Looking for a patch of green among the towers
Council may expropriate downtown parking lot in effort to make area more livable for residents
A Toronto councillor is looking to un-pave paradise and green over a parking lot to fill a void of parkland in the downtown core.
Councillor Joe Cressy’s move to expropriate a parking lot in the King St.-Spadina Ave. area highlights the challenge council faces to create livable communities in the midst of unprecedented development.
An ad hoc system sees the city negotiating with developers on a case-by-case basis while limited real estate in the core is being bought out and built up.
And with the constant threat of appeals at the Ontario Municipal Board, it has proven difficult to inject amenities such as parks into those areas without out-of-the-box solutions, councillors say.
Cressy and his colleagues are running out of space — and time.
“The focus has to be on building neighbourhoods, not just building condo towers. And if you’re going to build a neighbourhood, then you need the parkland and the community space to make it livable,” Cressy (Ward 20 Trinity-Spadina) said. “The park becomes your backyard if you live in a condo tower.”
The commercial parking lot on Richmond St. is an increasingly rare flat patch surrounded by skyscrapers, with a perfect view of the CN Tower between Duncan and John Sts.
Although the cost of acquiring the land at market value — a city requirement — is confidential, a 2014 city study estimated the value of land in the downtown core at $30 million to $60 million per acre. With that estimate now outdated and the parking lot measuring 0.65 acres, it could be a record-high parkland purchase for the city.
Cressy and staff say it’s desperately needed.
The King St.-Spadina Ave. area has undergone massive change in the past decade, staff reported. A push to regenerate the largely industrial area saw the population increase from just 945 in 1996 to 19,000 by 2016. The number of employees grew from 24,000 in 2001 to 33,400 by 2015. Proposed development in the area could push both the number of residents and employees to more than 50,000 each.
That proposed development is unprecedented, staff said, with more than 40 projects for mostly condo towers currently under construction, approved or under review by the city.
Despite that, the most-affected blocks east of Spadina Ave. have seen no new parks, except for one 130square-metre parkette.
Although the Richmond St. lot’s owner has agreed to sell the city the land, the stated value “vastly exceeded” what the city thinks it is worth, according to a staff report. Last week, council directed staff to get an appraisal of the site.
Staff noted it is “improbable” the city will be able to reach a negotiated deal, forcing the city to expropriate the space — a lengthy process that council would have to approve. But how did it come to this? The current system for leveraging community spaces from new development is governed by the provincial Planning Act. The act allows cities to secure parkland from developers who want taller or denser buildings than municipal guidelines allow.
The rules allow the city to require part of the development site be dedicated as parkland or for the developer to pay cash-in-lieu of that dedication.
Because developers are increasingly buying up small parcels of land, especially downtown, and building up to compensate, the size of parkland to be dedicated is often an insignificant patch of grass — a tiny parkette for dogs to squat, but not to play, and certainly not enough space for humans to stretch out on a warm day. A “postage stamp,” Cressy called it. So staff recently reported that cashin-lieu is, in most cases, the best outcome the city can achieve. That money is pooled in reserve funds that can only be used toward the development of parks or the purchase of land for parks.
Between 2000 and 2014, the most development-rich downtown wards — Ward 20 (Trinity-Spadina) and Wards 27 and 28 (Toronto Centre-Rosedale) — collected $213 million in cash from developers for parks, according to the city.
The development money is split into separate funds for each ward. In Ward 20, there is $22 million in uncommitted reserve funds. Additional money available for acquisition in a south district fund totals $36 million. A city wide fund for acquisition totals $42 million.
Just raising the word “expropriation” can inspire controversy at city hall. Although it’s rarely done for social infrastructure, Cressy said it’s something the city and province do often to build hard infrastructure such as transit.
Although the city’s attempt to re- generate King St.-Spadina Ave. was “wildly successful,” Cressy said it has left those communities wanting.
“We’ve swung too far to the other spectrum that we’ve built it up without making it livable,” Cressy said.
“If we do not do it now, there will not be the land to do it in the future.”
Jake Tobin Garrett, manager of policy and research for advocacy group Park People, agreed places such as King St.-Spadina Ave. have “totally overshot” their growth potential.
“It’s held up as a success, I guess, of regenerating an area of the city, but it’s almost like they’ve created a monster in this one particular section of town,” he said by phone from his office just down the street from the Richmond St. parking lot. The problem extends beyond downtown.
At Yonge St. and Eglinton Ave., where growth has also well exceeded city targets, there is a similar struggle to maintain public spaces.
On a strip of Soudan Ave., a quiet residential street just southeast of the busy intersection, there has been an influx of planned development — seven new condo and apartment towers containing about 1,600 units directly across from single-family homes.
Although the towers are to be built by different developers, local Ward 22 (St. Paul’s) Councillor Josh Matlow worked to push the buildings back from the north side of the street and dedicate land to create a stretch of green space — a linear park.
Matlow said it is bad planning and bad governance for social infrastructure to not keep pace with development. But he says it’s not too late. “We have an opportunity to support great communities and successful neighbourhoods if we make the right decisions, if our focus is on residents’ quality of life rather than just more condos.”