What to know
- The 74-unit development near Trinity-Bellwoods will include 17 affordable units, with the remaining homes being rent-controlled.
- The building will use mass timber, prefabricated exterior panels and geo-exchange heating and cooling to reduce emissions during construction and operation.
- The project will not include parking spaces, instead offering 78 long-term bike stalls and easy access to the Dundas streetcar, Ossington bus and nearby subway.
- Developers say flexible layouts and a mix of one-, two- and three-bedroom units are designed to create more liveable homes, avoiding some of the awkward layouts found in many condos.
- The project is intended to become a repeatable model for sustainable, affordable housing in Toronto, with construction expected to be completed by summer 2028.
The City of Toronto has just announced the construction of a new rent-controlled and sustainable housing development near Trinity-Bellwoods, which developers say might become an inspiration for similar projects in the future.
Located at 1113–1125 Dundas St. W., the development is a collaboration between the City of Toronto, CreateTO and the Government of Canada and will be designed and constructed by a fully Canadian team, including Moriyama Teshima Architects, Montgomery Sisam Architects and Pomerleau Construction.
The building aims to combine Toronto’s affordable housing needs with climate advancement, by delivering 74 new rent-controlled units, including 17 affordable ones designed for energy efficiency and low carbon emissions. The project is also a contribution to a municipal target of delivering 65,000 new rent-controlled homes by 2030.
“The development at 1113-1125 Dundas St. W. demonstrates how the City of Toronto can deliver more housing while advancing climate action, with sustainable features such as mass timber construction and geothermal energy,” Executive Director, Housing Development Office Hugh Clark said in an email shared with Now Toronto.
Now Toronto spoke with Moriyama Teshima Architects’ project manager and designer Phil Silverstein and Montgomery Sisam architect Daniel Ling, who were involved in the project to understand what is behind it.
Project will be an inspiration for future housing
As explained by Silverstein and Ling, the Trinity Bellwoods project was designed to be an inspiration to future sustainable housing in the city, which could also remain affordable for renters.
“It’s affordable housing, so there’s not a lot of money. We have to be very tight with our budget. So we have to build smart,” Silverstein said.
All city-owned projects need to meet the Toronto Green Standard (TGS), which outlines design and performance requirements for new developments since 2010. The Development Charge Refund Program offers partial refunds to development projects that meet certain tiers of the TGS, including Tier 2 and higher.
Given the difficulty of meeting the higher tiers, 1113-1125 Dundas St. W. developers were directed to meet the requirements for Tier 2, in order to make the project easier to reproduce in the future.
“Tier 1 is quite simple to achieve, but once you get beyond Tier 1 and you go into Tier 2 or Tier 3, it becomes harder and harder to achieve,” Silverstein explained.
“This being the first-of-its-kind city-built affordable housing, low-carbon project, they’re looking to design a model that can be repeatable throughout the city. So, they chose Tier 2, which is still difficult to meet.”
What makes the construction sustainable?
A sustainable development includes a series of design decisions and processes that prioritize reducing climate emissions and increasing energy efficiency beyond the operation of the building.
To achieve this mark, 1113-1125 Dundas St. W. was designed to reduce emissions during the construction processes and regular operation of the building.
Developers say one of the ways to do that was designing the building to be constructed with mass timber, instead of mostly steel and reinforced concrete. Mass timber is a modern construction method that uses large, pre-manufactured columns, beams, and panels to build structures.
“There’s no such thing as a pure mass timber building, they’re always hybrid in some sort. In this case, our foundations are concrete, our stair core is concrete, and our elevator core is concrete,” Silverstein said.
In addition to reducing carbon emissions, the use of the mass timber is also a way for developers to keep the internal layout of the building flexible, accommodating a series of different sized units, beyond the typical studio or one-bedroom apartments.
“Unlike many of the housing projects where there is shear walls in between the units, whether concrete shear wall or other shear walls, here we’re actually using blue-lamp timber columns with a standardized grid that is quite flexible that allows unit layouts to be flexible and for us to accommodate a wide variety of units,” Ling explained.
In addition to being more sustainable, Silverstein said the mass timber is also helpful in maintaining the project’s “made-in-Canada approach,” as it is fully Canadian sourced.
Another method used to make sure the construction is sustainable is the use of pre-fabricated envelopes, a method where exterior walls and panels, which need to only be assembled on site.
Besides reducing emissions, this method also expedites the construction process.
“You can be building your envelope offsite while the structure is being built, which means when the structure is complete, or even while the structure is being built, you can start clipping on your panels,” Silverstein added.
Finally, the building also includes no below-grade construction, eliminating the process of excavation, which also significantly reduces its carbon footprint.
What makes the building sustainable?
The new construction was also designed to remain sustainable after residents move in.
The building will use geo exchange for heating and cooling, a system that uses stable earth temperatures to cool and heat buildings, avoiding the typical gas-powered system.
“Geo exchange means you just have a few little pumps moving that water through the building to get your heating, your cooling, and your hot water. So, we’ve also greatly reduced the operation carbon, and because there’s no gas-fired appliances, we are considered net-zero energy operating energy,” Silverstein said.
As explained by the developers, making sure that the building has a reasonable window-to-wall ratio is also important in this process, as the excess of windows might heat up or cool down the unit, making more heating and cooling necessary to maintain its temperature.
“It’s only 20 per cent windows. The rest are solid walls. The high-performance windows, triple glazed, with sort of a larger window in the living space and in bedroom. [It’s a] way to balance both daylighting sort of solar comfort as well as for privacy,” Ling said.
Building doesn’t come with parking
Another innovative aspect of the new development is that it does not include parking spaces. The design is developed to encourage residents to take advantage of the central location and choose to take transit or bike instead of relying on cars.
Although Silverstein said the decision to remove parking was controversial at first, the objective is to also shift the way Toronto usually designs its buildings.
“We’re on a major intersection. We have the Dundas streetcar, the Ossington bus, subway’s a quick walk away… There’re 78 long-term bike stalls with a workstation, bike repair tools, all electrified, so you can plug in your e-bikes,” Silverstein said.
“Toronto needs to expand how it thinks about affordable housing, the types of communities it wants to make, and I think that if this pilot project pencils out and becomes that model that we’re hoping will be repeated, not just by City Toronto, but hopefully other developers.”
Units designed to be liveable
With the market oversaturated with condos, and residents raising concerns over strange unit layouts with excessively small and unusable spaces, Ling and Silverstein said this new development hopes to also provide great living spaces.
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Out of 74 total units, the developers said 40 per cent will be one-bedrooms, 40 per cent two-bedrooms and 20 per cent three-bedrooms.
“Part of it, unfortunately, is driven by tall-building guidelines of the 750 square-metre floor plate, where the developer is trying to fit one-bedroom units, two-bedroom units, and studios all within the same kind of module,” Ling said.
“What we’re doing here with this building is we’re using a three-metre by three-metre flexible structural grid using this point-loaded column system that’s holding up the mass timber slabs, and that allows us a high degree of flexibility in laying out the units.”
By using this method, developers work with a module, where they can create a layout that has depth and in which there are windows in every space, getting rid of that weird aspect.
In addition, the building includes plenty of outdoor and indoor amenity spaces including lounges, barbecues, and accessible gardens, as well as one retail space on the first floor.
“When you have a low budget, it’s very hard to not compromise on beauty and make a building look good… So we lost the freedom to really explore something unique in terms of the shape, but I think what we’ve tried to do is take the small budget we have and do something that’s meaningful, beautiful, and fits in with the neighbourhood,” Silverstein said.
With the start of its construction being announced by the city earlier this year, the development is currently set to be completed by the summer of 2028.
