Cover story from today's Eye (When Condos Attack!)
Eye - January 5, 2006
Beyond NIMBY
BY DALE DUNCAN
Virtually everyone agrees Toronto needs to grow up, but residents' groups say planners and developers should build consensus before building condos
GROWING PAINS: The first in a series of stories on building the Toronto of tomorrow
Gail Bebee's neighbourhood is changing before her eyes. "Lands from here down to the 401 are planned for development by a big whack of people," she says, pointing south towards a defunct Canadian Tire halfway between Bayview Avenue and Leslie Street.
There's so much development going on, it's difficult for Bebee to keep track of it all: condo towers and townhomes are sprouting up like dandelions along Sheppard Avenue, the southern boundary of her Bayview Village neighbourhood. More than 7,800 residential units have been approved for development along the Sheppard corridor in the last several years. And city planners say the area will be able to absorb the population of a small town, up to 28,000 more people.
If new condos must go up, Sheppard Avenue appears to be an ideal place to put them. Toronto's newest subway line runs underneath the busy corridor, its trains and artfully tiled stations sitting half-empty, ready to welcome future rush-hour crowds. Sheppard Avenue is the type of street earmarked in the city's Official Plan for potential growth and developers are treating land along the highway as a blank slate, creating new subdivisions in the sky wherever they can.
Bebee, a member of the Bayview Village Association, understands why the area is prime for growth, but worries that it is happening too fast. Walking east along Sheppard, she points out three sites in less than half a kilometre where new residential complexes have been approved or proposed. Just north of Sheppard, we pass through the empty parking lot of a church, where two 19-storey towers, along with mid-rises six and eight storeys high, will be built. Citing concerns over increased traffic and the sheer scale of the towers, the residents' association fought the development at the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) and lost.
Bebee's assessment of the situation is bleak. "It's like David and Goliath, except David doesn't have a slingshot," Bebee says. "Developers have high-priced lawyers who are listened to. Since I've been involved, [the OMB] hasn't turned down much in our area."
Talk to people in Rosedale, Etobicoke or the Annex and you'll hear similar concerns. Toronto is development crazy these days, and it seems as though everyone -- developers and local residents alike -- has a strong opinion on how the Toronto of tomorrow should be built. The provincial government has proposed changes intended to speed up the planning process in the New City of Toronto Act. But even if the mayor gets more power or the OMB gets less, one fact remains: the more development proposals that come forward, the more residents want to be involved.
Instead of looking to simply placate resistant residents, the challenge now facing the city is how to give citizens a voice in the process. A citywide model for consulting residents does not exist -- at least not in the way associations would like it to -- while a confusing planning process, made up of layers of bylaws and difficult-to-access information, presents an overwhelming obstacle to involvement. One million new people are expected to move to Toronto in the next 30 years. For many residents, the fight is no longer to stop development from happening, it's simply to be involved.
It's not just the city's outskirts that have been bitten by the development bug. On the narrower, grittier and more pedestrian-friendly Queen Street West just outside of downtown, similar development proposals are in the works. Plans submitted by three different developers for the area between Abell Street and the railroad tracks across from the Gladstone Hotel include at least five towers between 10 and 26 storeys high.
The local residents are mostly younger, hipper and less well-off than their North York counterparts, but their overall concerns are the same. They'd like to slow down the process so those already living in the area can be consulted and proper studies can be conducted to ensure the area's infrastructure -- its public transit, sewage system and public spaces -- can support the influx of people the buildings would bring.
"We want to invite great development," said Gladstone Hotel manager Christina Zeidler at a public meeting, "[but] this voice, us, has to be part of the process."
Examples of citizens' desire to play a role abound. Around 200 people packed a room in Rosedale last November to hear plans for a 35-storey condo proposed for Yonge and St. Clair. At the November Toronto and East York Community Council meeting, a whopping 22 agenda items dealt with development applications. Developers and concerned residents packed the room, some waiting all afternoon to make deputations on items that were never discussed due to lack of time and the overwhelming public turnout.
At first glance, these stories appear to portray classic cases of NIMBYism -- stubborn neighbourhood associations who relentlessly crusade against the evil developers and their demon high-rise condos despite the city's need to intensify and grow up in already established areas instead of growing out into farmland and greenbelts. That's the way the media spins it: angry, narrow-minded residents in one corner ready to take on the money-grabbing developers in the other.
Bitter battles have taken place, but many residents are aware that a certain amount of intensification is necessary. They're willing to support development, but have good, smart questions about how it should take place. Bebee, of the Bayview Village group, shows me the quiet edge of the family-friendly subdivision where she believes car owners from the new towers will be tempted to drive. "The city agreed to do a traffic study next spring," she says, "but the development might go ahead before it starts."
Rosedale residents expressed similar concerns after hearing plans for the 35-storey tower at the packed November meeting. "The issue was not design; it was density and traffic congestion," says Tim Reid, himself a resident of a 13-floor condo near the proposed site.
Though the developer went to great lengths to design an elegant building, right down to details such as the placement of aesthetically pleasing trees, Reid says that questions from the crowd concerning the impact the high-rise would have on traffic left the architect tongue-tied.
"He spent all his time talking about brick work and didn't have an answer to the traffic issue," says Reid. To Reid, understanding the impact of bringing more people into the community is just as important as the look of the building itself.
Along Queen West, residents say they're the voice of the market, a cross-section of the community to whom the developers may eventually sell homes. They have as much interest in seeing the development succeed as the property owners -- healthy growth will ensure a healthy neighbourhood. Their concerns go beyond problems of traffic and scale: at a community meeting organized by their local councillor, discussions centred on mixed-use buildings, affordable housing, retail space at ground level and the creation of new public parks.
Such discussions and debates are a sign of things to come. The city is committed to building in the city rather than expanding the suburbs. But as the city's chief planner, Ted Tyndorf, points out, building new homes in a sparsely populated area is a lot easier than building them in the heart of an already established community.
He compares a proposal for 350 acres of land in Morningside to development being negotiated for about 60 acres in the West Don Lands community. "It's an order of magnitude difference in terms of the attention that had to be paid there," Tyndorf says. "Come [downtown] and it's like you're stepping through the looking glass; it just gets curiouser and curiouser every time you turn up. It's only going to get more complicated. As it gets more complicated, it means more people from the community have to get involved, and more staff have to get involved; it takes longer."
If taking longer means greater citizen involvement, residents living near Queen West are all for it. They've formed a group called Active 18 and are working to bring together their own vision for the neighbourhood. This month, they'll hold a design charrette, in which business owners, citizens, artists, architects and planning professionals will work in groups to draw up their own proposals for the area.
The Toronto Society of Architects has offered to be involved and the group is planning to invite the developers as well. Developing a relationship with city planners, meeting with their local councillor and familiarizing themselves with complicated urban-planning lingo has all been part of the fun. The next step, however, may be taking on developers at the OMB -- one of the developers filed an appeal in December; the date of the hearing will be set sometime this month.
Like other groups throughout the city, Active 18 is challenging the idea that planning is strictly for professionals. Instead of being labelled NIMBYs, they'd like to be viewed as an important voice in the development of their community. If all goes well, they'll provide the city with a model for including citizens in the planning process, something our current council, awash in a city-building boom, could definitely use.
