Give condo buildings what they need to become communities
Exerting a little leverage could go a long way toward turning condos into communities, say urban developers. With the city in the midst of a mixed-use development boom, what if every new condo was accompanied by a daycare, a health care clinic, a dentist’s office, a library and a grocery store? “Typically the developers are looking for something from the city. . . . They’re looking for some approvals — and that gives the city leverage, it gives neighbourhoods leverage,” says Ken Greenberg, veteran urban planner and architect.
What if the city traded height and floorspace ratios for the promise of a groundfloor daycare or doctor’s office?
“The smarter developers are doing it anyway,” says Greenberg, highlighting neighbourhoods such as King-Spadina.
They realize planning has to go beyond zoning, he says, and “get into the qualitative issues and the human needs of making good neighbourhoods.”
But expanding the practice isn’t as simple as mandating that new buildings include more essential services, not just retail.
“It’s not enough to say ‘put a daycare.’ It comes down to who’s going to run it and who’s going to operate it,” says Jeanhy Shim, president of Housing Lab Toronto. “It’s a publicprivate partnership.”
Slowly but surely, Shim and Greenberg agree, businesses are catching on.
“We’re seeing that the retail industry and the service industry are waking up to the opportunities that condos represent,” says Shim, who lives in a downtown condo herself.
“I’ve physically seen our city grow and transform,” she says. “Big grocery stores are now urban-format; there’s a lot more doctors and dentists moving into a lot of retail spaces in condo buildings.”
It’s a question of finding “win-win situations” with each development, says Shim, and, to take a page out of Vancouver’s book, “negotiate.”
In the next five years, George Dark, a partner at Urban Strategies Inc., expects to see more developers embrace what he calls “the softer side.”
“The more wonderful cities are those that are completely mixed up, and there’s a library beside an art gallery beside a residential building beside an office building,” says Dark, who is helping to create a new mixed-use neighbourhood, dubbed “The Well,” at Front St. W. and Spadina Ave.
“If all you have is a world made up of condominium towers and office buildings, even though it’s massively dense. . . . It’s sort of isolated,” he says.
That doesn’t mean the city should adopt a blanket approach, Greenberg says, since each neighbourhood has its own needs. When it comes to new developments, the city already evaluates education needs and traffic concerns, he says, but it needs to go beyond those items. “We need to have a definition of what constitutes a healthy, sustainable neighbourhood,” Greenberg says, “and make a checklist of all the things that could be required, based on different levels of population.” Food, pharmacy, banks, hardware stores, playgrounds, daycare, community centres and libraries — the list goes on. “I think there’s a convergence,” he says. “This is something (where) thoughtful people on all sides of the issue are coming around to the same conclusions.”