By Jane Gadd – Globe and Mail

A bid to launch a cre­ative new style of down­town loft by con­vert­ing a laneway com­mer­cial build­ing into two “town lofts” became a harsh primer in the bureau­cratic process for two young sons in a Toronto devel­op­ment dynasty.

The costly tribu­la­tions of Jor­dan Meck­linger, 25, and his brother Shawn, 27, show just how hard it is to build hous­ing any­where in Toronto’s 311 kilo­me­tres of back lanes, despite the city’s com­mit­ment to increas­ing den­sity in the core and to con­sid­er­ing such projects on a case-by-case basis.

Jor­dan and Shawn, recent grad­u­ates in urban devel­op­ment and real estate finance, respec­tively, and the fourth gen­er­a­tion in a fam­ily of builders, thought they’d come up with a no-brainer to brand their new com­pany, Kil­barry Hill Corp., as a hip, young down­town developer.

They had pur­chased a build­ing on Croft Street, tucked behind the shabby cafes and vari­ety stores of Bathurst and Col­lege streets, right next door to a pio­neer laneway loft con­ver­sion (the Croft Lofts) that had set a prece­dent when the Ontario Munic­i­pal Board approved it in the eighties.

The Meck­lingers’ build­ing, though zoned res­i­den­tial, was being used as a com­mer­cial pho­tog­ra­phy stu­dio. To turn it into hous­ing would restore it to its cor­rect legal use.

Fur­ther­more, city plan­ners had specif­i­cally men­tioned Croft Street as the type of lane that is suit­able for the odd, inno­v­a­tive lit­tle laneway homes that have been pet projects of a num­ber of archi­tects in the past 20 years. It was clas­si­fied as a street, had water, sewage and power hookups and a num­ber of com­mer­cial structures.

But their plans to trans­form the big square com­mer­cial build­ing into two 2,100-square-foot res­i­dences with three open-plan lev­els and exposed beams and ducts quickly ran into trou­ble. They needed zon­ing vari­ances because the present build­ing filled the whole lot, and that meant notices were sent out to the neigh­bour­hood, includ­ing the home­own­ers on to whose yards the prop­erty backed.

They got unlucky. Some of the neigh­bours hated the idea and one hap­pened to work for the city. A mas­sive neigh­bour­hood mobi­liza­tion ensued, and the Meck­lingers found them­selves fac­ing a crowd of hos­tile faces at two pub­lic meet­ings called to dis­cuss the plan.

At the sec­ond one, they were shouted down and hus­tled out of the pub­lic hall.

“We had intro­duced our­selves, said ‘Hi, we’re gonna be in the neigh­bour­hood,’ and there were 20 or 30 peo­ple there all shout­ing,” Shawn says. “We weren’t build­ing 150 town­homes or a high-rise condo, yet there was this huge mobi­liza­tion and email campaign.”

After pur­chas­ing the prop­erty a year ago and clos­ing the deal in Feb­ru­ary, they’d hoped to be start­ing the con­struc­tion work last April.

Their uncle, Jerry Mamid, wanted to move into one of the units and had agreed to sell his family’s For­est Hill home to Shawn.

“The city ground us,” says Mr. Mamid, a for­mer lawyer, teacher and gar­ment fac­tory owner who is “acqui­si­tions direc­tor” for Kil­barry Hill.

When the vari­ance issue went to the com­mit­tee of adjust­ment, the plans were rejected.

The Meck­lingers didn’t want to throw in the towel, and pre­pared an appeal to the OMB. It sched­uled a meet­ing for August. The after­noon before the meet­ing, the family’s lawyer got a call from city solic­i­tors ask­ing for a com­pro­mise that would push the mass­ing of the build­ing away from back­yards and onto the lane.

Mr. Mamid called on his father-in-law, 75-year-old archi­tect Peter Dar­ling, to do an 11^th-hour over­haul of the plan, and the funky H-shaped orig­i­nal with its cut-in court­yards at front and back, and open space on the lane, was gone.

“It would have been beau­ti­ful,” Jor­dan sighs. “We wanted it to be like a wedding-cake step-up to the sec­ond and third lev­els. It would have been more aes­thet­i­cally pleasing.”

Mr. Dar­ling drew the redesign by hand, Mr. Mamid recalls.

“Faxes flew back and forth that after­noon and the next morn­ing between lawyers’ offices.” When they got to the OMB hear­ing they had made a deal, which the OMB approved.

But still no build­ing per­mit came.

After spend­ing more than $700,000 on the prop­erty and $100,000 to get it through the approvals process, they still don’t have a per­mit in hand – though the city has said it will come in two weeks and has given them the go-ahead to pro­ceed with dig­ging up the floors and exca­vat­ing soil for new footings.

Jor­dan and Shawn’s father, Alan Meck­linger, a devel­oper and land­lord of indus­trial and com­mer­cial plazas through­out the city, expresses bitterness.

“NDPers [at the city] are just pick­ing our pock­ets,” he says. “A sim­ple project is turned into a very, very costly chain of events orches­trated by the bureau­cracy. … Every­one is a loser in the end.”

Then he switches from expe­ri­enced busi­ness­man to fond father.

“I really saw it as a great oppor­tu­nity for the boys to put them­selves on the map with some­thing cre­ative in the cen­tral core, and it turned into a very mis­er­able expe­ri­ence,” he says sadly.

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