Mega-projects and tow­ers flood city despite grow­ing concerns

Russ Blinch – Reuters

Barry Fen­ton walked to the bank of floor-to-ceiling win­dows in his 30^th-floor uptown Toronto pent­house suite and declared, “This is the best view of the city.”

To the south, a mass of steel-and-glass sky­scrap­ers glinted in the bright autumn sun. Sev­eral cranes were in motion on unfin­ished build­ings, a com­mon sight in a city in the midst of a res­i­den­tial build­ing boom.

“If you look around the core, every build­ing you look at has a dif­fer­ent look to it, a dif­fer­ent ambi­ence,” said the ener­getic co-founder of Lanterra Devel­op­ments, one of the city’s most active builders. “That’s important.”

Mr. Fen­ton, 56, says he is con­fi­dent the city’s con­do­minium mar­ket will remain strong – despite warn­ings that it is all mov­ing too far, too fast – and has an ambi­tious lineup for future devel­op­ment. And he is not alone in his optimism.

Toronto’s seams are burst­ing with new condo and hotel tow­ers designed by star archi­tects like Frank Gehry and built by famed devel­op­ers like Don­ald Trump.

But Mr. Fen­ton and oth­ers face for­mi­da­ble obsta­cles: an infra­struc­ture buck­ling under soar­ing den­sity rates, the laws of sup­ply and demand and preser­va­tion­ists who says too many new tow­ers are destroy­ing the city’s character.

Canada’s cen­tral bank drew a bead on the city of 2.6 mil­lion this month in its weighty “Finan­cial Sys­tem Review,” warn­ing of “poten­tial future sup­ply imbal­ances” in the condo market.

The Bank of Canada noted that the num­ber of unsold con­do­mini­ums in pre-construction has dou­bled, to 14,000, over the past year.

Greater Toronto home sales have slowed after years of steady increases. Sales fell 16% in Novem­ber from the same month a year ago, accord­ing to the Toronto Real East Board. So far, how­ever, prices are flat­ten­ing, not falling, as some ana­lysts have predicted.

In defi­ance of warn­ings by the cen­tral bank and econ­o­mists, two mega-projects were unveiled within days of each other in Octo­ber – a three-tower condo com­plex to be designed by Gehry and a multi-tower office project that includes a mas­sive casino.

RACE TO THE TOP

More sky­scrap­ers – 147 of them – are being built in Toronto than any­where in North Amer­ica, accord­ing to Empo­ris, the Ger­man data provider. That is twice as many as in New York, a city with about three times the population.

Toronto is get­ting taller fast. Fif­teen build­ings that will be more than 150 meters high are under con­struc­tion, more than any­where in the west­ern hemisphere.

The recently com­pleted Trump Inter­na­tional Hotel topped out at 277 meters, just shy of Toronto’s tallest sky­scraper, the 72-story First Cana­dian Place, which is 298 meters. That height could be exceeded by a cou­ple of major projects on the draw­ing boards, includ­ing the Mirvish project.

(The city’s tallest free­stand­ing struc­ture, how­ever, is the CN Tower, which soars over Toronto at 553 meters.)

“Toronto is cre­at­ing a very sus­tain­able future by build­ing con­dos down­town,” said Daniel Libe­skind, the Amer­i­can archi­tect, who was in Toronto in Octo­ber for a cer­e­mony for one of his lat­est projects, the 57-story L Tower, with its sweep­ing, cur­va­ceous, design that rises above the city’s mod­ernist Sony Cen­ter for Per­form­ing Arts.

“It fights urban sprawl and brings peo­ple into the heart of the city.”

While build­ing in big Amer­i­can cities and in West­ern Europe cratered fol­low­ing the finan­cial cri­sis four years ago, Toronto never stopped boom­ing. Demand for res­i­den­tial space has been strong, and while the office mar­ket has also been healthy, most of the new devel­op­ments have been for condo projects.

Lanterra’s Mr. Fen­ton said his com­pany has built some 9,000 con­do­minium units in Toronto over the past 10 years and now has “in the hop­per” up to 6 mil­lion square feet of prop­erty in down­town Toronto that is being rezoned for new projects.

Lanterra gained promi­nence over the past five years for the devel­op­ment of Maple Leaf Square, which included two condo tow­ers, a hotel and office space, near the city’s hockey shrine, Air Canada Cen­ter, on land that had sat vacant for years.

Now it is “one of the hottest places to be,” said Mr. Fenton.

“ONE TOWER LEADS TO ANOTHER”

Some worry that Toronto can’t han­dle much more development.

Despite decades of debate about trans­porta­tion pol­icy, Toronto has just two sub­way lines, a fleet of charm­ing but lum­ber­ing street­car lines and crum­bling roadways.

Com­muters in Toronto spend at least 80 min­utes in traf­fic a day, on aver­age – worse than what com­muters face in Lon­don or Los Ange­les – accord­ing to the Toronto Board of Trade.

Toronto’s City Plan­ning Depart­ment did not respond to numer­ous requests for comment.

There is also con­cern about soar­ing neigh­bor­hood den­sity rates. The city’s water­front area has seen the most growth. Its pop­u­la­tion has soared 134% in a decade and is up 66% in the past five years, to 43,295, accord­ing to city data.

Toronto’s aging energy grid is strained. In July, down­town Toronto endured an eight-hour black­out after a trans­former blew due to high demand. There was a sim­i­lar out­age last January.

THE MEGA-PROJECTS

Now two of the most ambi­tious projects the city has ever seen are being floated.

First out of the gate was the­ater impre­sario David Mirvish, who with his father, the late Ed Mirvish, helped cre­ate Toronto’s vibrant arts and the­ater scene.

In early Octo­ber, Mirvish unveiled a plan for three con­do­minium tow­ers, with up to 85 floors each, that would be the city’s tallest buildings.

A podium at the build­ings’ base would house two muse­ums, includ­ing one for the Mirvish family’s con­tem­po­rary art collection.

The Mirvish build­ings would be designed by Gehry, the cel­e­brated Canadian-born archi­tect whose 76-story 8 Spruce Street res­i­den­tial tower was just com­pleted in New York.

“These tow­ers can become a sym­bol of what Toronto can be,” the 83-year-old Mr. Gehry said at project’s unveil­ing. “I am not build­ing con­do­mini­ums, I am build­ing three sculp­tures for peo­ple to live in.”

Two weeks later, Oxford Prop­er­ties Group, a Cana­dian devel­oper with a $20-billion global real estate port­fo­lio, announced a $3 bil­lion makeover of the down­town con­ven­tion cen­ter, just south of the Mirvish and Gehry project. It envi­sions a casino, two hotel tow­ers and two office tow­ers that would be among the tallest in the city.

Adam Vaughan, a city coun­cilor whose dis­trict would encom­pass both projects, said a lot more plan­ning is needed. He had kinder words for the Mirvish pro­posal – “it’s a trans­for­ma­tive and aston­ish­ing pro­posal” – than for Oxford’s project, which he called “all out of proportion.”

“It’s time to have a really smart con­ver­sa­tion about how we are build­ing this neigh­bor­hood because there is a hell of lot of den­sity arriv­ing not just with this project but with all the projects that have been approved,” he said in an interview.

AT THE KIT KAT

Al Car­bone, owner for the past three decades of the Kit Kat restau­rant, doesn’t think peo­ple like Mr. Vaughan are lis­ten­ing to him, as the coun­cilor and other politi­cians are not heed­ing the grow­ing con­cerns about the rapid pace of development.

He said build­ings are spring­ing up too close to lot lines, cre­at­ing jammed side­walks and alley­ways. And the sun does not shine on the streets like it once did.

He sup­ports the Mirvish project, which would pre­serve his street, known as Restau­rant Row. But he is bat­tling a sep­a­rate 47-story build­ing that would go up steps away from his restaurant.

The plan, which still must be approved, would retain the his­toric facades of build­ings on the street, which Mr. Car­bone believes will destroy the char­ac­ter of the row.

“It’s a tough bat­tle,” said Mr. Car­bone, who launched the web­site SaveR​estau​rantrow​.com to drum up sup­port in oppo­si­tion to the project. “You can’t have a condo on every corner.”

WHERE IS TORONTO HEADED?

Some believe Toronto is at a cross­roads as devel­op­ers, politi­cians and cit­i­zens debate the rapid changes the city’s urban landscape.

David Lieber­man, an archi­tect who also teaches at the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto’s archi­tec­tural school, agrees the new devel­op­ments have been good for the city, but he is not sure the city’s cit­i­zens are ready for it.

“We have such an excel­lent oppor­tu­nity to get things right, but there is the Cana­dian con­ser­vatism,” Mr. Lieber­man said, sip­ping cof­fee in his stu­dio in an old down­town Toronto house. “Cana­di­ans in their city build­ing are not risk takers.”

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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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eau du soleil zon­ing issues

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