The dangers of aiming too high with condos
Every fall, urban planning professor Pierre Filion asks the same question of new students at the University of Waterloo.
What’s the most efficient mechanical mode of transportation in the city?
“They come up with all kinds of answers. The bus. The train. The scooter,” he chuckles. “Well, it’s the elevator. It’s quick. It’s efficient. And it doesn’t take much energy to operate.”
Thanks to the condo boom in Toronto, elevator stock has nowhere to go but up. This city is where the 78-storey Aura is erupting at Gerrard and Yonge, where David Mirvish is planning three 80-storey towers on King St. W., where hoarding all over the core announces 60 storeys here and 75 there.
Filion loves that kind of high life, as long as the skyscrapers sit on the street in the right way, with retail, restaurants and other services.
Lloyd Alter, on the other hand, is not so sure.
An architect and former developer who now teaches sustainable design at Ryerson University, he often casts a jaundiced eye upward.
“There is what I call ‘the Goldilocks theory of density,’ ” Alter says. “That is, not too low that you can’t get human interaction and you can’t support a store on the main street, and not so high that it gets depersonalized and anonymous because there are just too many people packed in slab towers.” So how high is too high? One proposed condo project is the Massey Tower, slated on the tiny site of the 108-year-old Bank of Commerce building at 197 Yonge St., across from the Eaton Centre.
Long derelict, this Beaux-Arts building might find new life as a spectacular lobby to a 60-storey tower atop the Queen St. subway station. It’s already nearly sold out.
The building hit a temporary road block with city planners, who say it represents “overdevelopment” for the area. But last week, Gary Switzer, CEO of MOD Developments, cleared a major zoning hurdle with Toronto city council and is preparing for a statutory public meeting on the project in May.
Switzer maintains what matters is form and function, not height. “Is the building well designed? Does it meet the street in the right way? If it does those things, does it really matter if it’s 40 storeys or 50 storeys or 60 storeys?”
Some experts say it matters, especially with the extreme-weather events that climate change threatens to bring.
“What do you do when you’re on the 40th floor and you are in a blackout and you don’t have any water and you have to go all the way down?” demands Ted Kesik, a U of T building science professor.
Alter agrees. “When you look at New York after Hurricane Sandy, and you look at how fast it took for buildings that had been evacuated to recover, what you find is that there were people who could not return to their 40- or 50-storey towers,” he says. “Their systems were blown out, everything was gone and they had to stay in hotels. The walk-ups, and the brownstones, and the six- or seven-storey buildings, were resilient.
“(Toronto) is not planning for this resilience.”
Both Filion and Alter point to the St. Lawrence neighbourhood as the ideal: a series of low and midrise buildings, a diversity of housing, a vast shared green space, retail and restaurants, access to transit and an easy walk to the Financial District. Filion explains that the area inspired a city plan for developing “avenues” along wide main streets such as the Lakeshore, Kingston Rd., St. Clair and Sheppard Aves. But, he laments, the idea never coalesced and much of those streets remain virtual highways. “The problem the city is facing is that developers don’t like those kinds of (low and midrise) buildings, because once they have all their building equipment in place, it is much more profitable for them to keep on building up.” Some developers, however, may be reconsidering, concerned the market for the 400- to 600-sq.-ft. condos they’re now building is saturated. An industry survey, conducted in December 2012 by Urbanation, the go-to source for condo news, revealed 53 per cent think six- to eight-storey condominium projects on the avenue is the next big market opportunity. Toronto chief planner Jane Keesmaat says the city is trying to direct growth to the avenues, adding between July 2010 and 2012 the city received 44 applications for zoning along avenues. Alter agrees there are so many places to develop in Toronto, you don’t have to go high. Even so, “there have been all these wars in places, like the Beaches, over buildings that are six storeys high. People are saying ‘It will ruin the Beach, it will ruin the Beach.’ “The fact of the matter is, that’s where people want to be. And we need to be going up and down all of our main streets, and building six storeys. That’s the kind of density we need so we can put transit services down.” As for Filion, the elevator advocate, he has an admission to make: “Elevators, when they work, are the most efficient mode of transportation. When they don’t work, they are potentially a disaster. I would never live above the 10th floor in a building.”