John Lor­inc – Globe and Mail

The founder of a giant Texas devel­op­ment con­glom­er­ate that secured an $800-million deal with Water­front Toronto to build a 2-million-sq.-ft. mixed-use com­plex on the East Bayfront says the Ford administration’s threat to pull out of the revi­tal­iza­tion effort would “shake our con­fi­dence” in the project.

“Who would be the entity we would deal with?” said Ger­ald Hines, who set up his pri­vately held real estate firm in 1957. The Hines com­pany now has prop­er­ties in over 100 cities around the world, and con­trols $22.9-billion in real estate assets.

Mr. Hines, 85, was respond­ing to dis­parag­ing com­ments made this week by Mayor Rob Ford and his brother Doug, who dis­missed efforts to rede­velop the water­front as “a boon­dog­gle” and a waste of money. The mayor said Fri­day the city’s con­tri­bu­tion to water­front revi­tal­iza­tion was under review.

But in an inter­view Fri­day from his office in Hous­ton, Mr. Hines lauded the Water­front Toronto agency as “an eth­i­cal and pro­fes­sional group” that has cre­ated incen­tives that attract inter­na­tional investors with deep pock­ets. “We have con­fi­dence that they’ll exe­cute their part of the agreement.”

There’s lit­tle doubt the agency reeled in a big fish when it final­ized an agree­ment with Hines last sum­mer. The firm has devel­oped projects in cities like Paris, Milan and Barcelona, where it worked with local and state gov­ern­ments on a mas­sive water­front rede­vel­op­ment com­plex involv­ing 1,500 high-rise apart­ment units, three hotels, and a con­ven­tion centre.

“Every­one in Barcelona said it would never work, but we now have the high­est prices in [the city],” Mr. Hines said, adding that the chance to remake Toronto’s water­front pre­sented a sim­i­lar opportunity.

He’s not the only major fig­ure in the devel­op­ment indus­try to look askance at sig­nals com­ing out of the mayor’s office.

“If Water­front Toronto was less effec­tive, peo­ple will have to ask the ques­tion, where’s the government’s com­mit­ment?” says Andrew Bar­nicke, senior vice-president of DTZ Bar­nicke Ltd., the firm that nego­ti­ated the deal which saw Corus Enter­tain­ment move into the first new office com­plex built on the water­front in over a generation.

Water­front Toronto, Mr. Bar­nicke said, has suc­ceeded in attract­ing cap­i­tal invest­ment to the area east of Yonge and dis­missed sug­ges­tions that the agency has lit­tle to show for the $750-million it has spent to date. “Prob­a­bly the most dif­fi­cult thing in doing new dis­trict devel­op­ment is get­ting the plan­ning right and doing the infra­struc­ture. Build­ing the build­ings isn’t so difficult.”

Since 2008, the agency, which is jointly owned by all three lev­els of gov­ern­ment, has approved three major devel­op­ment deals worth $1.3-billion. The Corus build­ing opened last year, and con­struc­tion on the new water­front cam­pus for George Brown Col­lege, a $175-million ven­ture, is under way. Infra­struc­ture Ontario is in the process of ten­der­ing a $700-million devel­op­ment deal to build 8,000–10,000 units of hous­ing in the West Don­lands for the Pan Am Games ath­letes’ village.

While Mr. Ford dis­missed the water­front as a pet project of for­mer mayor David Miller, the agency itself dates back to the Mike Har­ris era and the city’s unsuc­cess­ful bid for the 2008 Olympics under Mel Last­man. The three lev­els at the time each pledged $500-million for the revi­tal­iza­tion effort.

Con­ser­v­a­tive finance min­is­ter Jim Fla­herty is cur­rently respon­si­ble for Ottawa’s con­tri­bu­tion. Fed­eral offi­cials have signed off on the agency’s pro­cure­ment rules. A spokesper­son for Ontario infra­struc­ture min­is­ter Bob Chiarelli said in an e-mail that the province “has no inten­tions of pulling out from Water­front Toronto.”

Accord­ing to the agency’s fig­ures, almost half of the fund­ing pro­vided since 2001 has come from the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, while Queen’s Park has anted up $240-million and the city just $162-million.

Dur­ing the com­ing nine years, the city has ear­marked $193-million in cap­i­tal spend­ing on water­front projects, includ­ing an LRT and new pub­lic spaces. Bud­get doc­u­ments show the city antic­i­pates an addi­tional $106-million in oper­at­ing expenses asso­ci­ated with water­front rede­vel­op­ment. But water­front offi­cials esti­mate that land devel­op­ment will increase prop­erty val­ues in the East Bayfront and West Don­lands by almost $10-billion, gen­er­at­ing an esti­mated $136-million in addi­tional annual prop­erty taxes.

———————————————————————————————————————
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.
———————————————————————————————————————

kerri voum­vakis

Related posts:

1. Devel­oper cho­sen to build 1,700 water­front con­dos Backed by an $800-million private-sector invest­ment, the plan includes new…
2. Get Toronto’s water­front right this time What not to do is appar­ent to any­one look­ing west…
3. Toronto water­front renewal Think­ing big, Water­front Toronto last week revealed its choice of…
4. Toronto’s future unfold­ing on the water­front At a time when Toronto is being held up…
5. Reclaim­ing the east water­front For more than a decade the 13.5-acre prop­erty at…