Let’s leverage development to preserve our heritage

It’s 2013 and do you know where your city is?

A good question for anyone in Toronto, and a particularly good question for anyone living Downtown. Currently there are some 324 residential and commercial developments in various states of realization in our city, most Downtown:
• 93 are proposed developments; 54 have active applications;
• 55 are approved but not yet under construction;
• 122 projects are currently under construction. Many would argue that this is a crisis, our city is under siege, we are building the slums of the mid-21st century.

Ironically but predictably many making such claims are the residents of the previous wave of development in the late 20th century that remade such neighbourhoods as St.Lawrence, King Street West and Yorkville or launched neighbourhoods such as Liberty Village.

But of course that’s just human nature: not so much NIMBY as After Me No One.

I get it. Thing is, it doesn’t make a viable argument.

It doesn’t help us understand where we are going as a city, as Downtown,and whether growth is being planned and executed well.

A knee-jerk negative reaction to “developers” that often seems to accompany any coffee shop or pub conversation
about the “condo boom” also fails to connect to an inconvenient truth: the majority of us who live Downtown live in structures conceived and built by developers.

Every time we see a crane swinging in our Downtown neighbourhoods we are seeing the future homes of our new
neighbours; people who will shop in local stores, hang out in our cafés and pubs, eat in our restaurants,
befriend many of us and also create the economic argument that supports new businesses opening on our streets.

First Gulf is transforming the Toronto Sun building into a commercial, retail and institutional hub.

Already King Street East and Front Street East have new street-related retail and more is to come along with a 17-storey office building.

The SAS building in King Street East led development of mid-rise office buildings off the core of the Financial District. It’s true that condos came first in many of our neighbourhoods.

But in St. Lawrence and the Entertainment District we see new mid-rise office buildings going up and being planned; a muchneeded and healthy counter-balance to the residential development of the past decade.

Encouragingly we are also seeing the re-use and restoration of heritage buildings.

At King and Parliament there are new office spaces in what had been an underused and poorly maintained 19th-century
warehouse.

The revitalization of Market Street is proceeding apace, with the restoration of the long empty Fish Market Restaurant building and its adjacent structures. The Dineen Building at Temperance and Yonge Street has been restored as a home for new restaurants and shared office space.

We need more of these approaches to preserving and reusing our built heritage.

But these moves also come as a result of the ongoing population increase, the intensification of Downtown.
Properly planned new development and heritage reuse go hand in hand.

The Distillery District is living proof of this. Sure we could have expropriated, at the direct cost to taxpayers,
the Distillery District and hoped it could have been turned over to an operator to run it as a heritage theme park.

But the move was to guarantee whoever bought the site a given amount of density they could develop and have them pay for the restoration of the site out of the profits they would make on their new buildings.

And that is precisely what has happened. As well the new residential buildings provide a community of people who keep the area alive even in the dark and chilly days of winter when frankly visitors and tourists are few and far between.

What might have been a summer tourist trap has become a real neighbourhood while ensuring one of the largest extant complexes of 19th-century industrial buildings was preserved and reused.

So the questions we should be asking, that urgently need to be asked are not is development good or bad but how can
we build neighbourhoods instead of one-offs? How can we ensure high standards of architecture and sustainability?

How do we encourage real mixed-use development:more than a drycleaner and convenience store squished into the atgrade
streetscape of a new condo?

How do we leverage new development to preserve and enhance our built heritage?

How do we answer any of these questions in the context of planning regime that is litigious and whose final arbiter is often the quasi-judicial Ontario Municipal Board and not City Council or the Planning Department?