2002, the city has completed or started 13 “Avenue Studies” — intense planning and design investigations of specific arterials, undertaken in partnership with independent consultants who heavily involve the local communities. The studies specify the mix of uses, heights, setbacks, and other zoning standards, along with priorities for investment in open spaces, street amenities, and community services.
New zoning bylaws and design guidelines, drawn up in consultation with residents, businesses, and others, will be adopted to oversee the Avenues’ building-by-building evolution. “Growth along the Avenues can happen in a way that will enhance, rather than disturb, our single-family neighborhoods, while also providing much-needed accommodation to aging residents who wish to sell the family home but remain close by,” Freedman says.
OBSTACLES TO THE VISION
Since 2002, applications have been received for more than 250 projects containing over 21,000 residential units along the avenues. However, Freedman admits that “the Avenues Initiative is not exactly taking the city by storm.” Developers have been more eager to build townhouses or “point towers” (slim high-rises) than mid-rise buildings (defined as higher than a townhouse but no taller than the street right-of-way — usually 6 to 12 stories). The general feeling among Toronto developers, Freedman observes, is that mid-rise buildings — constructed of concrete, with underground parking, elevators, and common circulation space — are “too expensive and therefore too risky to build in any great numbers at the present time.”
Last November the city’s Urban Design Section teamed up with the Canadian Urban Institute and the Toronto Society of Architects to hold a symposium on mid-rise buildings, hoping to find ways of spurring their development. “One of the best things to come out of it was a realization that we are building lots of mid-rise buildings — just not enough yet, and not enough close together,” says Freedman. He expresses confidence that in time the numbers will grow, and the arterials will have “the ‘Avenues’ look that we show in our renderings.”
Among impediments cited by Freedman:
• “The Avenues that run through areas with the highest property values have the potential to get higher commercial and residential rents and sales prices, but the existing retail is very profitable, and therefore the owners don’t want to risk new development.”
• In lower-rent areas, the risk is that “it will take too long for the whole Avenue to build out.” In those areas, “no one wants to be the first one on the block to redevelop.”
• “There are many people in the city who are singing the praises of the old 1950s strip malls. They are real incubators in Toronto right now for small start-up (often ethnic) businesses.” Thus there is some resistance to replacing them with larger new buildings, even if the new buildings have more urbane designs.
THE VITALITY OF THE NOT SO PRETTY
As if to confirm the logic favoring retention of fifties strip centers, Freedman’s PowerPoint presentation to the symposium showed two mixed-use projects that possessed elements the city’s plan is striving for; one was a building with ground-floor retail and five stories of housing above, the other a building with ground-floor retail and six stories of housing above, yet they both seemed to lack the quirky vitality that John Lorinc, a local urban affairs writer, has praised in some 1950s and 1960s shopping centers.
In an essay in uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto, Lorinc observed that the inner suburbs are sprinkled with aging, low-rent shopping centers that have shallow, unattractive parking lots between the street and the building — and that contain immigrants’ shops on the ground floor and inexpensive offices above. They’re a kind of “weed species” of the built environment, lacking the aesthetic appeal of downtown retail, yet they contribute to urban life in ways that Jane Jacobs would have appreciated, providing “vividly lit eateries” and “an organic, self-correcting tenant mix,” Lorinc said. “If those modest 1950s strip plazas begin to disappear in the name of suburban intensification, a critical piece of what built Toronto’s peaceful diversity will go with them,” he warned. “We demolish them at our peril.”
The conflict between new development that meets stringent urban design standards and older, shorter, cheaper shopping centers that house variety, surprise, and immigrant energy may complicate Toronto’s effort to create coherent, better-defined streetscapes. “Not all properties along the Avenues will be redeveloped and not all Avenues will be developed at the same scale and form,” says a Planning Division staff report. What that means in practice will have to be worked out, Avenue by Avenue — and perhaps, property by property.
This article is available in the September 2006 issue of New Urban News, along with images and many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue. |
Courtesy of City of Toronto