Baby steps on Barton
Five years ago, The Spectator took a hard look at the problems and promise facing that once vibrant neighbourhood. Today, reporter Steve Buist checks back to see what progress has been made
THERE’S
A GAPING MUDDY HOLE in the ground at 374 Barton St. E., about halfway between Victoria Avenue North and Wentworth Street North.
With its protective fencing and plastic tarps strewn haphazardly around its edges, that hole is perhaps the perfect metaphor to sum up what’s happened over the past five years along the Ward 3 stretch of Barton Street.
Five years ago, as part of the ongoing Code Red project, The Spectator began an in-depth investigation of Barton Street, between Wellington and Ottawa streets, once one of the most vibrant corridors in the city.
The resulting series didn’t paint a pretty picture – staggering numbers of vacant buildings and empty storefronts, a steady erosion of businesses over time, slum-like living conditions in some places, worrisome levels of tax arrears, high rates of poverty, and a general lack of interest from developers.
Five year later, we’ve returned to see what’s changed. With the city in the midst of an economic renaissance and with real estate values booming, how has the Ward 3 stretch of Barton Street fared?
The saga of 374 Barton neatly encapsulates many of the ongoing issues: some progress, some frustration at the slow pace of change, a lot of barriers still to be swept away, and yet, there’s still optimism for the future.
Five years ago, when we last checked in on 374 Barton and its owner, Lou Di Leonardo, the property was home to a hideous abandoned blue monstrosity. Di Leonardo said he was strangling in red tape as he tried to redevelop the site.
So the hole in the ground is actually a step forward.
“Honestly, since the stadium came in, that’s pretty much when all the calls started coming in about the property.” ADNAN TAHA OWNER, VACANT LOT ON BARTON STREET EAST “The Toronto developers are developing the abandoned buildings that nobody has a vision for.” RACHEL BRAITHWAITE DIRECTOR, BARTON VILLAGE BIA
NONETHELESS,
it’s still just a hole in the ground, the project is at a standstill again, and Di Leonardo says he’s still tied up in a “phenomenal” amount of red tape.
“I think the gods are against me sometimes,” Di Leonardo says forlornly.
Di Leonardo received approval to build two commercial units on the ground floor and six apartment units in total on two upper floors. But he was required to maintain the front part of the structure and demolish just the back portion.
When he started taking the structure down in May, he says he discovered the front part of the building was unstable and too dangerous to leave standing. So down it came.
That’s when the project came to a halt. Di Leonardo says the city required him to start over, with a new permit and new drawings.
He says it will likely be spring before work resumes at the property, which he bought for $62,000 in 2006.
“Given what’s happened to me, I think ‘How can anyone do anything in a timely fashion here?’” Di Leonardo said.
“I just put my tail between my legs before I started having a nervous breakdown and I said ‘I just gotta do what I gotta do.’”
If we go just by the numbers, it’s the same mixed bag.
From 2012 to 2017,
the assessed value of all Barton Street properties between Wellington and Ottawa increased by 19 per cent.
That’s impressive, but Barton’s growth hasn’t kept pace with the rest of the city. Over the same time period, the assessed value of all Hamilton properties rose by 27 per cent.
The amount of property taxes levied
on the Ward 3 part of Barton jumped by 15.1 per cent. Again, that’s notable but still slightly behind the 15.6 per cent jump in property taxes levied across the city as a whole.
There have been a couple of undeniable successes, though.
Over the past five years,
the amount of tax arrears along that Barton stretch have dropped by 30 per cent, from $1.1 million in 2017 to about $770,000 currently.
And the number of vacant buildings
registered with the city along the Ward 3 part of Barton has dropped from 26 to just four over the past five years.
YET THERE ARE
still a disturbing number of storefronts that have either been converted to apartment units or sit vacant. Storefront apartments are a concern because they may not be built to proper living standards.
The difference from five years ago is that several of the vacant storefronts have been cleared out and spruced up, ready for new life. But they’re still empty.
The city has been adding incentives to try to stimulate redevelopment along Barton Street, said Judy Lam, Hamilton’s manager of urban renewal, including a matching renovation grant program of up to $50,000 per property.
“I think it’s starting to take hold but it’s a little too soon to try to see the true impact,” said Lam. Investors, she added, are “starting to see the potential.
“For the first time, investors are asking us about the street. Before I had to say ‘Have you looked at Barton?’”
Rachel Braithwaite, executive director of the Barton Village Business Improvement Area, says she’s also seeing a lot of interest, from within Hamilton and from outside the city.
“There are a lot of new people moving to the community,” said Braithwaite.
“Yes, some of them are Toronto developers, but you know what? The Toronto developers are developing the abandoned buildings that nobody else has a vision for.”
The next step, she said, is to make Barton a destination.
“It’s one of the busiest streets in Hamilton for a lot of people to drive right through and not stop,” said Braithwaite.
“It’s a bit of the chicken and the egg. Which comes first?”
FIVE YEARS AGO,
one of the properties on the city’s vacant building registry was 659 Barton, the former home of Hendry’s Shoes.
At the time, the building was owned by Steve Pocrnic, a local real estate specialist, and one of his business partners.
They purchased the building in Sept. 2009 for $175,000, stripped the three ground-floor units down to the walls and then were trying to figure out how to make the financials work to renovate apartments on the two upper floors.
Since the original Barton Street series, the property has changed hands three times in the past three years, rising in price from $342,000 in Oct. 2014 to $610,000 in July 2016.
The new owners are Greg Clewer and Tyler Pearson, who operate a Hamilton-based private equity fund. They’re big believers in Barton Street and they think it has the same potential as some of Toronto’s rejuvenated downtown streets, such as King West, Queen West and Ossington Avenue.
“I’m very confident that Barton is very much marching to that renaissance,” Pearson said.
“A lot of these great wonderful buildings were just kind of left to die,” he added.
“But like with any wonderful old piece of architecture, the bones are usually strong and if you get the right partners and have the right outlook and the right blueprint, you really can bring them back to their original glory.”
Clewer and Pearson have renovat-
The average income along that stretch is about $23,700, about a third less than the city’s median income of $35,500, according to the 2016 census.
ed the six apartments on the upper two floors and they’re all rented out. The small parking lot behind the building is freshly paved and there are new gas meters installed.
They have a tenant ready to occupy one of the ground-floor commercial units and say they’ve been pleasantly surprised by the amount of interest shown in the other two.
“I think people in the business community in Hamilton and the area recognize the direction of Barton and are actually willing to put their business there,” said Clewer.
“Good things are happening in that market and it’s a good community feel.”
Other positive developments are starting to trickle in.
Near Hamilton General Hospital, there are new eateries, such as The Heather, Motel and 1-876 Bar and Grill, which serves West Indian food.
West of Wentworth at 429 Barton, renovations are underway for the new St. Vincent de Paul store, which will be triple the size of the current King Street East location.
Farther east at Barnesdale, a Toronto developer has purchased the former Prince Edward Tavern and is remaking it as the Wingporium at Prince Eddie’s, hoping to take advantage of traffic to and from nearby Tim Hortons Field.
Mike Gismondi, the new owner, said a comparable building in Toronto would cost four times as much.
And farther east still, there are even signs of life at an empty lot one block directly north of the football stadium that’s long sat vacant.
When we last checked in, the property was owned by a company that listed a dead man as a vice-president and director.
For years, a wooden sign on the lot on the south side of Barton between Balsam and Connaught avenues hopefully declared the site would be home to a new convenience store in the spring of 2007.
More than a decade later, the lot is still empty. But owner Adnan Taha has a prospective restaurant tenant lined up and hopes to break ground by the spring.
“There’s been tons of interest,” said Taha.
“Honestly, since the stadium came in, that’s pretty much when all the calls started coming in about the property.”
Taha said he has no intention of selling the property. In fact, he said he owns more than half a dozen properties in Hamilton and he’s hanging on to all of them.
“I’m locked up in Hamilton,” Taha said. “I do see good value here.
“Things are looking up for Hamilton.”
NOT ALL
of the Barton Street stories are happy, however.
When we last saw Sandie Manning, the tiny sprite of a woman was wrestling 50-pound bags of potatoes inside her chip wagon, parked on an empty lot at the corner of Barton and Kensington Avenue.
The truck’s now gone. Manning sold it for scrap three years ago and walked away from the business.
Good riddance, she says. If there’s a Barton Street renaissance, she never saw it.
“Same crackheads, same hookers, seven-year-olds flipping you the bird – yeah, I miss that,” she says with a sarcastic snort.
“The last six months I had the truck, I brought in more money for baby food donations for food banks than I brought in for French fry sales.”
She got tired of the break-ins and the city’s bureaucracy. She got tired of escalating costs and discovering new staff stealing from her within days of being hired.
And she grew tired of the area’s grinding poverty, which never seemed to improve in the decade she operated her chip wagon.
The Ward 3 part of Barton slices through the heart of four census neighbourhoods. Of the 12,000 people who live in those four neighbourhoods between Wellington and Ottawa streets, three of 10 live below the poverty line, including nearly half of all children under age six.
The average income along that stretch is about $23,700, about a third less than the city’s median income of $35,500, according to 2016 census figures.
“When I first got the truck, there was this young girl and I mean young,” Manning said. “If she was 16 or 17, that’s all she was.
“She had one in the stroller brand new and was holding the other one’s hand, who was maybe two.
“By the time I left, she had six,” Manning said.
Manning’s not the only one with a pessimistic view of the street.
Some of the owners along the Ward 3 stretch of Barton point their finger at zoning bylaws for the street that require commercial operations in street-level units, something that has been a struggle to achieve.
Much of the Ward 3 portion of Barton Street East is zoned for commercial and community shopping uses.
That made sense before malls and big-box stores, when small shops on busy streets were the norm.
In the early 1960s, for example, there were 367 businesses on Barton Street between Wellington and Ottawa.
Fifty years later, the number of businesses on that same stretch had dropped to less than 170.
As retail opportunities evaporated, people began moving into the empty storefronts. Some of the properties were never meant for habitation and lack proper facilities, such as kitchens and bathrooms and plumbing.
Judy Lam, the city’s urban renewal manager, agrees that the storefront requirements present a challenge.
“Right now, there probably aren’t enough people in that area to support that much commercial zoning,” Lam said.
It’s more realistic, she said, to expect Barton’s growth to radiate out from places such as Ottawa Street and around Hamilton General Hospital.
“I think there are going to be pockets that will improve first,” Lam said, “and then it will slowly spread on either side.”
The city is also in the midst of proposed changes to zoning bylaws that will provide more flexibility for commercial space along Barton to help eliminate some of the red tape.
Fred Sobie owns a small apartment building at 309 Barton, just steps from the hospital.
Five years ago, four of his 10 tenants had stopped paying rent. His three street-level storefronts had been converted to apartments with bedsheets covering the windows.
Now, one of the ground-level units has been turned back into an actual store, home to a computer shop.
He says he’s seen a notable improvement around his property.
“The last two years have really been positive,” said Sobie. “We’re working with some of the community organizations and they’ve been very helpful.
“Tenants aren’t trying to get in with less than one month’s rent. It used to be ‘I’ll pay you after,’ or ‘My cheque is held up.’
“Now you don’t get the keys until you have first and last month’s rent,” Sobie said. “That’s made it a lot better.”
By no means would Sobie be considered a fly-by-night operator on Barton. His family has owned the building since 1974.
His wife thinks that’s long enough. She wants him to unload the property but he’s not ready yet.
“I need something to do,” Sobie said. “I’m a terrible golfer. This is my golfing substitute.
“I told my wife I’d like to be there five more years and I’d be ready to unload it or pass it on to someone else.”
In the meantime, he’s happy to see some progress for a change.
“It’s nice to have people appreciate what they have and also to give them a chance,” he said. “Everybody’s got to have a place to live.”
“I think the gods are against me sometimes.” LOU DI LEONARDO OWNER, 374 BARTON ST. E.
“The last six months I had the truck, I brought in more money for baby food donations for food banks than I brought in for French fry sales.” SANDIE MANNING FORMER OPERATOR OF A CHIP WAGON ON BARTON STREET EAST