When it comes to architecture, what is Toronto known for? The ROM Crystal, the AGO and OCAD are too new to have entered the civic subconscious. True, we have the second-largest number of high-rise towers of any city on the continent, but if you’re in the core, you might think of Victorian and Edwardian row houses.
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For me, the signature city building is the pre-war low-rise – the kind in the west College ‘hood or north of Eglinton on Bathurst.
It’s not just their proportions, but the balance they help neighbourhoods strike between modern and low-tech they’re just dense enough to boost local retail without packing us anonymously into filing cabinets. We should all age so gracefully.
But as developers exploit the discourse around density, will low-rise structures become just curiosities among the condos?
Maybe not, Lorna Day hopes. A manager in the city’s urban design department, she’s figuring out why developers aren’t taking the city up on “gentle urbanization” – mid-rise development along main streets like Sheppard, Bloor West and Kingston Road.
Mid-rises (four to 12 stories) aren’t exactly low-rises, of course, but they may be our 21st-century version of them. It’s not generally known, but when David Miller or planners talk about driving development to the avenues, as per the Official Plan, this is what they mean.
“There are ‘mom and pop’ developers who own a piece of land, want to redevelop it and need a context,” says Day. She wants to foster mid-rises so when developers want to build towers on main streets, there’s already a mid-rise precedent. In this way, locals can legitimately argue that massive buildings are not in keeping with the neighbourhood.
But, to put it bluntly, most developers don’t care. They love towers because the recipe is simple: repeat one floor plan over and over while saying “ka-ching.” There are height restrictions in most ‘hoods outside the core, but either the city chooses not to enforce them or developers just flout them, knowing that if the city complains they can go to the Ontario Municipal Board.
And developers who are interested in the new model say costs can make it unattractive. According to Les Mallins of Streetcar Developments, a specialist in mid-rises, laying down the first floor of any new construction is pricey, and mid-rise builders don’t get economy-of-scale advantages in materials or skilled labour.
“I talk about building the first floor and the roof. In between isn’t that hard – and it’s the profitable stuff,” says Mallins, who has projects in Corktown, Riverside, Beaches and other locations.
But city rules aggravate the problem, too. Developers pay the same amount to the municipality for services like water and electricity hookups whether they’re constructing 20 units or 100. And there are standardized rules for things like loading areas for multi-residence buildings, regardless of their size.
For builders who don’t want to do towers, says Mallins, the system tends to favour townhouses. “You can build townhomes even where it isn’t appropriate. You’re permit-ready from day one,” he says, referring to the fact that density debates seldom arise.
Official interest in mid-rises emerged from redevelopment of Toronto Community Housing’s Don Mount Court. The private developer wanted a 25-storey tower for the market units the community didn’t want a visual cue segregating subsidized units from market ones.
In the end, attempts to keep the whole site down to four storeys prompted a development study for the area (officially called an Avenue Study). That study became city-wide, and now Day’s department is trying to decide what kinds of buildings are appropriate for what kinds of streets.
The rule of thumb they’re considering is that you can only build as high as the street is wide. Urban design will begin consulting residents’ groups this summer.
The department is also considering a move to exempt development charges for mid-rises. But can units in these buildings be made affordable, given that there are fewer units? By facilitating progressive development, will the city also progressively price people out of the core?
And what of sustainability? One potential strategy is to exempt mid-rises from certain environmental requirements, such as the new green roof bylaw now being debated. And Mallins says that, given the costs, things like solar panels are often out of the question anyway.
But it may be that mid-rises are more sustainable than towers make your building tall enough and it will naturally be prone to issues of heat retention and irregular air pressure that require technological solutions. Gord Perks, Parkdale councillor and long-time enviro campaigner, tells me that many very tall towers in Toronto actually need to be artificially cooled in the winter.
So is there a point when tall becomes too tall? “Intuitively, towers don’t make sense from a sustainability point of view. The question is whether technology can mitigate that, and I don’t think there’s yet an expert in the world who could tell you.”
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