Dan416
Senior Member
I find the term "white trash" to be offensive. There's lots of people of questionable character and questionable taste of all colours and cultures both in the suburbs and downtown.
|
|
|
Mike in TO
Senior Member
Sales for this project have been very strong.
valves
New Member
The OMB's bohemian song and dance
By JOHN BARBER
Tuesday, June 5, 2007 – Page A11
The government at Queen's Park did not establish the Ontario Municipal Board to regulate railways, as some literal-minded authorities would have it. The revealed truth is that God created the OMB to show what he really meant by the word "excruciating." A morning spent in one of its airless hearing rooms makes prison in Afghanistan seem like a viable option.
Yet out of such arcane mumbling and shuffling, a city emerges - an important part of the city, in the case of yesterday's proceedings, which dealt with the looming threat of nuclear gentrification in the Queen West Triangle, a post-industrial hub of coveted "creative enterprise" west of the downtown. To the extent the case turns on the question of just how crazy the OMB really is - an important issue in the Triangle hearing - it also has the potential to help bring an end to the excruciation.
Hope springs from the fact that the board, as a result of invisible yet palpable political pressure, agreed to reconsider a notorious decision it made in January, which tore up the policy currently protecting the neighbourhood and unleashed the condo monster to do its worst. That decision was widely, and rightly, denounced as an outrage.
Typical of the many experts whose jaws dropped is Andrew Sancton of the University of Western Ontario, one of Canada's leading authorities on local government. "To my knowledge, no other major city in North America could have had such a crucial zoning decision overturned in this way," he said.
The decision mocked claims of reform. Without offering any substantial reasons, it dismissed other expert testimony about the important role of such mixed-use zones in creating the most desirable kinds of jobs. It was an embarrassment to the McGuinty government.
Hence this week's rare hearing under a seldom-used provision of whatever obscure act happens to apply, in which a new panel of esteemed "members" has convened to "review" the earlier decision - and perhaps to order a whole new hearing on the matter.
The sad fact is that victory in the current hearing, at least for the city and the local activists with which it is loosely allied, will amount to nothing more than another chance to shuck and jive at the OMB. But it would be the first time anything like it had ever happened.
The developers involved are certainly taking the proceedings seriously. On Friday, the company hoping to build the Bohemian Embassy condo - a project whose name alone neatly captures the agony at hand - submitted a proposal with the city to settle the dispute.
But that wasn't enough to forestall the hearing. The city will be considering the new offer "later in the week," according to one official. For the time being, it is trusting its luck amid the mumblers at the OMB, city lawyer Dawne Jubb complaining the board's earlier decision "violated rules of natural justice," made "several errors of law and fact" and "failed to have regard" for this and that under such and such an act.
Don't even ask what any of that has to do with the important business of building a 21st-century city. It's just a legal bun fight, with thick, spiral-bound "books of documents" substituting for the usual pastry. Yesterday, Ms. Jubb, wearing the tallest, brashest stiletto heels in her wardrobe, made sure each heavy book landed with a satisfying thump on the desks of her assembled adversaries.
But the result of the hearing will be telling, whichever way it goes. In the best of all possible worlds, it will be the last time important planning policy is subjected to such cruel torture.
jbarber@globeandmail.com
By JOHN BARBER
Tuesday, June 5, 2007 – Page A11
The government at Queen's Park did not establish the Ontario Municipal Board to regulate railways, as some literal-minded authorities would have it. The revealed truth is that God created the OMB to show what he really meant by the word "excruciating." A morning spent in one of its airless hearing rooms makes prison in Afghanistan seem like a viable option.
Yet out of such arcane mumbling and shuffling, a city emerges - an important part of the city, in the case of yesterday's proceedings, which dealt with the looming threat of nuclear gentrification in the Queen West Triangle, a post-industrial hub of coveted "creative enterprise" west of the downtown. To the extent the case turns on the question of just how crazy the OMB really is - an important issue in the Triangle hearing - it also has the potential to help bring an end to the excruciation.
Hope springs from the fact that the board, as a result of invisible yet palpable political pressure, agreed to reconsider a notorious decision it made in January, which tore up the policy currently protecting the neighbourhood and unleashed the condo monster to do its worst. That decision was widely, and rightly, denounced as an outrage.
Typical of the many experts whose jaws dropped is Andrew Sancton of the University of Western Ontario, one of Canada's leading authorities on local government. "To my knowledge, no other major city in North America could have had such a crucial zoning decision overturned in this way," he said.
The decision mocked claims of reform. Without offering any substantial reasons, it dismissed other expert testimony about the important role of such mixed-use zones in creating the most desirable kinds of jobs. It was an embarrassment to the McGuinty government.
Hence this week's rare hearing under a seldom-used provision of whatever obscure act happens to apply, in which a new panel of esteemed "members" has convened to "review" the earlier decision - and perhaps to order a whole new hearing on the matter.
The sad fact is that victory in the current hearing, at least for the city and the local activists with which it is loosely allied, will amount to nothing more than another chance to shuck and jive at the OMB. But it would be the first time anything like it had ever happened.
The developers involved are certainly taking the proceedings seriously. On Friday, the company hoping to build the Bohemian Embassy condo - a project whose name alone neatly captures the agony at hand - submitted a proposal with the city to settle the dispute.
But that wasn't enough to forestall the hearing. The city will be considering the new offer "later in the week," according to one official. For the time being, it is trusting its luck amid the mumblers at the OMB, city lawyer Dawne Jubb complaining the board's earlier decision "violated rules of natural justice," made "several errors of law and fact" and "failed to have regard" for this and that under such and such an act.
Don't even ask what any of that has to do with the important business of building a 21st-century city. It's just a legal bun fight, with thick, spiral-bound "books of documents" substituting for the usual pastry. Yesterday, Ms. Jubb, wearing the tallest, brashest stiletto heels in her wardrobe, made sure each heavy book landed with a satisfying thump on the desks of her assembled adversaries.
But the result of the hearing will be telling, whichever way it goes. In the best of all possible worlds, it will be the last time important planning policy is subjected to such cruel torture.
jbarber@globeandmail.com
Roots_Energize
Active Member
Funny how the city wants to be "world class" (the dreaded word) and trys to establish a controled culture but for a city to be loved you can't always neatly package culture in a corperate wrap! like they say, authentic culture has to come from grass roots, which they really dont seam to care about, this is a perfect example of disconnected civic awareness.
Attachments
digitalcabana
Active Member
West Queen West Triangle
No high-rise hate-in
These activists don't obsess on towers, they just want planners to listen up
By MIKE SMITH
Now Toronto
June 6 2007
It's become almost trite to say the real disaster of Hurricane Katrina wasn't natural, but political, thanks to the failure of federal and state authorities. But was disaster already inherent in New Orleans's urban design?
The question lingered at the May 26 conference of People Plan Toronto, a meeting at U of T's Faculty of Architecture inspired in part by the artsy rebellion against condo towers in the Queen West triangle.
It was raised first by speaker Mary Rowe, VP of philanthropic org the Blue Moon Fund, based in Charlottesville, Virginia, who talked about her research into "self-organization as the underpinning of urban resilience'' and her experience with New Orleans communities resisting being designated as not rebuildable.
Most instructional was her description of the way the city's layout frustrated attempts to mitigate the disaster. The poorest neighbourhoods, she said, tended to be cut off by thoroughfares, many of them inaccessible by pedestrians, making support work between neighbourhoods difficult when abandoned cars became mouldering barges. Planners, she said, wrote off these neighbourhoods as lost causes.
If we don't plan communities for self-sufficiency, do cities become unable to weather change?
Many of the folks here from Active 18, which is leading the Queen West fight, certainly grasp the urban resilience concept. It's the essence of their campaign to preserve heritage buildings and a local artist economy from condo monoculture.
It probably explains the avoidance of quick fixes on offer at this summit of reps from local organizations across T.O. Any suspicion that the day would turn into a meeting of the low-roof society, for example, quickly evaporated; most of the principals seemed anxious to ensure that things didn't devolve into a hate-on for height; one low-rise warrior was shouted down before he could even finish saying, "We don't want to build up[ward]."
If this conference is any indication, there's a negative correlation between Not In My Backyard syndrome and a real commitment to local planning. The overwhelming message isn't that neighbourhoods want to be left alone; it's that they want to be consulted and convinced, even.
Witness the almost warm welcome given to Howard Cohen, co-founder of real estate firm Context (developer of bejewelled Yorkville behemoth Radio City, recipient of more than its share of skyward fist-shaking) and former chief planner. "All people want to talk about is the height of the building,'' he said, and both building design and community design suffer as a result.
Cohen spoke of a 30-storey tower proposal that his firm couldn't get approved, despite plans to build a park and other amenities. A 22-storey building with no amenities was approved instead. "All anyone wanted to do was squash the tower down."
In response to objections that Paris is renowned for low heights and high density, Cohen reminded us of the riots in that city's suburbs. Focus on the core, he said, has come at the cost of poorly integrated sprawl. Though France's immigrant problems may have deeper causes, it's interesting that Mayor Bertrand Delanoë, who has pushed for affordable housing in Paris's Rosedales, is also the first mayor in a while to challenge that city's planning prohibitions.
To Cohen, towers are the paperweights that hold down progressive plans. "It was because we could guarantee year-round population that the city agreed to fund the waterfront streetcar," he said as an example.
According to Tony Coombes, another former chief planner and current member of consultancy City Formation International, if activists are only asking for the sky, it's because the city has abdicated its responsibility.
Coombes said hated planning appeal body the Ontario Municipal Board is a "distraction" from the real problems: the replacement of real planning by feel-good neighbourhood visioning studies and lack of autonomy for community councils.
The afternoon is spent in breakout sessions discussing variously what to do with the OMB (scrap it), why community groups are alienated (planners don't make the process transparent), and what's to be done (form networks to share planning info.)
Most of the proposed solutions are simple, like bringing back local planning offices rather than leaving it all to the priestly planning caste at City Hall.
While those answers likely could have been written on a card before the summit, it was still interesting to watch the common refrain emerge: people are fascinated by planning and resent having their enthusiasm met with silence and slander.
It took a disaster to force the issue of community planning in New Orleans. If all it ends up taking here is arguments, we should probably consider ourselves lucky.
No high-rise hate-in
These activists don't obsess on towers, they just want planners to listen up
By MIKE SMITH
Now Toronto
June 6 2007
It's become almost trite to say the real disaster of Hurricane Katrina wasn't natural, but political, thanks to the failure of federal and state authorities. But was disaster already inherent in New Orleans's urban design?
The question lingered at the May 26 conference of People Plan Toronto, a meeting at U of T's Faculty of Architecture inspired in part by the artsy rebellion against condo towers in the Queen West triangle.
It was raised first by speaker Mary Rowe, VP of philanthropic org the Blue Moon Fund, based in Charlottesville, Virginia, who talked about her research into "self-organization as the underpinning of urban resilience'' and her experience with New Orleans communities resisting being designated as not rebuildable.
Most instructional was her description of the way the city's layout frustrated attempts to mitigate the disaster. The poorest neighbourhoods, she said, tended to be cut off by thoroughfares, many of them inaccessible by pedestrians, making support work between neighbourhoods difficult when abandoned cars became mouldering barges. Planners, she said, wrote off these neighbourhoods as lost causes.
If we don't plan communities for self-sufficiency, do cities become unable to weather change?
Many of the folks here from Active 18, which is leading the Queen West fight, certainly grasp the urban resilience concept. It's the essence of their campaign to preserve heritage buildings and a local artist economy from condo monoculture.
It probably explains the avoidance of quick fixes on offer at this summit of reps from local organizations across T.O. Any suspicion that the day would turn into a meeting of the low-roof society, for example, quickly evaporated; most of the principals seemed anxious to ensure that things didn't devolve into a hate-on for height; one low-rise warrior was shouted down before he could even finish saying, "We don't want to build up[ward]."
If this conference is any indication, there's a negative correlation between Not In My Backyard syndrome and a real commitment to local planning. The overwhelming message isn't that neighbourhoods want to be left alone; it's that they want to be consulted and convinced, even.
Witness the almost warm welcome given to Howard Cohen, co-founder of real estate firm Context (developer of bejewelled Yorkville behemoth Radio City, recipient of more than its share of skyward fist-shaking) and former chief planner. "All people want to talk about is the height of the building,'' he said, and both building design and community design suffer as a result.
Cohen spoke of a 30-storey tower proposal that his firm couldn't get approved, despite plans to build a park and other amenities. A 22-storey building with no amenities was approved instead. "All anyone wanted to do was squash the tower down."
In response to objections that Paris is renowned for low heights and high density, Cohen reminded us of the riots in that city's suburbs. Focus on the core, he said, has come at the cost of poorly integrated sprawl. Though France's immigrant problems may have deeper causes, it's interesting that Mayor Bertrand Delanoë, who has pushed for affordable housing in Paris's Rosedales, is also the first mayor in a while to challenge that city's planning prohibitions.
To Cohen, towers are the paperweights that hold down progressive plans. "It was because we could guarantee year-round population that the city agreed to fund the waterfront streetcar," he said as an example.
According to Tony Coombes, another former chief planner and current member of consultancy City Formation International, if activists are only asking for the sky, it's because the city has abdicated its responsibility.
Coombes said hated planning appeal body the Ontario Municipal Board is a "distraction" from the real problems: the replacement of real planning by feel-good neighbourhood visioning studies and lack of autonomy for community councils.
The afternoon is spent in breakout sessions discussing variously what to do with the OMB (scrap it), why community groups are alienated (planners don't make the process transparent), and what's to be done (form networks to share planning info.)
Most of the proposed solutions are simple, like bringing back local planning offices rather than leaving it all to the priestly planning caste at City Hall.
While those answers likely could have been written on a card before the summit, it was still interesting to watch the common refrain emerge: people are fascinated by planning and resent having their enthusiasm met with silence and slander.
It took a disaster to force the issue of community planning in New Orleans. If all it ends up taking here is arguments, we should probably consider ourselves lucky.
EnviroTO
Senior Member
If the neighbourhood planning has too much power the good of the city as a whole and the needs of future citizens takes a back seat to current citizens in their neighbourhood which they are trying to protect from all change. The OMB exists to interpret city plans and goals, and provincial plans and goals and determine if a council desicion to avoid change sits well with the overall goals of the city and the context of the site. There was no plan by anyone that would ensure the urvival of art studios presented so the debate was all about height. The context of the site is major transit line on Queen, potential transit corridor on railway, and 10-12 storey buildings 350ft to the southwest and 8-10 storey building to the east. The city draft plan here (http://www.toronto.ca/planning/pdf/wqw_draftvision_cp_05nov16.pdf) shows allowances for about 8 storeys on Queen. What is planned is a 9 storey building on Queen and a 19 storey behind it next to railway tracks. The taller building is set so far back that it will not be visible to pedestrians on Queen St over top of the shorter building. I would be surprised if the OMB changed its mind. How bad are 19 storey buildings near the heart of Toronto sheilded by 10-12 storey buildings and a railway line and whose site is located along a major transit route?
samsonyuen
Active Member
Has anything moved with regards to the parking lot at Queen and Portland?
digitalcabana
Active Member
Bedevilled Triangle
Bedevilled Triangle
You can blame the developers or the OMB, but the flap over the Queen West Triangle revealed city hall’s dirty little secret: no one’s minding the shop
Toronto Life - June 2007 - Philip Preville
More than a decade ago, as gentrification pushed Toronto’s grassroots arts community out of the once-decrepit Queen and Spadina area, it picked up and moved farther west, past the mental hospital, to the Triangle, an abandoned industrial area south of Queen between Dovercourt and Dufferin. At the time, it was the kind of place you moved to only if you wanted to be left alone—an ugly, forgettable stretch bordering on Parkdale, where no one ever seemed to get on or off the streetcar. Inevitably, in the wake of these urban pioneers came others, creeping ever westward: art galleries like Stephen Bulger, restaurants like Swan and Bar One, and, in 2004, the Drake Hotel, which became a social hub and turned Queen West West into a destination in its own right.
Suddenly, the Queen West Triangle was the epicentre of the city’s cultural buzz, and everyone wanted a piece of it. Starbucks (which was briefly graffitied with the message, “Drake, you ho—this is all your fault!â€) came to Queen and Dovercourt, followed soon after by three developers in mid-2005 who, in rapid succession, applied to build high-rise condominiums. One of them was to be called Bohemian Embassy, a shameless attempt to usurp the neighbourhood’s artistic vitality as a lifestyle brand.
In response, community members created Active 18 (so named for the area’s municipal moniker, Ward 18–Davenport), which favoured intensification but sought to preserve the Triangle’s unique character. The group organized well and quickly, and counted among its supporters internationally renowned urban planner Ken Greenberg and arts-minded developers Margie and Christina Zeidler, the main movers behind the transformation of the Gladstone from flophouse relic to chic gallery-hotel. While all three condo proposals were considered inappropriate, much of the discussion centred on the 120-year-old former lamp factory at 48 Abell Street, where many artists had set up their studio homes, and whose owner proposed its demolition.
As the weeks and months passed, both Active 18 and the developers became frustrated by what they saw as city hall’s inaction on the file. Eventually, the developers took their case to the Ontario Municipal Board, the much loathed, Queen’s Park–appointed tribunal that has the final say on all development disputes in the province. On January 10, after 35 days of arguments and evidence, the OMB ruled in favour of the condos—to the outrage of artists’ groups, local residents, city officials and many sage observers.
In the days and weeks that followed, a growing chorus of anger, led by the Toronto Star’s Christopher Hume, demanded the province rein in the OMB and give Toronto the power to make its own planning decisions. In February, Mayor David Miller announced that the city would contest the decision by all available means. By focusing public outrage squarely on the OMB and putting Queen’s Park on the defensive, Miller managed to deflect attention from a bigger problem: the vast, toxic malaise that currently afflicts the city’s interactions not just with the OMB, but with developers, residents and its own planning department. These relationships form a sort of polygamous marriage, and the Queen West Triangle has become a multipartite divorce proceeding. As with all relationship breakdowns, there’s a whole sordid history behind it, lots of recrimination in every direction and more than enough blame to go around. And the artists are the kids caught in the middle.
By law, the city has six months to respond to a development application. Failure to do so is grounds for an OMB appeal. Yet the city’s planning department is perfectly upfront about the fact that, for complex applications that require the attention of community planners for zoning changes, approval takes at least nine months. The result is a policy perversion: on any major application, the city guarantees that it will fail to respond on time. If reasonable efforts are being made to advance a file, developers generally do not appeal at the six-month mark; they’ll let the process work its way to a conclusion. But it’s a dysfunctional truce: developers don’t appreciate being put in a position where they must voluntarily suspend their legal rights, while planners fear and loathe the threat of an appeal hanging over their every move.
In the Triangle, the truce did not hold. The city received the application for the Bohemian Embassy condominiums at 1171 Queen Street West on May 17, 2005. It already had two Triangle-area applications on file, dating back years: one for 48 Abell Street, the other for 150 Sudbury. The owners of 48 Abell had initially proposed to maintain their existing building and legalize the artist live-work studios that had been set up there, while 150 Sudbury had secured approval to build four-storey townhomes. In a June 2005 preliminary report, planning staff recommended public consultations on the Bohemian Embassy application, while noting that its height and density provisions were inappropriate. At that point, there was no reason to believe any outstanding issues couldn’t be resolved.
Then things got complicated. In August, the owners of 48 Abell revised their application, now requesting permission to demolish the building and erect two condo towers—one 24 storeys, the other 19. In November, 150 Sudbury revised its application, adding a 16-storey tower. (These changes point to another ingrained dysfunction: developers can submit massive modifications to their existing applications at almost any time without incurring additional fees.) From the city’s perspective, the proposals now amounted to a radical transformation of the Triangle. In a report dated November 9, city planners asked council to direct them to complete an area study before approving anything. They now felt they needed to step back and consider the area as a whole.
To the Bohemian Embassy’s developers, Baywood Homes, the city’s shift was sudden, unexpected and unacceptable. “My client had no warning of a need for an area study,†says Ronald Kanter, lawyer for Baywood. “It seemed to me the city had dropped the ball on the application.†The developers appealed to the OMB less than seven months after filing their original application, and the other developers followed suit. The city conducted its area study while simultaneously attending preliminary OMB hearings.
Kanter says the planning department’s inability to respond within the six-month time frame “tells you something about how seriously the city takes its legal responsibilities. This has become a habit.†Adam Giambrone, the local councillor, retorts that “six months isn’t sufficient for a large and complex city like Toronto†and that “developers who appeal to the OMB before the nine-month mark are operating in bad faith.†Both sides of this argument are trafficking in half-truths. On the city’s side, there’s a lot of self-flattery in the insistence that Toronto is so much more complicated than, say, Ottawa or Hamilton. On some level, cities are cities: they have wires on poles and pipes underground; they have buses and garbage trucks on the roads; they have separate, professional bureaucracies to manage each of these things; and all these bureaucracies must co-operate on any development application. For what it’s worth, Ottawa is no more enamoured of the OMB than Toronto, but its planning department rarely fails to respond to development applications on deadline. That said, in the Triangle case, a gold rush mentality was taking hold, and the city’s desire to step back and reassess the neighbourhood was justified, if not expedient. What’s less justified was its inability to anticipate the gold rush and establish a vision for the area before developers came calling.
Like the department he runs, Ted Tyndorf looks more imposing than he actually is. At 53, Toronto’s chief planner stands a broad-shouldered six-foot-one with dark hair and a moustache. He’s remarkably mild- mannered as he lays out the state of his department. He describes it as “unacceptable,†which is a diplomatic euphemism for disastrous. His staff is faced with an avalanche of building applications—140,000 housing units currently in the approval pipeline. On average, every weekday, three major applications come through the door. This is a problem, because processing applications is, broadly speaking, only one-third of a planner’s job. The most important and most fun part of the job is doing strategic planning, preparing a vision for the future of a neighbourhood. The third part consists of mopping up at the OMB: assembling the city’s case, attending the hearings, giving testimony and implementing the aftermath of its rulings. Between the overflowing inboxes of applications and the steady stream of OMB appeals—last year, planning staff logged 14,000 hours on OMB cases alone—no one has a minute to devote to strategic planning. Which means the most important work never gets done and no one has any fun.
So they leave. City planning, whose resources were slashed by a third through the 1990s, is currently funded for a full-time complement of 344 staff but usually has more than 20 vacancies at any given time, unable to fill the jobs faster than people quit. “Planning is stuck in reactive mode,†says Toronto Centre–Rosedale councillor Kyle Rae. “Morale is very low. People are moving to either the private sector or to other city departments.†Tyndorf notes that they also go to other municipalities, where the stress level is lower. The workload has become so heavy that “we now have significant health issues. We’ve had a lot of people taking time away from the office.â€
And yet, when Rae tried to remedy the problem in last year’s budget, he was astonished to watch Tyndorf open wide and swallow his words whole. “The chief planner asked for 12 more staff last year, and I supported him in budget deliberations,†recalls Rae. But senior city managers had been told to keep their budget increases below two per cent, and Etobicoke-Lakeshore councillor Peter Milczyn opposed the proposal. “When the question was put to Ted in council,†says Rae, “he stood up and said he didn’t need it.†Looking back, Tyndorf admits that “tactically, it may have been a mistake for me to say, ‘We will cope with what we have.’ †The department’s grand malaise has affected all its files, including the Triangle. “What we hadn’t done was flesh out the vision for the area in sufficient detail,†Tyndorf says. “It’s just a matter of priorities. We ran out of people to do the work.â€
In the meantime, most city councillors, resigned to a bad situation, have learned to cope by watching all the development files in their wards like hawks, through every step of the process. “You have to keep close tabs on them,†says Scarborough Southwest councillor Brian Ashton, who chairs the city’s planning committee. “Politically, they can kill you.†Rae is notorious for managing all his ward’s development files personally, refusing (until recently) to delegate them to his staff. “Most planners,†he says, “don’t have the level of experience they need to handle the kind of intensification that’s happening downtown.†Rae also notes that he is “very motivated†to keep the OMB out of the process. That means taking a leadership role in the file, driving the bureaucracy and being brutally honest with residents about expectations. “Too many residents simply don’t want change,†he says, “but I have fought with residents many times, and it has never cost me re-election.â€
Indeed, if a councillor sides with angry residents, it can produce a gross miscarriage of planning justice: a development proposal that conforms to the official plan and is approved by city planners but is blocked at council then ends up before the OMB. In such instances, the public is treated to the surreal sight of the city’s legal staff arguing against its own planners’ recommendations.
Members of Active 18 have publicly chided Adam Giambrone for inexperience, and some observers wonder whether he has the passion for land-use issues that’s required to be a truly effective councillor. At the early stages, he delegated the file to his executive assistant, Kevin Beaulieu. When he did take the lead, it was too late to broker a solution. In May and June of 2006, he chaired a series of working groups involving city planners, residents and developers, but the OMB appeals had already been launched, so “the developers were present,†Giambrone says, “but they weren’t participating.†He seems to have learned from the experience: when I asked him what he would do differently if he could turn back the clock, he said, “hold fewer working groups. The points of compromise were far apart. They made us put effort into the process with no real chance of success.â€
The real problem with the OMB, as urban planner Ken Greenberg aptly puts it, is that “the form of the discussion is like a trial, which is not a good way of talking about planning.†Ostensibly an appeals body, the OMB actually holds the power to ignore all earlier proceedings and render any judgment it sees fit, based on whatever evidence it considers pertinent, which is exactly what it did in the Triangle case. Still, Greenberg believes that the general public is much better educated about urban issues than it used to be, and that “it’s now possible to have very sophisticated discussions about city building. Planning ought to be collaborative, but the cross-examination by lawyers tends to be binary and cannot manage problems of organized urban complexity.†Yet this binary forum is where city hall and the development community do much of their talking these days—a perpetual divorce court.
This is the conundrum that the city faced when it put together its Triangle case for the OMB. Both the planning and legal departments worked full-time on the file in the months leading up to the hearings, completing the area study and laying out a vision. They made artists their focal point—but they did not mount a save-the-struggling-artists-from-eviction defence. Rather, the city put forward a more nuanced position: it contended that artists are self-employed entrepreneurs in the “creative sector†of the economy, and that the Triangle was one of the most important areas of cultural activity in the city. The creative economy matters not just to city hall, but to Mayor Miller personally, since it represents a major plank in his campaign platform, and one of his grand ambitions for Toronto. He has targeted creative industries—art, music, theatre, film, fashion, media, publishing, curation, architecture, urban and industrial and graphic design, software and game development, floral arrangement (it’s a broad category)—as pillars of the city’s future economic growth. It’s a strategy that plays to our existing strengths, since Toronto is home to more than 25,000 designers, the third-largest total in North America. The idea is to turn the cultural capital of English Canada into a global creative hub, a member of that select group of cities (New York, San Francisco, London, Tokyo, Paris) renowned for their contributions in the world of art and design.
That might seem a bit of a stretch, but it’s a worthy ambition that could pay off handsomely. Estimates suggest that, globally, creative industries are valued at roughly $2 trillion per year, or about double the size of the entire Canadian economy.
In its arguments before the OMB, city legal staff told the chair of the hearings, Don Granger, that the issue wasn’t the displacement of artists, but the displacement of creative-industry jobs. The centrepiece of their position was a “no net loss†policy, which stated, in essence, that new residential developments in the Triangle must not result in a loss of industrial and commercial space. They also wanted to ensure that new development would be welcoming to artists and creative entrepreneurs: they suggested measures to encourage the building of artist live-work studios, and proposed that these be managed by an organization like Artscape, a non-profit that serves as a sort of economic development bureau for artists. They even proposed ways to lower the amount of industrial and commercial space the developers were required to build under the official plan— a way of demonstrating their willingness to compromise.
But the OMB, as Greenberg says, is no place for compromise—once you’re at trial, the time for negotiation is over. In his rulings, Granger dismissed the city’s position on creative-industry jobs and its no-net-loss policy as “inconsistent.†He clearly thought their arguments were half-baked: if the city wants to protect employment, he wrote, “it must be able to rely on objective criteria and data achieved through comprehensive analysis of the planning area.†He also dismissed their arguments on parkland, height restrictions and density. Granger wasn’t the only one who was underwhelmed by the city’s arguments. “The city had difficulty with its positions, which were confusing and undeveloped,†says Charles Campbell, the legal counsel for Active 18, who you’d expect to be on the city’s side. “If I were a developer, I’d be furious that I had to plan my project with this kind of lack of guidance from the city.†Granger also expressed disappointment with all the parties’ inability to find a mutually agreeable solution, especially given that everyone, including Active 18, agreed on the need for intensification. “It was an odd decision,†says councillor Ashton. “It’s as if Granger was saying, ‘I’d like to make a different ruling here, but I can’t.’ â€
Notably absent from the hearings were the planning department’s big guns, including the Toronto and East York District’s planning manager, Lynda Macdonald; its director, Gary Wright; and Tyndorf himself. In fact, the last time the city’s chief planner testified before the OMB was in the case of the Home Depot site on the waterfront in 1998; Paul Bedford took the stand for a full week, and the city won the case.
The only thing more disappointing than the city’s arguments was the OMB decision itself: it ruled in favour of numerous high-rise condo towers, an eight-storey building on the south side of Queen Street, and a park that would be impossible to find from any major street, while reserving only some ground-floor spaces for non-residential uses, “including affordable artist live-work studios where subsidy is available.†And so an outraged Miller launched his appeals, based largely on the principle that the OMB had shown a blatant disregard for the city’s duty to protect employment areas and its right to set economic development policy. But the appeals were also a shrewd political ploy: they shifted the focus away from the city’s handling of the case and put it squarely on the OMB, which sparked a public relations war with provincial Liberals. Queen’s Park had in fact introduced a series of reforms to the OMB, which took effect at the start of this year, designed to give municipalities more power in the appeals process; the Triangle development proposals, since they were launched years ago, were governed by the old rules. The Liberals had been hoping to make those reforms part of their platform of accomplishment for this fall’s election campaign, but they’ve now been tarnished by the Triangle controversy. Still, they’re not likely to tinker with the OMB any further until they see the reforms in action over the next couple of years.
Can there be a happy ending in the Triangle? Despite all the bad blood, the answer is a hard-nosed maybe. The city’s appeals, by putting everything on hold indefinitely, might give the developers new incentive to negotiate. After all, they had intended to capitalize on the artistic buzz of the Queen West West area, and the negative publicity has been a buzz killer. The most likely scenario is for the city to allow increased density in exchange for artist live-work studio space and other public amenities that will entrench the Triangle’s status as a creative hub.
But a resolution in the Triangle won’t fix the broader dysfunctions with city planning. It’s worth noting that, recently, the best examples of good planning were not led by the planning department. For its West Don Lands project, the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation called upon private-sector planners, as did the Toronto Community Housing Corporation for the Regent Park redevelopment. Neither plan ended up before the OMB.
Tyndorf has been kept busy this spring putting together a list of priority areas that are attracting development interest, in order to avoid merely reacting to applications as it did in the Triangle. Still, his department remains short of staff and financial resources. Former chief planner Paul Bedford offers this simple, cost-effective solution: reinstate the city’s planning board. Back in the ’70s, the 12-member board comprised prominent citizens and some councillors. The city’s planning staff were tecically employed by the board, which vetted all development applications. This structure helped take politics out of the equation, which most experts consider essential to good city building. The idea is to create complex, well-informed discussions early on in the approvals process, so that fewer cases ever reach the OMB.
“The relationship with the OMB was much different back then,†says Bedford. “It operated more like a true appeals body, and its rulings were nowhere near as legalistic.†If there’s any lesson to be learned from the Triangle, it’s that the OMB merely works with what it’s given, and its decisions will be as poor as the evidence and arguments it’s provided.
Bedevilled Triangle
You can blame the developers or the OMB, but the flap over the Queen West Triangle revealed city hall’s dirty little secret: no one’s minding the shop
Toronto Life - June 2007 - Philip Preville
More than a decade ago, as gentrification pushed Toronto’s grassroots arts community out of the once-decrepit Queen and Spadina area, it picked up and moved farther west, past the mental hospital, to the Triangle, an abandoned industrial area south of Queen between Dovercourt and Dufferin. At the time, it was the kind of place you moved to only if you wanted to be left alone—an ugly, forgettable stretch bordering on Parkdale, where no one ever seemed to get on or off the streetcar. Inevitably, in the wake of these urban pioneers came others, creeping ever westward: art galleries like Stephen Bulger, restaurants like Swan and Bar One, and, in 2004, the Drake Hotel, which became a social hub and turned Queen West West into a destination in its own right.
Suddenly, the Queen West Triangle was the epicentre of the city’s cultural buzz, and everyone wanted a piece of it. Starbucks (which was briefly graffitied with the message, “Drake, you ho—this is all your fault!â€) came to Queen and Dovercourt, followed soon after by three developers in mid-2005 who, in rapid succession, applied to build high-rise condominiums. One of them was to be called Bohemian Embassy, a shameless attempt to usurp the neighbourhood’s artistic vitality as a lifestyle brand.
In response, community members created Active 18 (so named for the area’s municipal moniker, Ward 18–Davenport), which favoured intensification but sought to preserve the Triangle’s unique character. The group organized well and quickly, and counted among its supporters internationally renowned urban planner Ken Greenberg and arts-minded developers Margie and Christina Zeidler, the main movers behind the transformation of the Gladstone from flophouse relic to chic gallery-hotel. While all three condo proposals were considered inappropriate, much of the discussion centred on the 120-year-old former lamp factory at 48 Abell Street, where many artists had set up their studio homes, and whose owner proposed its demolition.
As the weeks and months passed, both Active 18 and the developers became frustrated by what they saw as city hall’s inaction on the file. Eventually, the developers took their case to the Ontario Municipal Board, the much loathed, Queen’s Park–appointed tribunal that has the final say on all development disputes in the province. On January 10, after 35 days of arguments and evidence, the OMB ruled in favour of the condos—to the outrage of artists’ groups, local residents, city officials and many sage observers.
In the days and weeks that followed, a growing chorus of anger, led by the Toronto Star’s Christopher Hume, demanded the province rein in the OMB and give Toronto the power to make its own planning decisions. In February, Mayor David Miller announced that the city would contest the decision by all available means. By focusing public outrage squarely on the OMB and putting Queen’s Park on the defensive, Miller managed to deflect attention from a bigger problem: the vast, toxic malaise that currently afflicts the city’s interactions not just with the OMB, but with developers, residents and its own planning department. These relationships form a sort of polygamous marriage, and the Queen West Triangle has become a multipartite divorce proceeding. As with all relationship breakdowns, there’s a whole sordid history behind it, lots of recrimination in every direction and more than enough blame to go around. And the artists are the kids caught in the middle.
By law, the city has six months to respond to a development application. Failure to do so is grounds for an OMB appeal. Yet the city’s planning department is perfectly upfront about the fact that, for complex applications that require the attention of community planners for zoning changes, approval takes at least nine months. The result is a policy perversion: on any major application, the city guarantees that it will fail to respond on time. If reasonable efforts are being made to advance a file, developers generally do not appeal at the six-month mark; they’ll let the process work its way to a conclusion. But it’s a dysfunctional truce: developers don’t appreciate being put in a position where they must voluntarily suspend their legal rights, while planners fear and loathe the threat of an appeal hanging over their every move.
In the Triangle, the truce did not hold. The city received the application for the Bohemian Embassy condominiums at 1171 Queen Street West on May 17, 2005. It already had two Triangle-area applications on file, dating back years: one for 48 Abell Street, the other for 150 Sudbury. The owners of 48 Abell had initially proposed to maintain their existing building and legalize the artist live-work studios that had been set up there, while 150 Sudbury had secured approval to build four-storey townhomes. In a June 2005 preliminary report, planning staff recommended public consultations on the Bohemian Embassy application, while noting that its height and density provisions were inappropriate. At that point, there was no reason to believe any outstanding issues couldn’t be resolved.
Then things got complicated. In August, the owners of 48 Abell revised their application, now requesting permission to demolish the building and erect two condo towers—one 24 storeys, the other 19. In November, 150 Sudbury revised its application, adding a 16-storey tower. (These changes point to another ingrained dysfunction: developers can submit massive modifications to their existing applications at almost any time without incurring additional fees.) From the city’s perspective, the proposals now amounted to a radical transformation of the Triangle. In a report dated November 9, city planners asked council to direct them to complete an area study before approving anything. They now felt they needed to step back and consider the area as a whole.
To the Bohemian Embassy’s developers, Baywood Homes, the city’s shift was sudden, unexpected and unacceptable. “My client had no warning of a need for an area study,†says Ronald Kanter, lawyer for Baywood. “It seemed to me the city had dropped the ball on the application.†The developers appealed to the OMB less than seven months after filing their original application, and the other developers followed suit. The city conducted its area study while simultaneously attending preliminary OMB hearings.
Kanter says the planning department’s inability to respond within the six-month time frame “tells you something about how seriously the city takes its legal responsibilities. This has become a habit.†Adam Giambrone, the local councillor, retorts that “six months isn’t sufficient for a large and complex city like Toronto†and that “developers who appeal to the OMB before the nine-month mark are operating in bad faith.†Both sides of this argument are trafficking in half-truths. On the city’s side, there’s a lot of self-flattery in the insistence that Toronto is so much more complicated than, say, Ottawa or Hamilton. On some level, cities are cities: they have wires on poles and pipes underground; they have buses and garbage trucks on the roads; they have separate, professional bureaucracies to manage each of these things; and all these bureaucracies must co-operate on any development application. For what it’s worth, Ottawa is no more enamoured of the OMB than Toronto, but its planning department rarely fails to respond to development applications on deadline. That said, in the Triangle case, a gold rush mentality was taking hold, and the city’s desire to step back and reassess the neighbourhood was justified, if not expedient. What’s less justified was its inability to anticipate the gold rush and establish a vision for the area before developers came calling.
Like the department he runs, Ted Tyndorf looks more imposing than he actually is. At 53, Toronto’s chief planner stands a broad-shouldered six-foot-one with dark hair and a moustache. He’s remarkably mild- mannered as he lays out the state of his department. He describes it as “unacceptable,†which is a diplomatic euphemism for disastrous. His staff is faced with an avalanche of building applications—140,000 housing units currently in the approval pipeline. On average, every weekday, three major applications come through the door. This is a problem, because processing applications is, broadly speaking, only one-third of a planner’s job. The most important and most fun part of the job is doing strategic planning, preparing a vision for the future of a neighbourhood. The third part consists of mopping up at the OMB: assembling the city’s case, attending the hearings, giving testimony and implementing the aftermath of its rulings. Between the overflowing inboxes of applications and the steady stream of OMB appeals—last year, planning staff logged 14,000 hours on OMB cases alone—no one has a minute to devote to strategic planning. Which means the most important work never gets done and no one has any fun.
So they leave. City planning, whose resources were slashed by a third through the 1990s, is currently funded for a full-time complement of 344 staff but usually has more than 20 vacancies at any given time, unable to fill the jobs faster than people quit. “Planning is stuck in reactive mode,†says Toronto Centre–Rosedale councillor Kyle Rae. “Morale is very low. People are moving to either the private sector or to other city departments.†Tyndorf notes that they also go to other municipalities, where the stress level is lower. The workload has become so heavy that “we now have significant health issues. We’ve had a lot of people taking time away from the office.â€
And yet, when Rae tried to remedy the problem in last year’s budget, he was astonished to watch Tyndorf open wide and swallow his words whole. “The chief planner asked for 12 more staff last year, and I supported him in budget deliberations,†recalls Rae. But senior city managers had been told to keep their budget increases below two per cent, and Etobicoke-Lakeshore councillor Peter Milczyn opposed the proposal. “When the question was put to Ted in council,†says Rae, “he stood up and said he didn’t need it.†Looking back, Tyndorf admits that “tactically, it may have been a mistake for me to say, ‘We will cope with what we have.’ †The department’s grand malaise has affected all its files, including the Triangle. “What we hadn’t done was flesh out the vision for the area in sufficient detail,†Tyndorf says. “It’s just a matter of priorities. We ran out of people to do the work.â€
In the meantime, most city councillors, resigned to a bad situation, have learned to cope by watching all the development files in their wards like hawks, through every step of the process. “You have to keep close tabs on them,†says Scarborough Southwest councillor Brian Ashton, who chairs the city’s planning committee. “Politically, they can kill you.†Rae is notorious for managing all his ward’s development files personally, refusing (until recently) to delegate them to his staff. “Most planners,†he says, “don’t have the level of experience they need to handle the kind of intensification that’s happening downtown.†Rae also notes that he is “very motivated†to keep the OMB out of the process. That means taking a leadership role in the file, driving the bureaucracy and being brutally honest with residents about expectations. “Too many residents simply don’t want change,†he says, “but I have fought with residents many times, and it has never cost me re-election.â€
Indeed, if a councillor sides with angry residents, it can produce a gross miscarriage of planning justice: a development proposal that conforms to the official plan and is approved by city planners but is blocked at council then ends up before the OMB. In such instances, the public is treated to the surreal sight of the city’s legal staff arguing against its own planners’ recommendations.
Members of Active 18 have publicly chided Adam Giambrone for inexperience, and some observers wonder whether he has the passion for land-use issues that’s required to be a truly effective councillor. At the early stages, he delegated the file to his executive assistant, Kevin Beaulieu. When he did take the lead, it was too late to broker a solution. In May and June of 2006, he chaired a series of working groups involving city planners, residents and developers, but the OMB appeals had already been launched, so “the developers were present,†Giambrone says, “but they weren’t participating.†He seems to have learned from the experience: when I asked him what he would do differently if he could turn back the clock, he said, “hold fewer working groups. The points of compromise were far apart. They made us put effort into the process with no real chance of success.â€
The real problem with the OMB, as urban planner Ken Greenberg aptly puts it, is that “the form of the discussion is like a trial, which is not a good way of talking about planning.†Ostensibly an appeals body, the OMB actually holds the power to ignore all earlier proceedings and render any judgment it sees fit, based on whatever evidence it considers pertinent, which is exactly what it did in the Triangle case. Still, Greenberg believes that the general public is much better educated about urban issues than it used to be, and that “it’s now possible to have very sophisticated discussions about city building. Planning ought to be collaborative, but the cross-examination by lawyers tends to be binary and cannot manage problems of organized urban complexity.†Yet this binary forum is where city hall and the development community do much of their talking these days—a perpetual divorce court.
This is the conundrum that the city faced when it put together its Triangle case for the OMB. Both the planning and legal departments worked full-time on the file in the months leading up to the hearings, completing the area study and laying out a vision. They made artists their focal point—but they did not mount a save-the-struggling-artists-from-eviction defence. Rather, the city put forward a more nuanced position: it contended that artists are self-employed entrepreneurs in the “creative sector†of the economy, and that the Triangle was one of the most important areas of cultural activity in the city. The creative economy matters not just to city hall, but to Mayor Miller personally, since it represents a major plank in his campaign platform, and one of his grand ambitions for Toronto. He has targeted creative industries—art, music, theatre, film, fashion, media, publishing, curation, architecture, urban and industrial and graphic design, software and game development, floral arrangement (it’s a broad category)—as pillars of the city’s future economic growth. It’s a strategy that plays to our existing strengths, since Toronto is home to more than 25,000 designers, the third-largest total in North America. The idea is to turn the cultural capital of English Canada into a global creative hub, a member of that select group of cities (New York, San Francisco, London, Tokyo, Paris) renowned for their contributions in the world of art and design.
That might seem a bit of a stretch, but it’s a worthy ambition that could pay off handsomely. Estimates suggest that, globally, creative industries are valued at roughly $2 trillion per year, or about double the size of the entire Canadian economy.
In its arguments before the OMB, city legal staff told the chair of the hearings, Don Granger, that the issue wasn’t the displacement of artists, but the displacement of creative-industry jobs. The centrepiece of their position was a “no net loss†policy, which stated, in essence, that new residential developments in the Triangle must not result in a loss of industrial and commercial space. They also wanted to ensure that new development would be welcoming to artists and creative entrepreneurs: they suggested measures to encourage the building of artist live-work studios, and proposed that these be managed by an organization like Artscape, a non-profit that serves as a sort of economic development bureau for artists. They even proposed ways to lower the amount of industrial and commercial space the developers were required to build under the official plan— a way of demonstrating their willingness to compromise.
But the OMB, as Greenberg says, is no place for compromise—once you’re at trial, the time for negotiation is over. In his rulings, Granger dismissed the city’s position on creative-industry jobs and its no-net-loss policy as “inconsistent.†He clearly thought their arguments were half-baked: if the city wants to protect employment, he wrote, “it must be able to rely on objective criteria and data achieved through comprehensive analysis of the planning area.†He also dismissed their arguments on parkland, height restrictions and density. Granger wasn’t the only one who was underwhelmed by the city’s arguments. “The city had difficulty with its positions, which were confusing and undeveloped,†says Charles Campbell, the legal counsel for Active 18, who you’d expect to be on the city’s side. “If I were a developer, I’d be furious that I had to plan my project with this kind of lack of guidance from the city.†Granger also expressed disappointment with all the parties’ inability to find a mutually agreeable solution, especially given that everyone, including Active 18, agreed on the need for intensification. “It was an odd decision,†says councillor Ashton. “It’s as if Granger was saying, ‘I’d like to make a different ruling here, but I can’t.’ â€
Notably absent from the hearings were the planning department’s big guns, including the Toronto and East York District’s planning manager, Lynda Macdonald; its director, Gary Wright; and Tyndorf himself. In fact, the last time the city’s chief planner testified before the OMB was in the case of the Home Depot site on the waterfront in 1998; Paul Bedford took the stand for a full week, and the city won the case.
The only thing more disappointing than the city’s arguments was the OMB decision itself: it ruled in favour of numerous high-rise condo towers, an eight-storey building on the south side of Queen Street, and a park that would be impossible to find from any major street, while reserving only some ground-floor spaces for non-residential uses, “including affordable artist live-work studios where subsidy is available.†And so an outraged Miller launched his appeals, based largely on the principle that the OMB had shown a blatant disregard for the city’s duty to protect employment areas and its right to set economic development policy. But the appeals were also a shrewd political ploy: they shifted the focus away from the city’s handling of the case and put it squarely on the OMB, which sparked a public relations war with provincial Liberals. Queen’s Park had in fact introduced a series of reforms to the OMB, which took effect at the start of this year, designed to give municipalities more power in the appeals process; the Triangle development proposals, since they were launched years ago, were governed by the old rules. The Liberals had been hoping to make those reforms part of their platform of accomplishment for this fall’s election campaign, but they’ve now been tarnished by the Triangle controversy. Still, they’re not likely to tinker with the OMB any further until they see the reforms in action over the next couple of years.
Can there be a happy ending in the Triangle? Despite all the bad blood, the answer is a hard-nosed maybe. The city’s appeals, by putting everything on hold indefinitely, might give the developers new incentive to negotiate. After all, they had intended to capitalize on the artistic buzz of the Queen West West area, and the negative publicity has been a buzz killer. The most likely scenario is for the city to allow increased density in exchange for artist live-work studio space and other public amenities that will entrench the Triangle’s status as a creative hub.
But a resolution in the Triangle won’t fix the broader dysfunctions with city planning. It’s worth noting that, recently, the best examples of good planning were not led by the planning department. For its West Don Lands project, the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation called upon private-sector planners, as did the Toronto Community Housing Corporation for the Regent Park redevelopment. Neither plan ended up before the OMB.
Tyndorf has been kept busy this spring putting together a list of priority areas that are attracting development interest, in order to avoid merely reacting to applications as it did in the Triangle. Still, his department remains short of staff and financial resources. Former chief planner Paul Bedford offers this simple, cost-effective solution: reinstate the city’s planning board. Back in the ’70s, the 12-member board comprised prominent citizens and some councillors. The city’s planning staff were tecically employed by the board, which vetted all development applications. This structure helped take politics out of the equation, which most experts consider essential to good city building. The idea is to create complex, well-informed discussions early on in the approvals process, so that fewer cases ever reach the OMB.
“The relationship with the OMB was much different back then,†says Bedford. “It operated more like a true appeals body, and its rulings were nowhere near as legalistic.†If there’s any lesson to be learned from the Triangle, it’s that the OMB merely works with what it’s given, and its decisions will be as poor as the evidence and arguments it’s provided.
urbandreamer
recession proof
Get rid of the planners and get a design review panel instead! Not a timid blah thing like Vancouver's but something with guts and passion for change. Was the old city of Toronto planned? Seriously, I often wonder if urban planners were responsible for the built form south of say st clair? As far as I can tell, the planners are just bureaucrats with little real passion for change and bold city building. Dump them, get a dictatorship going and hire a few city architects to oversee developers applications.
digitalcabana
Active Member
City to take condo fight to court
City to take condo fight to court
Council faces `uphill struggle' in last-ditch duel over contentious Queen West Triangle proposal
Jul 12, 2007 - Paul Moloney- Toronto Star
The City of Toronto is running out of strategies to fight a controversial condo plan it fears will destroy a creative employment area in the west end.
The latest setback came Tuesday when the Ontario Municipal Board upheld an earlier board decision that okayed condos for a 2.4 hectare (6-acre) site near Queen St. W. and Dovercourt Rd. – part of an area known as the Queen West Triangle.
The city will now try its luck in Divisional Court on Monday, although that's expected to be an "uphill struggle," said Councillor Adam Giambrone (Ward 18, Davenport).
"It is unusual that cases are heard by the Divisional Court around the OMB, but there aren't really many other options at this point, unfortunately," he said.
Giambrone was alarmed when the OMB endorsed proposals by three developers for condos up to 26 storeys tall in an area the city would rather see as an enclave for artists and other creative activities.
However, the city missed its chance to impose an interim control bylaw on the area, which would have provided breathing space to allow a comprehensive policy for the district to be developed.
"In other words, there was a proper way for them to proceed, but they failed to do so," said Ron Kanter, lawyer for Bohemian Embassy Residences Inc., which wants to build a 10-storey and 26-storey condo.
"They dropped the ball on that one, no question."
After 35 days of hearings at the OMB, the developers received a favourable decision in January.
At the city's request, the OMB assigned a new three-member panel for a review. The panel concluded the original decision was reasonable and the important issues had been identified and examined.
"We're very pleased," said Cary Green, executive vice-president of Verdiroc Development Corp., which wants to put up a 19-storey and 25-storey condo on its site. "It's a reaffirmation of the fact that it's an excellent development the way it was planned."
Aside from seeking the OMB review and preparing for a court action, the city requested provincial Minister of Municipal Affairs John Gerretsen to intervene. But Gerretsen is staying out of the fight.
"Because the matter is still before the court, the minister wouldn't want to comment," Gerretsen's spokesperson Patti Munce said yesterday.
Kanter said if the court agreed to hear the case and then ruled in the city's favour, the matter would just go back to the OMB.
"The most they (the city) could win would be another hearing from the OMB, which has already ruled that the original decision was fine, thank you very much," Kanter said.
Kanter questioned the soundness of the city's strategy. "It is unprecedented for a municipality to continue to ask for things after the OMB rejected them twice," he said. "That does not seem to be a positive use of city resources."
Giambrone, however, stressed the city isn't going to drop the matter.
"Queen West is an incredibly significant area," he said. "There's a big concentration of the arts community. I think it's really sad that the OMB chose not to revisit the decision that we think is very flawed."
City to take condo fight to court
Council faces `uphill struggle' in last-ditch duel over contentious Queen West Triangle proposal
Jul 12, 2007 - Paul Moloney- Toronto Star
The City of Toronto is running out of strategies to fight a controversial condo plan it fears will destroy a creative employment area in the west end.
The latest setback came Tuesday when the Ontario Municipal Board upheld an earlier board decision that okayed condos for a 2.4 hectare (6-acre) site near Queen St. W. and Dovercourt Rd. – part of an area known as the Queen West Triangle.
The city will now try its luck in Divisional Court on Monday, although that's expected to be an "uphill struggle," said Councillor Adam Giambrone (Ward 18, Davenport).
"It is unusual that cases are heard by the Divisional Court around the OMB, but there aren't really many other options at this point, unfortunately," he said.
Giambrone was alarmed when the OMB endorsed proposals by three developers for condos up to 26 storeys tall in an area the city would rather see as an enclave for artists and other creative activities.
However, the city missed its chance to impose an interim control bylaw on the area, which would have provided breathing space to allow a comprehensive policy for the district to be developed.
"In other words, there was a proper way for them to proceed, but they failed to do so," said Ron Kanter, lawyer for Bohemian Embassy Residences Inc., which wants to build a 10-storey and 26-storey condo.
"They dropped the ball on that one, no question."
After 35 days of hearings at the OMB, the developers received a favourable decision in January.
At the city's request, the OMB assigned a new three-member panel for a review. The panel concluded the original decision was reasonable and the important issues had been identified and examined.
"We're very pleased," said Cary Green, executive vice-president of Verdiroc Development Corp., which wants to put up a 19-storey and 25-storey condo on its site. "It's a reaffirmation of the fact that it's an excellent development the way it was planned."
Aside from seeking the OMB review and preparing for a court action, the city requested provincial Minister of Municipal Affairs John Gerretsen to intervene. But Gerretsen is staying out of the fight.
"Because the matter is still before the court, the minister wouldn't want to comment," Gerretsen's spokesperson Patti Munce said yesterday.
Kanter said if the court agreed to hear the case and then ruled in the city's favour, the matter would just go back to the OMB.
"The most they (the city) could win would be another hearing from the OMB, which has already ruled that the original decision was fine, thank you very much," Kanter said.
Kanter questioned the soundness of the city's strategy. "It is unprecedented for a municipality to continue to ask for things after the OMB rejected them twice," he said. "That does not seem to be a positive use of city resources."
Giambrone, however, stressed the city isn't going to drop the matter.
"Queen West is an incredibly significant area," he said. "There's a big concentration of the arts community. I think it's really sad that the OMB chose not to revisit the decision that we think is very flawed."
H
Hydrogen
Guest
Tiny little side comment: could people please take a moment and space paragraphs before posting? It makes the text a little easier to read.
Thanks!
Thanks!
AlvinofDiaspar
Moderator
From the Star:
Deal reached in Queen St. W. fight
Jul 19, 2007 04:30 AM
Paul Moloney
City hall bureau
More space for artists is part of a deal hammered out with developers that quelled most of the city's concerns about a controversial development in the Queen West Triangle, a 2.4-hectare site at Queen St. W. and Dovercourt Rd.
City council approved the deal yesterday, ending the city's long legal battle against two developers. City lawyers will still appear in Divisional Court today seeking permission to appeal an Ontario Municipal Board ruling in favour of a third, Landmark Developments.
One developer bought extra land for non-residential uses the city believes will enliven the area, said lawyer Ron Kanter. The space could support "a whole mix of things, everything from arts space – subsidized space for artists – to perhaps a grocery store."
A second developer, building at 48 Abell St., included 27 live/work artist studios in plans for an 18-storey affordable-rent building and a 14-storey condo. Verdiroc Development Corp.'s project will also provide nine art workshops along a pedestrian mews, said lawyer David Bronskill.
AoD
Deal reached in Queen St. W. fight
Jul 19, 2007 04:30 AM
Paul Moloney
City hall bureau
More space for artists is part of a deal hammered out with developers that quelled most of the city's concerns about a controversial development in the Queen West Triangle, a 2.4-hectare site at Queen St. W. and Dovercourt Rd.
City council approved the deal yesterday, ending the city's long legal battle against two developers. City lawyers will still appear in Divisional Court today seeking permission to appeal an Ontario Municipal Board ruling in favour of a third, Landmark Developments.
One developer bought extra land for non-residential uses the city believes will enliven the area, said lawyer Ron Kanter. The space could support "a whole mix of things, everything from arts space – subsidized space for artists – to perhaps a grocery store."
A second developer, building at 48 Abell St., included 27 live/work artist studios in plans for an 18-storey affordable-rent building and a 14-storey condo. Verdiroc Development Corp.'s project will also provide nine art workshops along a pedestrian mews, said lawyer David Bronskill.
AoD
urbandreamer
recession proof
dump though it may be, i wish they'd just keep 48 abell and build around it. It's not like the city has unlimited supply of victorian factory buildings (unlike hamilton or montreal.) I've sparred with the active 18 folk but secretly, I kind of agree with what they're saying but just disagree with their obsession that artists make w queen w's identity--many working class folk have lived in that area for decades so active 18 implies those people are nobodies? Nice. I'm of the opinion that there are many better, cheaper places for artists to live in toronto--dundas w of dufferin? At any rate, I have noticed a steady decline in the quality of artist run galleries in w queen w--they all seem rather yuppie/rich kid crowd and the cool kids have all moved to hamilton. w queen w, since the drake scene took over, imho is a bore!
adma
Superstar
Pep'rJack
Active Member
^ Interesting interview - thanks for the link.