Christo­pher Hume – Toronto Star

With the excep­tion of the car, noth­ing has changed the city more than the condo. Thanks to the condo, thou­sands and thou­sands of new res­i­dents have flooded into Toronto and helped make it one of the most vibrant cities in North America.

At the same time, how­ever, many Toron­to­ni­ans, indeed, whole neigh­bour­hoods, are con­sumed with rage against the condo. Mere men­tion of the C-word is enough to send shiv­ers down the spine of oth­er­wise mild-mannered home­own­ers and turn them into howl­ing NIMBY hordes.

Typ­i­cally, the object of their fury is height. And in a city where res­i­den­tial devel­op­ers now rou­tinely pro­pose 75– to 85-storey tow­ers, the fear of high­rise build­ings has never been more palpable.

Yet the most con­tro­ver­sial condo project in Toronto these days is not some­thing such as David Mirvish’s Frank Gehry-designed triple-towered sky­scraper extrav­a­ganza at King and John Sts., but a qui­etly ele­gant six-storey build­ing at 109 Oss­ing­ton Ave. It would replace a used-car lot and garage, the sort of thing you’d expect locals would be thrilled to see disappear.

Think again. In addi­tion to height – six storeys is too much, four would be bet­ter – the argu­ments against the midrise scheme are that it would suck the life from the street and be a “party building.”

Archi­tec­tural ren­der­ings of 109 Oss­ing­ton show a frankly mod­ernist struc­ture, an arrange­ment of glass-and-concrete cubes that breaks down the bulk into a series of smaller ele­ments. With retail at street level, it appears to be fully inte­grated into the neigh­bour­hood, and a wel­come addi­tion to a part of town that has seen lit­tle invest­ment over the decades.

The same sce­nario is also being played out on Queen St. E., where the object of scorn is another midrise condo by the same archi­tec­tural firm, one of Toronto’s most inno­v­a­tive, RAW Design.

NIM­BY­ism, which has an increas­ingly ugly side, has reached the point where many Toron­to­ni­ans seem to think they have the right to choose their neighbours.

The com­plaints are reveal­ing. Most reveal­ing is the accu­sa­tion that 109 Oss­ing­ton will be a “party build­ing.” This asser­tion gets to the heart of the fear and loathing so many feel for the very idea of the condo. Con­dos, they charge, attract the young, the noisy and the rootless.

As much as any­thing, per­haps, it is also a reac­tion against the mar­ket­ing of con­dos, which, in its empha­sis on “lifestyle,” has long been aimed at the younger end of the mar­ket. In fact, devel­op­ers have focused on spe­cific demo­graphic cat­e­gories: the rich, of course, but mostly this myth­i­cal cohort of young, upwardly mobile professionals.

At the same time, in an effort to keep units afford­able for this group, builders have reduced apart­ment sizes to the point where they have become more attrac­tive as invest­ments than places to live.

City­Place is a good exam­ple. The aver­age stay at the mas­sive and still-unfinished devel­op­ment, which extends west of the Rogers Cen­tre to Bathurst St., is said to be 27 months. Tran­sient pop­u­la­tions such as this, so the logic goes, don’t put down roots and have lit­tle stake in their build­ing let alone neighbourhood.

This mar­ket­ing model has worked until recently because of the appar­ently insa­tiable demand on the part of inter­na­tional investors from China, Rus­sia, Asia, Iran and beyond. That’s chang­ing now, but it hasn’t been unusual for 60 to 70, even 80,% of new units to be snapped up by investors. The result in a mar­ket as hot as Toronto’s is the condo indus­try has grown dis­con­nected from the mar­ket. On the other hand, bankers, who look no fur­ther than the bot­tom line, like what they see.

Now, stricter mort­gage and amor­ti­za­tion require­ments intro­duced by the fed­eral gov­ern­ment have had their intended effect. Investors are with­draw­ing. Sales of con­dos and build­ing starts are down; the heady days of the Toronto real estate mar­ket are draw­ing to a close.

“The Golden Age of the condo may be over,” admits Toronto’s lead­ing real estate ana­lyst Barry Lyon, “but it’s good. The mar­ket needed this.”

“What we’re see­ing is a healthy mar­ket cor­rec­tion,” he argues, “it’s one that’s long over­due. We need to catch our breath. We’re track­ing 420 sites that are for sale in the GTA. It should be 300 or 320. We’re build­ing so quickly we haven’t had a chance to learn. We haven’t had a chance to build for an evolv­ing market.”

Lyon makes a lot of sense. Indeed, one imag­ines a period of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion in the decades ahead dur­ing which the con­dos built today will finally be made inhab­it­able through inte­rior ren­o­va­tions and, when pos­si­ble, join­ing units. But the big issue must be how to ensure that projects yet to be built are more finely adapted to human, not exclu­sively indus­try, demands.

As more aging cou­ples and fam­i­lies choose to stay down­town and go high­rise, plan­ners and devel­op­ers will also have to fig­ure out ways of pro­vid­ing larger liv­ing spaces that are afford­able. Regard­less of what builders say, it can be done. Why, for exam­ple, are con­dos in New York larger on aver­age than those in Toronto?

One of the major dif­fer­ence is that the condo in Man­hat­tan is not viewed strictly as an invest­ment or a tem­po­rary domi­cile, but as a place to live, often with kids and pets.

At the same time, like the rest of the planet, North Amer­ica is wit­ness­ing a return to the city. Car own­er­ship rates are down among young peo­ple for the first time since the 1950s. The same phe­nom­e­non can be seen in Europe where, after nearly 70 years, bicy­cle sales have out­stripped car sales.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has fought the trend, but to lit­tle avail. Remov­ing bicy­cle lanes from Jarvis St. makes this city an object of inter­na­tional smirk­ing, but it won’t keep peo­ple from their bikes. Iron­i­cally, this step back­wards comes at the same time when con­ges­tion in Toronto has reached a low point: Accord­ing to at least one sur­vey, grid­lock in this city is the worst in North Amer­ica. Another report, released last week, had three Cana­dian cities in its list of the worst five; in addi­tion to Toronto, Mon­treal and Van­cou­ver made the cut. The U.S. cities were Los Ange­les and San Francisco.

Canada, it appears, is falling behind. But the speed at which we erect con­dos says oth­er­wise. Our grow­ing desire to live in the city has fun­da­men­tally altered the way we view down­town. No longer is it seen as a place to escape from, but rather place to escape to. The his­toric Cana­dian dis­trust and dis­ap­proval of the city has started to give way to a new appre­ci­a­tion of the ben­e­fits of mixed-use den­sity that char­ac­ter­izes downtown.

In an RBC/Pembina Insti­tute study pub­lished last sum­mer; most respon­dents said they were will­ing to sac­ri­fice space for loca­tion. They made it clear, all things being equal, that they would pre­fer to live in a town or city rather than a car-dependent suburb.

But of course all things are not equal. The big com­plaint against urban hous­ing is the cost, which fewer and fewer can afford.

The argu­ment for con­dos has never moved far from the issue of afford­abil­ity. But the condo phe­nom­e­non, if not the condo boom, is about more than just prices. It lies at the heart of this great shift to the city, one that in decades ahead will come to char­ac­ter­ize the early part of the 21^st cen­tury as much as sub­ur­bia summed up the post-war period.

For a vari­ety of rea­sons, urban life makes more sense than it has for gen­er­a­tions. In a world of instant com­mu­ni­ca­tion and social media, the lure of vehic­u­lar mobil­ity is no longer irre­sistible. But before con­dos can ful­fill their city-building poten­tial, Toronto will have to learn how to have a mature debate on the sub­ject, not a scream­ing match.

The most inno­v­a­tive, urban and pro­gres­sive projects in Toronto today are those with pub­lic sec­tor involve­ment, notably the Regent Park revi­tal­iza­tion and those on the water­front. In both cases, the spaces between build­ings were planned first. As a result, the build­ings were con­ceived as part of some­thing larger, a com­mu­nity, a neigh­bour­hood, not just another piece of archi­tec­ture occu­py­ing its site in a state of splen­did isolation.

Now it’s time for devel­op­ers not work­ing with pub­lic agen­cies to reac­quaint them­selves with the city they have done so much to change, the city that has made them so very rich. Builders argue, for exam­ple, that few buy­ers are really inter­ested in the much-ballyhooed fam­ily unit. They claim larger apart­ments are the last to sell, that demand just doesn’t exist.

On the other hand, condo tow­ers in this city are home to more fam­i­lies than many real­ize. It isn’t unknown for build­ings to have sev­eral dozen fam­i­lies with kids among its res­i­dents. Not only must they agi­tate for schools and play­grounds in areas where chil­dren have tra­di­tion­ally been rare, they must also bat­tle with their own condo boards, some of whom are less than enthu­si­as­tic about hav­ing kids around.

These are cul­tural wars that have yet to be played out. Even today, Cana­di­ans har­bour a deep-seated bias against apart­ment liv­ing, espe­cially high­rise and rental. In many world cities, how­ever, the Cana­dian ideal of the single-family house in the city is sim­ply not fea­si­ble, let alone afford­able. That’s also true of Toronto, where real estate prices have become a major issue.

The only more press­ing issue might be the fear of change that now grips the city. It slows down legit­i­mate growth and polar­izes neigh­bour­hoods. Though city res­i­dents are right to be vig­i­lant, even mil­i­tant, but when they do so irra­tionally, they dis­credit their cause.

Toronto’s Offi­cial Plan specif­i­cally states that devel­op­ment should be focused on what it calls the “avenues” — the main streets — so that it can be kept out of the city’s estab­lished neigh­bour­hoods, which are typ­i­cally lowrise. Even so, there have been epic bat­tles that have lasted years and neces­si­tated the expen­di­ture of mil­lions of dollars.

Think of the twin-towers of Minto’s Quan­tum project at Yonge St. and Eglin­ton Ave., or One Bed­ford at Bloor St. W. and Bed­ford Rd. Each in its own way has greatly enhanced the neigh­bour­hood and streets on which it is located. Yet both were vilified.

Though the archi­tec­ture dif­fers, each project suc­ceeds at ground level, which is where condo tow­ers make their most cru­cial con­tri­bu­tion to the city. The Minto project is instruc­tive; despite claims from out­raged locals, it was the best thing to appear at this impor­tant North Toronto cor­ner in decades. One of the nicest touches is the pedes­trian walk­way that bisects the site on an east-west axis. It leads directly to a sub­way entrance on the other side of Yonge, thereby endear­ing itself to the thou­sands of com­muters who use it daily.

This project could serve as a model for large-scale mixed-use con­dos in Toronto. Height notwith­stand­ing, Quan­tum is ever mind­ful of con­text and respon­sive to it. Also worth point­ing out is that a fea­ture such as the walk­way adds tremen­dous value with­out increas­ing costs. After all, how much does a path cost?

If noth­ing else, the approach­ing slow­down will be help­ful if it pro­vide an oppor­tu­nity to ana­lyze and absorb the lessons of recent years.

The hard­est part, how­ever, may be what hap­pens beyond the city core in the post-war tow­ers on the so-called “inner-suburbs.” The semi-official Tower Renewal Project, launched dur­ing for­mer Toronto mayor David Miller’s term, has showed how these ubiq­ui­tous slabs can be not sim­ply reha­bil­i­tated, but civ­i­lized. Though the own­ers have much to gain, mobi­liz­ing them won’t be easy.

In the mean­time, decreased demand will spell the end of the res­i­den­tial sky­scraper — at least tem­porar­ily. More than ever, devel­op­ers will focus on smaller projects, espe­cially midrise. They cost less to build and are eas­ier to finance in these trou­bled eco­nomic times.

But as we have learned from bit­ter expe­ri­ence, even these seem­ingly benign schemes get a rough ride in Toronto. Some cities just can’t take yes for an answer.

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Con­tact the Jef­frey Team for more infor­ma­tion – 416−388−1960

Lau­rin & Natalie Jef­frey are Toronto Real­tors with Cen­tury 21 Regal Realty.
They did not write these arti­cles, they just repro­duce them here for peo­ple
who are inter­ested in Toronto real estate. They do not work for any builders.
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