Hipster Duck
Senior Member
I was thinking the other day about how Toronto has a general lack of commercial streets that are sort of quasi-urban/quasi-suburban. These would be immediately-postwar commercial arteries where most of the retail comes right up to the sidewalk, and the residential areas are all on a grid, but there are also a lot of strip malls and parking lots and all the houses are detached bungalows. West Coast cities have a lot of this. We have a few places like Avenue Road north of Lawrence and the Queensway east of Royal York, but these are just fragments here and there.
Why is this important? Because these areas represent the next area to be successfully urbanized once we run out of infill space in the older, prewar parts of the city. I know it seems like we have a lot of places still left that are redevelopable, but we can't tear down pre-war residential neighbourhoods en masse, easy parking lots are starting to get harder to find, and those masterplanned communities on derelict industrial lands need large developers and have been a mixed bag in terms of urban success. These quasi-urban strips also easy places to redevelop, because you can tear down a strip mall and build a midrise-above-retail that integrates pretty naturally with the other street-fronting retail. The buildings along these are also one-storey tear downs that aren't really of much heritage merit, so it's not like you lose character as you redevelop these properties.
Why is this important? Because these areas represent the next area to be successfully urbanized once we run out of infill space in the older, prewar parts of the city. I know it seems like we have a lot of places still left that are redevelopable, but we can't tear down pre-war residential neighbourhoods en masse, easy parking lots are starting to get harder to find, and those masterplanned communities on derelict industrial lands need large developers and have been a mixed bag in terms of urban success. These quasi-urban strips also easy places to redevelop, because you can tear down a strip mall and build a midrise-above-retail that integrates pretty naturally with the other street-fronting retail. The buildings along these are also one-storey tear downs that aren't really of much heritage merit, so it's not like you lose character as you redevelop these properties.