Making the library home
NEW RENTAL BUILDING FEATURES BRANCH INCORPORATED INTO THE GROUND FLOOR
When completed in 2022, the ground floor of 299 Campbell will be unlike any other new building in Toronto. Instead of a fancy restaurant or retailer, the purpose-built rental building in the Junction will feature a 10,000-squarefoot public library — its stacks visible through a row of floor-to-ceiling windows.
The Campbell branch will be a replacement for the one at Perth/ Dupont, which at 3,600 square feet is the third-smallest in the city. But while its itsy-bitsy front window isn’t much grander than a convenience store from the outside, the library’s attendance has grown rapidly in the past few years — a reflection of the influx of residents moving into the area.
Such rapid gentrification would normally make it even harder for a library to relocate to a bigger space. But the city was able to strike an unusually sweet deal with developers TAS Design Build, who sold the ground floor for $1 million, a third of its estimated value.
That’s not because the firm messed up their math: TAS is a registered B Corporation, which means it’s committed to maximizing community benefit through its work, not just maximizing profits. In fact, B Lab, the third- party administrators of the B Corporation certification, counts TAS among the top 10 per cent of companies worldwide for community impact because of their involvement in projects like this one.
“We spent a couple of years in consultation with residents in the Junction Triangle,” says TAS CEO Mazyar Mortazavi. “We spent a lot of time listening to their concerns. Having a new, much larger library was a clear way we could make a contribution.”
TAS is buttressing the community esthetically too. The building, designed by Toronto’s Teeple Architects, fits with the neighbourhood. Aside from the glassed- in library, it will mainly be clad in red brick, echoing many of the surrounding industrial structures; the area has a long history as a manufacturing hub. The choice of cladding is also more sustainable, as masonry transmits far less heat than the expanses of windows common in new developments.
The rental building will also help address Toronto’s historically low vacancy rates, now at one- to two per cent because of the soaring cost of buying a new house or condo over the past decade. Families priced out of the housing market are a particular target, so TAS has incorporated play spaces for young children, various rooftop gardens and a communal rooftop kitchen in the Campbell.
The library is also essential to the vision: “These days, many people treat libraries like their living rooms,” says Mortazavi. “They are such important gathering spaces.”
Owning a rental building can be lucrative, of course, especially since a one- bedroom unit in the city goes for about $ 2,300 a month, a 30- per- cent increase from 2012. Building a rental building, however, is often riskier for developers because they have to finance the project themselves, instead of relying on residents to cough up down payments on pre- sale condos. Since rental rates fluctuate, there’s also no guarantee that prices will stay aloft between now and when 299 Campbell is completed.
“Either way, real estate is a high- risk business,” says Mortazavi. “With a condo, it’s possible that people don’t close on their units. Meanwhile, demand for rentals is increasing twice as fast as new supply is being added.”
In other words, he isn’t worried.