Pat Bren­nan – Toronto Star

She lib­er­ated the kings and changed the face of our town.

Politi­cians of all stripes, from City Hall to Queen’s Park to Par­lia­ment Hill, have had sig­nif­i­cant impact on the build­ing of new homes in the GTA, but likely few have left as big a mark as Bar­bara Hall.

When she was mayor of Toronto in 1995, Hall noticed that many of the city’s indus­trial oper­a­tions had vacated the city core in favor of more spa­cious sub­ur­ban sites. That left many indus­trial build­ings and their adja­cent park­ing lots sit­ting empty, with lit­tle prospect of another indus­try ten­ant mov­ing in.

“Maybe those indus­trial neigh­bour­hoods need a renewed life,” spec­u­lated the mayor. So she launched her Kings Regen­er­a­tion Ini­tia­tive, which encour­aged devel­op­ers, builders and Toronto res­i­dents to cre­ate and buy new homes in new down­town neighbourhoods.

Hall per­suaded coun­cil to make zon­ing changes for the King St. W. and Spad­ina Ave. neigh­bourhod, plus the King St. E. and Par­lia­ment St. indus­trial area that per­mit­ted res­i­den­tial devel­op­ment, either in con­verted indus­trial build­ings or in new structures.

Many mar­ket watch­ers believe Hall’s ini­tia­tive trig­gered the biggest down­town con­do­minium boom in North Amer­ica. Today there are more Toronto con­do­minium projects under con­struc­tion or com­ing to life on archi­tects’ dig­i­tal draugh­t­ing boards than in New York City and Mex­ico City combined.

Hall’s regen­er­a­tion exper­i­ment, designed by chief plan­ning offi­cer Paul Bed­ford and cheered on by the late urban activist icon Jane Jacobs, caught on fast. Peo­ple wanted to live in lively neigh­bour­hoods. Many of those empty 60-year-old indus­trial build­ings were soon throb­bing as enter­tain­ment venues and their funky inte­ri­ors attracted mod­ern ten­ants, such as new media, fash­ion design­ers, archi­tec­tural firms, indus­trial design­ers and a vari­ety of other bur­geon­ing new tech­nol­ogy businesses.

Within five years, nearly 8,000 new res­i­dences were cre­ated along the King cor­ri­dor between Bathurst St. on the west and the Don River on the east.

Con­text Devel­op­ment, then known as Cohen and Alter, was the first devel­oper to jump at the eased rules and reg­u­la­tions in the King-Spadina neigh­bour­hood and built a new condo at 20 Nia­gara St. — and many projects since.

Cohen, a for­mer plan­ning direc­tor at Har­bourfront, said in an inter­view with the New York Times, “an oppor­tu­nity came up for a really inter­est­ing site, because it was right on a park in this quasi-industrial area, but very close to Toronto’s core. We thought there might be some demand to live down­town in an area that had a lot of char­ac­ter, although it didn’t appeal to every­body because it was still full of old indus­trial build­ings and park­ing lots.”

Hall wasn’t suc­cess­ful in her 1997 bid to be re-elected as mayor of the much larger Toronto megac­ity, but her legacy has spread beyond the Kings to prac­ti­cally every inter­sec­tion in the city core — and, of course, through­out the GTA.

She is still very much involved in get­ting peo­ple into down­town res­i­dences as chief com­mis­sioner at the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

“There is still a lot of dis­crim­i­na­tion in Toronto hous­ing. We find peo­ple are refused rental accom­mo­da­tions because of their reli­gion, because of their race, their her­itage. We work to over­come those unfair and ille­gal dis­crim­i­na­tions and get peo­ple into homes,” Hall says.

The City of Mis­sis­sauga didn’t exist when Hazel McCal­lion was elected mayor in 1970. She was elected mayor of Streetsville, an urban island sur­rounded by Toronto Town­ship and its sea of farm fields.

Today, more than 713,000 peo­ple occupy those farm fields; Toronto Town­ship has grown into the City of Mis­sis­sauga and swal­lowed up Streetsville. It became one of Canada’s fastest grow­ing cities in the last cen­tury and its 91-year-old mayor says its orderly, planned and admired growth was inspired by two com­pa­nies — Cadil­lac Fairview and Mark­bor­ough Properties.

Those two devel­op­ment giants started Mississauga’s growth spurt on its west side by cre­at­ing Erin Mills and Meadowvale.

“Devel­op­ment was started in Mis­sis­sauga by those two com­pa­nies and they did it with pre­cise plan­ning, with con­trolled growth and cre­at­ing com­mu­ni­ties that were designed to put peo­ple first,” says McCal­lion in an inter­view with New in Homes & Con­dos.

“Our coun­cil decided that all new devel­op­ment in Mis­sis­sauga had to fol­low the same approach. Peter Langer at Mark­bor­ough Prop­er­ties and the prin­ci­pals at Cadil­lac Fairview — later Marco Muzzo — were excel­lent for our coun­cil to deal with. They were tough nego­tia­tors, but they were fair and when we finally reached an agree­ment, they stuck to their word.

“We required that kind of approach from all devel­op­ers propos­ing projects in Mis­sis­sauga,” says McCal­lion, now head­ing for her 34^th year as the city’s mayor.

“We dis­cour­aged small devel­op­ment pro­pos­als in favor of big pack­ages because we could seek more enhanced site plan­ning to main­tain the Cadil­lac Fairview standards.

“And most of them are of that same qual­ity, like Orey Fidani (deceased). His Orlando Corp. (now headed by son Carlo) cre­ated Heart­land near the air­port. It’s con­sid­ered one of the finest busi­ness parks in the coun­try. Harold Shipp has always given us lovely projects”

McCal­lion cites Aquitaine Lake in Mead­ow­vale as one of the good pub­lic ben­e­fits of requir­ing exten­sive urban plan­ning. “It was going to be just a storm water reten­tion pond, but it’s one of Ontario’s finest small recre­ation lakes. We have a very pop­u­lar three-day fish­ing tour­na­ment there each year.”

It was his 75^th birth­day on April 24, so it was eas­ier to catch David Crom­bie at home for an inter­view. He is still as active in the com­mu­nity as he was through his three terms as Toronto’s mayor from 1972 to 1978.

Crom­bie stopped more hous­ing projects than he ini­ti­ated, but that was because he was try­ing to intro­duce new think­ing to an old-guard city coun­cil — pre­serve and restore, rather than tear down.

There were many pro­pos­als before coun­cil to tear down the homes in poorer neigh­bour­hoods so devel­op­ers could build new hous­ing. “That was stu­pid,” Crom­bie recalls.

He wanted small homes pre­served and that’s why the desir­able neigh­bour­hoods of Cab­bage­town, Kens­ing­ton Mar­ket and Tre­fann Court exist today.

Iron­i­cally, Crom­bie was the dri­ving force behind the largest urban res­i­den­tial devel­op­ment in Cana­dian his­tory. He didn’t mind tear­ing down aban­doned under-used indus­trial build­ings and con­vert­ing empty weed-choked fields on the edge of down­town Toronto to cre­ate new housing.

St. Lawrence Ward, bet­ter known today as St. Lawrence Mar­ket, is a com­mu­nity of 17,000 res­i­dences of both market-priced homes and sub­si­dized apart­ments. Urban plan­ners through­out North Amer­ica con­sid­ered it one of the finest exam­ples of urban renewal, and its design con­cept has been repeated through­out Cana­dian and Amer­i­can cities.

The neigh­bour­hood is bounded by Jarvis St. on the west, Front St. on the north, Par­lia­ment St. on the east and the rail­way cor­ri­dor on the south.

“It was a hor­ri­ble, decay­ing indus­trial area sit­ting on the edge of our down­town and serv­ing no good pur­pose for our city,” says Crom­bie. He man­aged to bring together a team of foreword-looking urban plan­ners, but con­sid­ers his finest achieve­ment get­ting the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, the provin­cial gov­ern­ment and city gov­ern­ment to come together as a sin­gle devel­oper to get the project under­way and see it suc­cess­fully built out 15 years later.

“In those days, you could use back­door approaches to bring var­i­ous polit­i­cal enti­ties and philoso­phies together to achieve some­thing of ben­e­fit for the pub­lic,” he says.

“It is a shame that co-operation for the pub­lic good among var­i­ous gov­ern­ment lev­els just doesn’t seem to exist any­more. I doubt we could have cre­ated St. Lawrence Mar­ket in today’s atti­tude,” Crom­bie says.

For­mer Lib­eral cab­i­net min­is­ter Don­ald McDon­ald (Lib­eral MP for Rosedale), the late Lib­eral sen­a­tor Keith Davey and Ontario Pre­mier Bill Davis all played major roles in get­ting pub­lic money com­mit­ted to cre­at­ing St. Lawrence Mar­ket, he says. And his friend Jane Jacobs was one of his clos­est back­room advisers.

Scar­bor­ough Lib­eral MPP Alvin Curl­ing has no idea why he was appointed Ontario Hous­ing Min­is­ter in 1985 by Pre­mier David Peterson.

He was the first black per­son appointed to the Ontario cabinet.

“At the time, I had no idea why I was made hous­ing min­is­ter by David. I fig­ured he must have heard about my teenage days in Jamaica. After I grad­u­ated from high school, I started orga­niz­ing poor fam­i­lies liv­ing in squat­ter huts all over the island. They had occu­pied those sites for years, but were still con­sid­ered squat­ters with no legal rights.

“I helped orga­nize them into a rec­og­nized soci­ety giv­ing them a com­mu­nity impact towards improv­ing their qual­ity of life,” Curl­ing says.

As hous­ing min­is­ter he pushed for gov­ern­ment poli­cies that would assist the hous­ing chal­lenges of many lower income res­i­dents of Ontario. Curl­ing headed up the Peter­son government’s intro­duc­tion of rent con­trols in the mid 1980s.

He also wanted to keep devel­op­ers active in pro­vid­ing new hous­ing, par­tic­u­larly in the rental mar­ket and intro­duced var­i­ous poli­cies, such as interest-free loans to build new rental hous­ing, and relaxed reg­u­la­tions so exist­ing build­ings, such as for­mer indus­trial build­ings and home base­ments could be more eas­ily ren­o­vated to safe and secure liv­ing stan­dards to relieve the severe short­age of rental housing.

“I wanted devel­op­ers and builders to get a rea­son­able return on invest­ment so they wouldn’t sim­ply stick their money in the bank and stop build­ing. In con­sul­ta­tion with the build­ing indus­try we were able to find a solu­tion that guar­an­teed builders a return on invest­ment that beat any bank sav­ings rates and yet pro­tect renters from run-away rental rates caused by a short­age of units,” he recalls.

Curl­ing always main­tained his Scar­bor­ough seat while gov­ern­ments changed and was Ontario’s Speaker of The House before retir­ing to become Canada’s ambas­sador to the Domini­can Repub­lic. Stephen Harper removed Curl­ing as ambas­sador when he replaced Paul Mar­tin in the prime minister’s office.

“I am still being invited by the pres­i­dent of the Domini­can Repub­lic as a con­sul­tant to advise his gov­ern­ment how to make bet­ter hous­ing avail­able to his peo­ple at afford­able prices,” Curl­ing says.

And his name will live for­ever in the his­tory of new homes in Scar­bor­ough. A new street soon to be cut into a new hous­ing project will be called Alvin Curl­ing Dr.

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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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dog day devel­op­ers toronto revenue

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