Incremental growth

[Memph]

I really think having more incremental intensification in the GTA would be nice. Most of the developments are rather large scale, either big highrise projects or big subdivisions.

For the last little while, I've had an interest in Montreal's mid-century urbanism. It has a lot of places that had their first phase of growth in the early 20th century, followed by a second phase of growth around 1945-1965. In some cases, there was actually very little there before WWII. But while Toronto was mostly building bungalows in Scarborough, North York and Etobicoke, and a bit later, big apartment complexes like St James Town, or the apartments North of High Park, Montreal was building a lot of small walk up apartments.

Despite having been built in the mid 20th century, not a time the average person associates with great urbanism and architecture, and the fact that many of these areas were pretty poor, I think they turned out pretty well.

Examples:
http://goo.gl/maps/fNQrA
http://goo.gl/maps/dcjCZ
http://goo.gl/maps/LNqUy
http://goo.gl/maps/Y7NlW

I think this would be a great way to urbanize many parts of the city without causing as many problems of "not fitting into the neighbourhood".

In addition to being more human scaled, this kind of development could potentially create more affordable apartments than highrise construction, although that would probably require more flexible parking requirements and a smoother approval process.

 

[innsertnamehere]

Keesemat seems to be really pushing 8 or so floor buildings, so I expect to see much more of that.

 

[Memph]

Keesemat seems to be really pushing 8 or so floor buildings, so I expect to see much more of that.

8 floor buildings make sense along many of the avenues, but I don't think most people would feel they fit in very well in the "stable residential neighbourhoods" which are single family homes to rowhouses. The midrise buildings that do get built are also still quite big, it's not just a height thing, they're also often quite wide/deep. Ex: http://goo.gl/maps/1IQp6

You'll have a building maybe 80-200 ft wide as opposed to the 20-30ft that is more typical for lowrise buildings. So there's a risk of getting a less interesting streetscape. It doesn't necessarily have to be that way mind you, there are cities where it's quite common to have narrow midrises like Tokyo: http://goo.gl/maps/HvcB3

They don't necessarily have to be that narrow, but it would be nice if buildings of around 50 ft wide were more common. The downside of narrower buildings though is parking. Even if it's underground, you'll need garage entrances, and you don't want them to be very frequent, and take up a large percentage of the street frontage. Not to mention I'm not sure how feasible it is to build an underground garage that's even as much as 50ft wide. I guess that there would have to be a compromise between a wide street frontage that risks making a place boring, and frontages that are too narrow to adequately allow for cars to be stored...

 

[DKsan]

Actually, incremental growth is what individual towers going up is. Incremental growth is defined by the scale of the buildings, but the scale of the land use. Incremental growth is the opposite of master planning. CityPlace, the Canary District or a subdivision in Peel is master planning. An individual project is incremental growth.

 

[Memph]

Actually, incremental growth is what individual towers going up is. Incremental growth is defined by the scale of the buildings, but the scale of the land use. Incremental growth is the opposite of master planning. CityPlace, the Canary District or a subdivision in Peel is master planning. An individual project is incremental growth.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying, much of the growth going on in Toronto is not incremental. I'm not entirely sure if I would consider the typical single tower project incremental growth. Although they have a relatively small footprint (though still considerably bigger than the typical Montreal plex) and consist of a single building, and there are often similar sized highrises nearby, they are still very large (about as many units as a smaller subdivision) and often replace parking lots, so going from a parking lot to a 50 storey tower is a pretty big increment...

 

[TrickyRicky]

The City would have to FORCE this kind of growth to happen on a large scale. There is gap, well pointed out in other threads, between the mom-and-pop and the high level of effort and sophistication required to realize a larger project under the laws and letters of our context. Given free reign the sophisticated will always maximize the return on their efforts by going big or doing nothing. If you want wide-scale transformation on this level you would have to push mom-and-pop to go big, and squeeze Joe developer to go small.

 

[Memph]

The City would have to FORCE this kind of growth to happen on a large scale. There is gap, well pointed out in other threads, between the mom-and-pop and the high level of effort and sophistication required to realize a larger project under the laws and letters of our context. Given free reign the sophisticated will always maximize the return on their efforts by going big or doing nothing. If you want wide-scale transformation on this level you would have to push mom-and-pop to go big, and squeeze Joe developer to go small.

Well, there's plenty of places where NO intensification is allowed. You could start by allowing small increments of intensification to happen there. You also have all the tear downs going on across the city and some suburbs with bigger homes replacing smaller ones. Although the developers are often not mom-and-pop, it's still an example of a small increments of change (even though no housing units are added). Assemblage of lots for large projects might be difficult in many areas too, in places where there isn't enough demand to pay double market value for a house. Many of the factors that incentivize developers to go large (approval process and dealing with NIMBYs, off street parking requirements, ammenity requirements, etc) could be changed.

 

[sixrings]

I really like the midrise on Sheppard. However my one complaint is that they arent built right up beside eachother. Instead they are maybe 10 meters apart so they can sell corner units with east and west windows. The main problem with this is that at street level you walk by a few stores then theres a pause and then another few stores etc... If they were directly beside eachother it would end up creating a better pedestrian environment which was more retail friendly....

 

[Dandy Horse]

Incremental growth seems a lot like what is happening in the 'gentrified' areas of the city, where historic facades are kept but possibly added to, and new buildings are inserted that are of normal human scaled proportions, like the starbucks and TD bank buildings on Parliament. It generally looks a lot nicer, and the fact that they are chains is irrelevant, as large scaled development have the same chains, they just look uglier.

 

[Towered]

Keesemat seems to be really pushing 8 or so floor buildings, so I expect to see much more of that.

That's encouraging, but essentially meaningless unless it's backed up with new by-laws designed to encourage that kind of development. The city needs to make it very easy to intensify all our main arterial roads. I've been saying this for years, but it makes absolutely no sense for streets like Islington to be lined with detached, single family bungalows. It's particularly offensive on those stretches where these homes have their backyards toward the street, leaving nothing but ugly fences for miles. Redevelop it all!!!

 

[Memph]

Eliminating parking requirements could probably help for some of the smaller projects in more walkable areas. However, most will still find it difficult to find buyers/renters in a building with zero parking. In smaller projects, if there's only demand for say for a few parking spots in a small building on a small site, and there's no on-street space, it might be difficult to justify an underground garage, not to mention that if you have a bunch of 20-30 ft wide walk-ups each with a garage (thinking of development in a place like Silverthorn), it wouldn't look too good. Is it possible to purchase a parking spot in a building where you don't live? That could help, you could have buildings on larger footprints building excess underground capacity and sell parking spots to smaller neighbouring developments.

 

[diminutive]

The City would have to FORCE this kind of growth to happen on a large scale. There is gap, well pointed out in other threads, between the mom-and-pop and the high level of effort and sophistication required to realize a larger project under the laws and letters of our context. Given free reign the sophisticated will always maximize the return on their efforts by going big or doing nothing. If you want wide-scale transformation on this level you would have to push mom-and-pop to go big, and squeeze Joe developer to go small.

Is the kind of development Memph is referring to really so far beyond the abilities of small-to-medium scale developers?

It's hardly uncommon to see a bungalow replaced by a lot-hugging monster home which is essentially the same size as the multi-unit structures Memph offered.

Also, it's worth pointing out that it's been within the realm of small to medium developers to convert a lot of existing houses into multi-unit structures all around downtown where a teardown wouldn't have been appropriate or desirable.

The biggest issue seems to be the regulatory burden of increasing density allowances. If the City just increased allowed densities to a level which would permit this kind of development as of right, I don't see why it wouldn't be as common as McMansionisation. Both are ultimately ways of maximizing property values.

 

[TrickyRicky]

^The fact that we see so few infill developments of this nature is proof enough that it is hard. It can be hard for may reasons more complex than just city bylaw. Some people are doing small scale redevelopments and property intensifications but again they are rare and this development segment is littered with failed and zombie developments. When something does happen they are often very long-linear developments that don't in my opinion enhance the streetscape much because the shear size of their street frontage kills street vitality.

Most small scale properties on our main streets are owned by older immigrant investors. The upward rise of downtown property values has provided incentive to re-develop by some, but it is usually only when their kids take over that something happens. And these kids are often people with advanced degrees or some kind of professional credentials or experience in the construction or finance industry.

It's that hard. Financing is tough, regulation is tough, the city and community are against you, the returns are risky. Basically you have to be a masochist. That's not to say it can't be done and isn't being done. It's just that you won't see a lot of development of this nature unless a lot of things change. And maybe we should be careful what we wish for because making it too easy may trigger a lot of destruction of our existing building stock particularly in the central city.

 

[diminutive]

^The fact that we see so few infill developments of this nature is proof enough that it is hard. It can be hard for may reasons more complex than just city bylaw. Some people are doing small scale redevelopments and property intensifications but again they are rare and this development segment is littered with failed and zombie developments.

I'm not doubting it's hard, but aside from various regulatory hurdles (parking minimums, density allowances ect...) I can't see such huge hurdles in terms of economic or technical requirements.

Land acquisition costs are not prohibitive. Buying 2 or 3 bungalows in Etobicoke is not an insurmountable hurdle. Nor is constructing an appropriate structure prohibitively expensive. There are thousands of McMansions of equal size to the buildings Memph listed all around.

Clearly there is also something of a desire for intensification in much of post-WW2 Toronto. The proliferation of, often illegal, basement apartments and second suites suggests as much. It's unclear how prevalent informal rooming houses are, but presumably they point to a similar demand.

That we see informal infill (which i interpret as demand for densification) coupled with substantial McMansionisation (which I interpret as the ability to redevelop) to me suggests that regulatory rather than technical or economic considerations are behind most of the difficulty potential developers face with these types of projects.

 

[pman]

I'm not doubting it's hard, but aside from various regulatory hurdles (parking minimums, density allowances ect...) I can't see such huge hurdles in terms of economic or technical requirements.

Land acquisition costs are not prohibitive. Buying 2 or 3 bungalows in Etobicoke is not an insurmountable hurdle. Nor is constructing an appropriate structure prohibitively expensive. There are thousands of McMansions of equal size to the buildings Memph listed all around.

Clearly there is also something of a desire for intensification in much of post-WW2 Toronto. The proliferation of, often illegal, basement apartments and second suites suggests as much. It's unclear how prevalent informal rooming houses are, but presumably they point to a similar demand.

That we see informal infill (which i interpret as demand for densification) coupled with substantial McMansionisation (which I interpret as the ability to redevelop) to me suggests that regulatory rather than technical or economic considerations are behind most of the difficulty potential developers face with these types of projects.

I agree, and would also note that any developer who tried to buy 3 bungalows in Etobicoke and replace them with something moderately denser - like stacked townhouses for example - would face armageddon from the local ratepayers' group. The local councilor would support the small number of intensely vocal opponents and the whole mess would be kicked to the OMB. It wouldn't be a slam dunk there because the proposal might be sensible but it probably wouldn't fit Places to Grow. So this kind of intensification would involve a world of pain for the developer, with a significant probability of ultimate failure.