‘Density,’ a dirty word in growing Toronto?
Residents of some older areas oppose developments that will overcrowd communities
Over the past five years, Toronto has added more residents than any other city in Canada, and older communities are feeling the growing pains.
In the High Park neighbourhood, dozens of lawns are dotted with plastic signs reading “Say No to Double Density” — a reference to a pair of development proposals which could add six midrise and highrise towers, with a total of more than 1,700 apartments, to a two-block area nearby.
These new constructions would fit in between a handful of rental apartment buildings already on the properties, roughly doubling the number of residential units in the two blocks.
“One of the biggest concerns is losing the character of the neighbourhood,” said Cathy Brown, who lives in a mid-century building on one of the proposed development sites.
“Right now you can walk through, it’s peaceful, it’s relatively quiet,” added Brown, who co-chairs High Park Community Alliance, the local resident group fighting the developments.
The new buildings would create more traffic, overcrowd local schools, jam up High Park and Keele subway stations, limit public recreation space, worsen wind tunnels and literally cast a long shadow across the neighbourhood, Brown and other community members say.
Residents of the Distillery District and Parkdale and Leslieville have cited nearly identical concerns when highrise development proposals threatened to increase density in their own neighbourhoods.
“Density is a loaded word, and that’s part of the problem,” said Peter Hal- sall, executive director of the Canadian Urban Institute think tank.
“Density in and of itself isn’t a good or bad thing. It’s the composition of the density that makes it work or not work.”
If a neighbourhood is designed properly, higher density should mean greater access to day-to-day amenities within walking distance, Halsall said.
“We’ve decided (in low-density neighbourhoods) that it’s OK to have to get in your car to get something, but for those of us who live within walking distance of those amenities, we wouldn’t trade it.”
Jennifer Keesmaat, chief planner for the city of Toronto, says opposition to large development proposals should not be dismissed as mere NIMBYism.
“It’s about the livability of our neighbourhoods,” Keesmaat said.
“We ought to be having conversations about, ‘Do we have enough park space? Do we have enough schools? Do we have the daycare spaces . . . to be absorbing all this growth?’ ” she added.
Some sections of Toronto, such as north Etobicoke and parts of Scarborough, are ready to be developed but haven’t attracted developer interest yet, while sought-after areas such as King St. W. and Spadina Ave., or Yonge St. and Eglinton Ave., have grown beyond what was anticipated in municipal and provincial policies, Keesmaat said.
Between the 2011 and 2016 census, Toronto’s population increased by more than 116,000 people. Much of that growth was focused downtown. Along the lakeshore and the Yonge St. corridor, the population increased by10 per cent or more in that five-year period.
“One of the great things about a place like Toronto is, it’s attracting the young, bright people into the inner city,” said James McKellar, director of the Brookfield Centre in Real Estate and Infrastructure at York University.
“The problem is, people should have more than a highrise to live in, and they’ve got to have more (affordable options) than a $1.5-million house,” he said.
There should be less concern with neighbourhood density and more concern with finding affordable places downtown for middle- and working-class Torontonians to live, McKellar added.
“We have to find ways to regenerate older neighbourhoods without ruining them,” he said.
That could mean adding stacked townhouses, building homes into city laneways, or carving out space in large houses for apartment suites, McKellar said.
“In the ideal scenario, every one of our neighbourhoods will have a mix of housing types and tenures,” said Keesmaat, adding that this means not only mixing low rise, highrise and single-family dwellings, but also owned and rented homes.
“We would like to see even more midrise buildings precisely because they are a gentler form of density but, even so, they can cause controversy in communities.”
It’s up to city planners to work with developers, to ensure that building projects create livable communities, Keesmaat said.
In the High Park area, that process is just beginning. Brown and other residents have offered their input at community meetings. Over the next several months, the city will conduct a “character study” of the area and review the development applications before issuing recommendations for the projects to the developers.
“It’s difficult to hear, but the city goes through evolutions, and right now, this neighbourhood is evolving, and it needs somebody to think about it with a longer term view,” said Matt Kingston, spokesperson for Minto developers, one of the companies proposing to build in High Park.
“If you look at the site, you have a 161-hectare park and two TTC subway stations within . . . walking distance.”
Kingston acknowledged the community’s criticisms.
“The concerns on green space are real, the concerns on more people are real,” he said. “At the end of the day, the city . . . has requirements, and if you don’t meet them, you have to make improvements (to your plan).”
Brown said she hopes the proposals will be scaled back to include fewer units.
“This is very simplistic, but I like to think of the neighbourhood like a boat,” Brown said. “It’s weighted enough, but if you add too much, it’s just going to sink. It’s not going to be workable.”