The Parkdale library teems with activity. On a recent Wednesday evening, people browse the stacks while dozens more sit around tables, staring at monitors, open laptops, open textbooks or phones. Few spare seats remain. The volunteer tutor sitting opposite me is helping teen siblings with math homework. Chatter and the laughter of kids playing online games fill the air. Meanwhile, in the basement auditorium, a not-for-profit and a community land trust are consulting residents on the design for a new urban agriculture project.
Parkdale’s library, at Queen West and Cowan, is a dynamic community space, the second-busiest branch in the city. But it’s due for revitalization. So are two more city-owned properties, the Masaryk-Cowan Community Centre and the Parkdale Arts and Cultural Centre leased by Artscape, at the same intersection. And that has created an opportunity: to redesign and possibly consolidate the three properties into a community service hub.
The idea, which aims to provide stable and affordable space for local organizations, reduce costs and enhance service coordination for residents, was just one recommendation to come out of a two-year equitable planning effort of local organizations and residents led by the Parkdale Activity-Recreation Centre (PARC). During its planning and research, the community identified public assets that might be better utilized for community benefit.
Parkdale-High Park Councillor Gord Perks, who is now championing the idea at City Hall, says it’s a chance to improve the public and social space available to people who live in the neighbourhood, and to integrate city programs.
“A kid should be able to run around a gym and then do their homework, all in one building,” he says. “My thought was there’s an opportunity to do something truly grand.”
All three properties require significant state-of-good-repair investments over the next one to 10 years (and, coincidentally, Artscape’s lease on the cultural centre is up for renewal). “Instead of fixing each a little, why don’t we look at consolidating functions and maybe make additional room available for community groups?” Perks asks.
STONE SOUP PROJECT
In late March, council adopted Perks’s motion to determine the feasibility of the idea by convening three city agencies (Toronto Public Library, Toronto Parking Authority and Toronto Public Health), several divisions and city-owned real estate and development corporation Build Toronto.
“It’ll be a bit of a stone soup project,” Perks says, referencing the folk tale in which a lofty idea (a soup made from stones) is realized by lots of small contributions (ingredients added by others). This big idea could be made possible, he says, by stitching together capital and resources such as state-of-good-repair money (already in place), the value in the land (which Build Toronto could leverage) and money the Library Board would eventually spend on renovations (which could be redirected).
“That Gord was able to stick-handle that at city council is great,” says PARC executive director Victor Willis. “He’s got insider knowledge of how this works, how this unleashes planning money. I’m hoping we’ll see an amazing investment on that corner.”
If the city takes on the project, it will start a community conversation to explore possibilities. “This could turn out in a dozen different ways,” Perks says. “Which is wonderful because we’re going in without a preconception, but also terrifying because a lot could go wrong.
“We have to make sure our eyes don’t get bigger than our stomachs and whatever we come up with makes sense,” Perks adds. “But I don’t want to start out fearful, I want to start with a sense of wonder at the possibility.”
Among the possibilities is vertical intensification. Two of the three properties, the library and the cultural centre, are one- to two-storey buildings on a prime piece of Queen West, which is a designated avenue in the city’s avenues and mid-rise buildings study. Approved in 2010, the study outlines policies that guide mid-rise development – that a building be no taller than the width of the adjacent street, for example. On the city’s narrower 20-metre streets, like Queen, that means buildings five or six storeys high.
A WIN-WIN BUT NO AFFORDABLE HOUSING
Build Toronto, created by the city to unlock the value in its under-utilized real estate assets, has already shown interest in the library. In fact, the corporation reviewed the Parkdale branch as a potential redevelopment site in 2009, but has never submitted a proposal to the Library Board for approval.
“Build Toronto looks at properties we have and asks, ‘Is there a win-win here if we do something with a private partner?’” Perks explains. “They get a piece, but we get a better public asset.” In this case, Perks says it’s possible that the community and a developer each get a few storeys.
What’s unlikely, Perks says, is that this project would create new affordable housing units, even though the community-driven Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust (PNLT) has identified the proposed community hub as a site that could meet that need.
PNLT development coordinator Joshua Barndt says that because Parkdale’s gentrification has made land too expensive for local affordable housing providers to compete for it on the open market, the best opportunity to build new affordable housing in the community is to do so on publicly owned land.
But Perks says, “Not every project can solve the affordable housing problem,” adding that he’s working on other sites nearby. For example, the councillor has a mandate to build affordable housing at 11 Brock, on the former LCBO site now owned by the Toronto Parking Authority.
Willis says as long as any new housing development meets some identified community need, like seniors housing, “we as a community would be willing to say it’s an acceptable addition.” The community just doesn’t want to see development based solely on what developers want, he says – such as the LCBO’s recent conversion of a three-storey building into a single-storey, single-use building without adequate community consultation.
“We’re sick of development that leaves most people out,” says Barndt. “We’re starving for equitable development that focuses on the actual needs of the community.”
Perks cautions, however, that while the community will be “a very big part” of the conversation because the hub would be for its benefit, “the reality is, there are more needs than the city is willing to provide resources for.”
With so many stakeholders, including multiple not-for-profits and multiple city divisions and agencies, Perks says his intention is to manage the conversation.
“We will not as a community get everything,” he says. “Everybody’s gonna have to go in thinking ‘I’m going- to get some of what I hoped for, but I have to make room for other needs.’”
Nonetheless Perks has “bottom lines:” don’t shrink the library’s space, don’t lose programming in the community centre, don’t displace any artists from the nine below-market live/work studios in the cultural centre, and retain the space available in all three for community-based not-for-profits.
GENTRIFICATION ANTIDOTE
For Willis, more space for local organizations is vital, “because we need community anchors.” An assessment by PNLT last year identified some 22 organizations with space needs (such as more space or secure long-term space), the majority of them over the next one to five years. PNLT estimates they could all be accommodated in 31,000 square feet.
The city has previously done some things well around co-location in new facilities, Perks says, but “this will be innovative in trying to do it around existing facilities and with this number of players. Everyone’s a little excited and a little scared.”
Still, Perks is confident. “As has happened so many times,” he says, “Parkdale is going to model a better way to deliver public services in a mixed-income neighbourhood.”
While North Parkdale is increasingly populated by higher-income homeowners, a third of residents in South Parkdale live in poverty. It’s one of the city’s designated Neighbourhood Improvement Areas.
During my Wednesday night visit, it was obvious that the library is already a hub of the neighbourhood, one that crosses socio-economic lines. Although gentrification researchers from the University of Toronto found Parkdale’s classes move within parallel but separate worlds, the library was one space frequented by both long-time, low-income residents and recently arrived middle-class homeowners.
That, says Perks, makes it the ideal place to create a new community hub with lots of different public and social services.
“The hope is,” he says, “we can do some magic.”
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