SUBWAY LINK’S PAYOFF MAY TAKE DECADES
It will be expensive — about $2 billion — but the payoff from a single-stop subway extension to the Scarborough City Centre could be huge in terms of jump-starting the commercial development that has lagged downtown and even North York since 1990.
“It will take a decade or two decades or maybe even 30 years. With the subway you will have an explosion of growth,” said Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker.
“We can have great philosophical debates of which comes first, the office towers or the subway, but there’s a certain reality that one of the reasons the North York City Centre has been so wildly successful is because it has the Yonge line and it now has the Sheppard line,” he said.
But it will take more than transit for jobs to come to Scarborough City Centre and there will be competition for that development, warn some experts. Scarborough’s commercial growth has never recovered from the recession of the 1990s, said Rod McPhail, a transportation consultant and former Toronto head of transportation planning. When the recovery came, residential development began to boom and it’s never stopped, he said.
“There are 40-storey residential buildings that could have been office buildings,” said McPhail.
But much of the commercial development that could have gone to Scarborough has gone downtown or north to York Region. GO’s regional express rail expansion and Mayor John Tory’s SmartTrack plan to use the same GO tracks won’t help Scarborough City Centre, said McPhail. The tracks are too far away.
There are too many examples of subways that haven’t lured the kind of density and development that some politicians and planners are promising, said Cherise Burda, executive director of the Ryerson City Building Institute. She cites the Danforth and Sheppard subways and the Spadina extension to York Region scheduled to open late next year.
“We’re very conscious that we’re about to build another subway to a place of low density,” said Burda.
Ontario’s Growth Plan calls for 400 people and jobs per hectare in the Scarborough City Centre. It is achieving less than 150.
Like other spots on Toronto’s underground, the Scarborough stop is part of a political journey which accedes to voter demand for a subway connection. Burda said that means the city and the province have an obligation to use whatever tools at their disposal to bring about the growth they’re dangling.
They have to find the combination of zoning restrictions, parkland dedication, development charge options — incentives and rules — that will make intensification attractive to developers.