Toronto’s date with density
Predrag Kalinic only partly jokes when he says that every time he gets stuck on the Gardiner Expressway, he sees condo dwellers “just three metres away, eating, drinking and making love” in their suites.
“I don’t know what those people were thinking buying those condos,” the independent cabbie says, adding that tourists laugh when they peer into their glass cubbies.
As downtown city blocks become more densely packed, so too have Toronto streets. Which is why the 25-year veteran road warrior, like many taxi drivers in the GTA, doesn’t like otherwise lucrative airport fares to or from Concord CityPlace, that warren of 15-and-counting condo towers.
The towers are bounded by Lake Shore Blvd., Spadina Ave., Front St. W. and Bathurst St.
Flat rate is $53, whether it takes 45 minutes or, more likely, 90 minutes, just because it takes so long to get in and out of the downtown during peak times.
As developers rush to build “supertalls” on shrinking sites downtown, shutting down traffic lanes for months, it doesn’t look like relief is coming any time soon for Kalinic.
It begs the question: how dense is too dense?
“We’re building way more than we should downtown, we’re not catching up with the infrastructure that we need, our subways are bursting and yet we still want to pump more people in,” insists Ted Kesik, a professor of building science at the University of Toronto and an outspoken critic of many of Toronto’s condo developments. “Everything has maxed itself out.”
After decades of GTA sprawl, people and jobs are coming back to the core. According to a recent TTC report, the downtown population, now at 71,000, is expected to almost double to 130,000 by 2031. At the same time the number of jobs, now at 315,000, will increase to 404,000.
It’s as if all the kids who grew up in two-car households in the suburbs are choosing to walk or bike to work while living in suites not much bigger than their bedrooms back home.
Meanwhile, foreign students are renting investor-owned condos, older singles and empty nesters are downsizing and rich suburbanites who come to town to dine, shop or see theatre, have pieds-à-terre.
Despite “condo country’s” shortcomings, say most experts, Toronto can — and should — be a lot denser.
When farmland is being swallowed up by driveways and power centres, when water tables are at risk, and the average daily commute is 82 minutes, density is the way to improve city life, they argue.
It means people walk more and drive less — 45 per cent of those living downtown do walk to work — which is considered better for the environment and citizens’ health. And, while density can strain infrastructure such as transit, roadways, hydro grids and even sewage, they say it’s less costly than building out.
Says Pierre Filion, a professor at the University of Waterloo’s School of Planning: “To combat urban sprawl, we need vertical development rather than horizontal development.”
But to be a good idea, density needs to fulfil a number of conditions, cautions Filion.
“It depends where it is located. It depends on how much mixed use that you have. It depends on the makeup of the population that lives in that dense area. Do the buildings recreate a city street atmosphere? Or are they like St. James Town, where you have those big slabs that arise from what was intended to be a park-like setting, but is more like a parking-lot environment?”
Toronto’s recently appointed chief planner, Jennifer Keesmaat, says the strategy of Toronto’s official plan is to direct growth to transit-rich areas like the downtown. “You could argue the plan is working,” she says. “As we create that critical mass around transit zones, one of the things that we are also seeing is that we create a very strong pedestrian environment. “But that doesn’t mean anything goes. There is a tipping point, where people are falling off the sidewalk because there just isn’t enough room or where there might be onerous impact on services.” The service probably hardest hit is transit. Downtown residents are constantly tweeting photos of packed subway platforms and bunched-up streetcars. “The King, Queen and Spadina cars are the busiest surface routes the TTC operates; we carry 50,000 a day on all three of those,” says Bill Dawson, TTC’s manager of service planning. “These three routes carry more riders than the whole GO Transit system. It’s been growing consistently, significantly, ever since the railway lands have been getting developed.” The city’s west end is expected to become even more choked. As Keesmaat points out, some 100 possible locations near the Rogers Centre — currently occupied by surface parking lots and two-storey buildings — are ripe for development. She acknowledges that approving massive proposals is getting increasingly complex because planners need to collaborate across a variety of divisions: transit, water, hydro, sewage and more. This can result in some novel solutions to unexpected problems. “One of the big issues is dog parks,” Keesmaat says. “Parks and rec has had to develop a whole system of irrigation to irrigate all of the dog waste in the parks downtown because, if they didn’t, all of them would reek to high heaven, just from the urine.”