People sometimes think of barriers and opposition to new housing construction as
coming from a suburban culture of NIMBYism, but urban areas can be just as bad. A few
weeks ago we told the story of neighbours and councillors fighting new housing development
near Guildwood Train Station in suburban Toronto, and in this video we’re going to
tell another frustrating tale of housing dysfunction in the heart of the city.
This site with an eight-storey parking garage on the Toronto waterfront was surplus federal
government land put up for sale in 2019 as a prime location to build housing. After
pressure from city council, Canada Lands — the crown corporation handling the sale — agreed
that any buyer should include affordable rentals in their development. After all,
if we’re going to be selling publicly-owned land for housing, it should at least make a dent in the
city’s enormous affordable housing waitlist. They put together a flashy promo video for the site.
[“Toronto, Canada, the fourth largest city in North America and Canada’s economic powerhouse.”]
They argued that this site, 200 Queens Quay West, was suitable for two high-rise towers.
[“Based on preliminary massing completed by notable planning firm Bousfields, the built
form would encompass a mixed-use podium crowned by two high-rise residential towers.”] A developer
bought the land and proposed exactly that: two towers with almost 1,500 homes, including 110
affordable rentals. Unfortunately, opposition from the city and neighbours forced the developer to
shrink the project down. [“Now in our review of the application we have found some issues with
the development and I want to share those with you.”] After being sent back to the drawing board,
the developer returned with a revised proposal of one single residential tower that city council
was willing to approve. There’s just one problem: dropping the other tower meant losing thirty five
thousand square metres of residential floor space. That’s 485 homes, including at least 31 affordable
rentals, just thrown out. Exactly how did this happen, and most importantly, was it worth it?
Neighbours and the city responded to the initial two-tower proposal with a list of concerns. As
always, parking and traffic were big. [“There have been lots of questions with respect to traffic.”]
There are two complaints that really stand out as interesting for this downtown context though:
views and shadows. Residents at the WaterClub condos next door worried that this would block
their views of the CN Tower, and 10 York across the street feared for their views of the lake.
[“Would anyone pay for the loss of owners who paid for the lake view?”]
We’ll be the first to recognize that views are nice, but people sometimes act like a view is
something you own, as if a building going up between you and the CN Tower or the lake is an
act of theft. This doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially because almost all condo residents
in the area live in a building that itself blocks other people’s views. A decade ago,
10 York was itself criticized for blocking views in the waterfront area.
Another major holdup for the city was that the initial two-tower proposal would cast shadows
on nearby Roundhouse Park, especially this small playground near the highway.
[“The heights of the buildings are also a concern from a shadow impact perspective,
particularly on Roundhouse Park, and the playground in the park.”] There’s a really
striking inconsistency in how people think about things that block the sun. Most people agree that
a tree canopy like this one adds a lot to a street or a park because it looks nice and provides shade
on hot summer days. But switch those trees for a building blocking the sun and people
think about them completely differently: it’s no longer providing shade but imposing shadows.
Toronto has a stated goal of ensuring that new high-rise developments don’t add shadows
to downtown parks and open spaces, but the city also has a 130-page Shade Policy that tells us how
shade, natural or constructed, is essential for public spaces, especially ones used by children,
to reduce UV exposure and encourage physical activity, among half a dozen other reasons.
The city even singles out the Critical Protection Time (CPT) from 11 am to 4 pm when shade is most
essential. Around 11am is exactly the time they were trying to avoid shading when eliminating one
of the towers in this development. [“With the revised proposal and elimination of that west
tower, what we do is eliminate any shadow on the playground from 10:18 am onwards.”]
We’re not going to argue that shadows are always good, or that buildings are just as good as trees.
Trees have the advantage of conveniently losing their leaves in the winter when shade is least
needed. But it also seems wrong to treat shadows as an unambiguous threat to quality-of-life. That
doesn’t line up with how other city policies talk about, or how people actually experience, the sun.
We distinctly remember walking down Bloor Street in Toronto during a heat wave and appreciating
the shade from the new towers at the old Honest Ed’s site. Maybe we should be less strict on using
shade on parks to block much-needed new housing — especially affordable housing — and instead focus
on bigger and clearer threats to parks, like the noise, pollution, and danger of nearby traffic.
No city policy or medical professional would tell you seven lanes of elevated urban highway
is a good neighbour for a children’s playground. This isn’t the only example of losing housing to
shadow concerns, either. Further north in downtown Toronto, saving this park from new shadows was
considered important enough to chop eight storeys off a nearby mixed-income housing development,
for a loss of 74 apartments, including 26 affordable units. Not only is this park a little
underwhelming, but there’s a bigger park with actual play equipment right across the street.
Back to 200 Queens Quay, neighbours also had concerns about density and overcrowding. [“I can’t
imagine another two towers in the neighbourhood that is already dense in the summer.”]
It’s true — this is a pretty dense neighbourhood. It’s also
an extremely high-demand and amenity-rich neighbourhood, as the federal government
highlighted when they put the land on the market and suggested a two-tower design.
[“This 1.24 acre parcel spans half a city block and is located at the nexus of Toronto’s south
financial core and harbourfront residential nodes.”] This site is a 15 minute walk from
the biggest job centre in the country. It’s 600 metres from the second business train station on
the continent. It’s an even shorter walk to three major professional sports franchises,
one of which actually wins sometimes. Can you really live here and not expect that lots of
other people will want to live here too? Of course, it’s easy for people downtown to say
“we’re already dense enough, spread the housing around more”. But then people in the suburbs
correspondingly say “we didn’t move here to have denser housing near us, send that back downtown
where it belongs”. This tag-team approach is how you dig yourself into a housing crisis.
In the end, this development got cut down from two towers to one because neighbours and the
city fought to protect views, to keep shadows off parks, and to avoid what some saw as too
much height and density downtown, among other concerns. When this development gets built,
it will have hundreds fewer homes and dozens fewer affordable rentals than it could have
had. Was that worth it? We’d say no. Some might disagree, but they should at least acknowledge
the cost. This isn’t abstract. That’s hundreds of families who could have lived here being pushed
elsewhere to pour fuel on the fire of Toronto’s already overheated housing market. That’s dozens
of moderate income families who probably won’t be able to find an affordable rental in the city any
time soon. To be clear, though, the crisis is not that this happens to any one project, it’s that
it happens all the time to projects across the city. Hundreds of homes lost turns into thousands,
and tens of thousands, and so on. What’s extra frustrating in this case is that the city asked
the federal government to ensure that any buyer of this land includes an affordable rental component.
[“We need housing, we need housing for a range of income levels, but we desperately need affordable
housing for 181,000 people on the waiting list for affordable housing in our city.”] And the federal
crown corporation handling the sale actually agreed! But then the city wasn’t willing to
allow the height and density that would actually maximize the amount of affordable housing. [“We
have concerns with the scale of this development proposal overall on this block on harbourfront.”]
Toronto’s mayoral election on June 26, 2023 is fast approaching, and we’d urge anyone living
there to make housing a priority when voting. We’d like to give a special thanks to HousingNowTO,
a group of volunteers working to hold the city accountable on its affordable housing targets.
They showed us around some affordable housing sites in the city and provided
some of the background information and resources we used to make the video. If you want to hear
more from them, follow them on Twitter and check out their affordable housing tracker.