Toronto Condo and Real Estate Blog

Toronto offers a wide variety of luxury, upper-end homes in many attractive and desirable neighbourhoods. Toronto also has many luxury home builders who will work with you to build any style of home such as estate, villa and manor. Here are some of the better known upscale areas of Toronto.

Bridle Path
The Bridle Path could hardly have been envisioned by Alexander Milne, who settled on what is now Edwards Gardens in 1827. Milne operated woolen and saw mills on the banks of Wilket Creek until 1832 when a dwindling water supply forced Milne to move east to a mill site along the Don River.

The Bridle Path inconspicuously spent the rest of the 1800’s and early 1900’s as farmland. It wasn’t until 1929, when the Bayview Bridge was built over the steep Don River Valley, that this area was considered for residential development.

Hubert Daniel Bull Page, a Toronto-based land developer was one of the founders of the present day neighbourhood. Page envisioned the Bridle Path as an exclusive enclave of estate homes. In 1929, Page built the Cape Cod Colonial style house at number 2 The Bridle Path, in an effort to spark interest in his subdivision.

Early plans for this neighbourhood called for an elaborate system of equestrian Bridle Paths. These Bridle Paths have long since been paved over, however their legacy remains in the Bridle Path’s unusually wide streets and in the name of this neighbourhood.

Forest Hill
Forest Hill was incorporated as a village in 1923. It was named after the summer residence of John Wickson, built in 1860, at the junction of Eglinton Avenue and Old Forest Hill Road. The hill is still there, but the forest is long since gone, having been replaced by apartment buildings.

Prior to its incorporation, Forest Hill had been known as “Spadina Heights”. Spadina is a derivative of the First Nations word “Ishapadenah”, which means a hill or sudden rise in land. The boundaries of the present day neighbourhood are shaped from the old Spadina Heights school district.

“Lower Forest Hill”, south of Eglinton, was completely developed by the 1930’s. “Upper Forest Hill” was slower to develop due to the fact it had previously been occupied by the old Belt Line railway, and then by industry.

In 1967, Forest Hill Village joined Swansea Village as one of the last two independent villages to be annexed by the City of Toronto.

Lawrence Park
The Lawrence Park subdivision was assembled in 1907 by the Dovercourt Land Building and Saving Company. The Dovercourt Land Company acquired the north parcel of Lawrence Park from John Lawrence, after whom this neighbourhood is named.

Wilfred Servington Dinnick was the president of the Dovercourt Land Company. It was under Dinnick’s direction that Lawrence Park was developed as a suburb for the ‘well to do’. The first advertisement for Lawrence Park trumpeted it as an ‘aristocratic neighbourhood’, ‘four hundred feet above Lake Ontario’, and ‘far from the lake winds in winter’.

Despite all its fanfare, Lawrence Park’s development was sporadic. The building of houses was interrupted by two world wars, a recession, and a depression. It wasn’t until the 1950’s that this neighbourhood was completely developed.

Rosedale
Rosedale began when Sherrif William Botsford Jarvis, and his wife Mary settled on a homestead here in the 1820’s. It was Mary Jarvis who came up with the Rosedale name, as a tribute to the profusion of wild roses that graced the hillsides of the Jarvis estate.

Mary’s frequent walks and horseback rides through Rosedale, blazed a trail for the meandering and winding streets that are today a Rosedale trademark. The Jarvis family sold the Rosedale homestead in 1864 which led to the subdivision and development of South Rosedale.

North Rosedale’s development began in 1909 when a bridge was built over the Park Drive ravine. Prior to its residential development North Rosedale had been the original home of St. Andrews College and the Rosedale Golf Club. It was also the site of the former lacrosse grounds, where the Canadian Football League’s first Grey Cup game was played.

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The new and proposed amendments to the Planning Act will make development in Ontario a complicated, expensive and time-intensive process, with the onus on the developer to make the process efficient and transparent. That was one of the messages from a panel of planners, developers and lawyers at a session on the implications of new and proposed legislation at the Land Conference in Toronto in June.

The pending Bill 51 – Planning and Conservation Land Statute Law Amendment Act and recently enacted Bill 26 – Strong Communities (Planning Amendment Act) seek to increase municipal autonomy and authority in the planning process by increasing time lines for reviewing, limiting rights to appeal expansions to municipal boundaries, restricting rights to convert employment land to other uses, and requiring a comprehensive “front end” submission process, as well as other changes.

“The one thing we know is that it is not going to get simpler, cheaper or faster to develop land in Ontario because of this legislation,” said Andrew Madden, President, Diral Development Corporation. “As a developer what you will have to do is put together your consulting team and your lawyers right from the beginning. You are going to have to be very strategic.”

Panelists said that the legislation suggests that developers have been putting skimpy evidence before city councils, waiting the time limit and then presenting the full case to the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB), with municipalities not having seen much of the material. The Planning Act amendments, said Stephen Diamond, McCarthy Tetreault LLP, place a greater obligation on the industry to provide the detailed information from the beginning.

“There are two parts of the act that I think are important; one is that the act now says that a municipality can make it mandatory that there is a pre-consultation process… The second part is that it says that the municipality can, by the official plan amendment, make requirements for what constitutes a complete application.” If all of the amendments are passed, said Diamond, it will mean “a lot of front end work that has to be done when you file an application. It likely will be more expensive, and more cumbersome, and all your reports – your traffic report, your planning reports, your architectural renderings, your soils and servicing reports – everything will likely have to be done from the day that you file your application.”

More municipal control

With Bill 51, municipalities would gain the ability to impose architectural control through the site plan process, a critical component to the application process, and these proposed changes cause some of the greatest concern.

The language in Bill 51 suggests that the matters relating to exterior design may include, without limitation, the character, scale, appearance and design features of the building and their sustainable design. “That’s a loaded gun of issues and I think the problem that I see is the political influence on this process. I think developers, architects, planners (can have) a reasonable and rational discussion (on these issues). When you begin to insert the political influence it is anybody’s guess how that will end up,” said Neil Rodgers, President, Urban Development Institute.

Madden added: “If sustainable development does not mean economical sustainability, then this site plan process may become a very dangerous one for all of us.”

With greater regard to the decisions of the municipalities, Bill 51 tries to reduce the role of the OMB in the planning process, if not eliminate it. The “no new evidence” rule essentially says that information or material that was not available at the municipal council may not be presented as evidence at the OMB unless it can be proved that it was not available at that time. Public bodies such as the municipality and conservation authorities, however, can present new evidence to the OMB, an unfair bias, the panel criticized, against the private sector.

More information about the legislation can be found at http://www.e-laws.gov.on.ca/.

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Housing starts in the Toronto census metropolitan area dropped by a greater than expected 20% in August to the lowest number since February of this year, according the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.The seasonally adjusted annual rate of starts was 33,100, down from 41,600 in July. Much of the decline was due to a big drop in the volatile condominium sector.

We are at a mature stage of this housing cycle, according to the CMHC. New construction has remained above average but will decline over the next two years.

CMHC is forecasting that starts will be 40,000 this year, down from 41,596 in 2005 and from the peak in 2003 of 45,475.

CMHC considers a home started once the concrete foundation is poured. Analysts warn that the monthly figures can be volatile because one large project can make a big difference to the monthly figures.

With so many condominiums being built in the Toronto area, the numbers have been up and down all year, making it especially difficult for economists to detect a consistent trend.

Record sales of condos in the first half of the year were expected to have an influence on future numbers because many have not been built yet. However, analysts say a correction may be in the works once they are all built.

Ontario Home Builders’ president Victor Fiume said the association was forecasting a soft landing from the cyclical highs we experienced a few years ago.

The builders also pointed to other factors for the slowdown. Higher interest rates, and the increasing costs of materials and labour have eroded housing affordability over the last year, which have contributed to the moderation in residential construction activity across Ontario.

Still, while the multiple segment in the Toronto area was down by almost 30%, the more stable single-detached segment was down only by 2%. This suggests the market is still healthy, although not as robust as it was, Dunning said.

Toronto’s decline surpassed the national average. Nationally, starts dropped by 9.6%, with multiple starts plummeting to 22% to the lowest rates since October.

In the Toronto area, new-home construction has fallen by 12% to the end of August compared to the same period last year. “Housing starts are below last year’s levels due to more balanced resale market conditions and high home prices for ground-oriented homes,” Mercer said.

Condominium starts, which have accounted for an increasing share of new construction, are down by about 8% for the year.

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