TOGETHER WE CREATE BETTER DEVELOPMENT
Withintensification now mandated across the GTA, the builders of new housing have had to increase their community engagement efforts.
In the decade since Ontario’s Growth Plan was introduced, GTA developers have come to recognize the importance of consulting with neighbourhood stakeholders very early on to head off potential problems and achieve positive outcomes by working together to create developments that benefit all concerned.
“The planning process is really about managing change in a community that’s ripe for redevelopment,” says Rockport Group CEO Jack Winberg. “And the key to helping people properly respond to that change is communication and information.”
Rockport’s most recent project, Montgomery Square, is an example of this philosophy. The mixeduse development on Yonge Street just north of Eglinton Avenue is located on the site of a surplus post office sold to Rockport by Canada Post. Rockport engaged in early conversations with the community and came to learn that the limestone post office building was considered the neighbourhood’s crown jewel. “We knew they wanted us to incorporate it,” says Winberg, adding that doing so was not easy and had implications.
The property includes a parkette, which, combined with the post office building, occupies 40 per cent of the developable land. To make the development economically feasible, the residential tower would have to be a certain height and density, which Winberg’s team made clear to five different ratepayer associations over a nearly three-month consultation period. “We brought them into the process and helped them understand our choices,” he says. “And they all came back and said, ‘We want you to save the building, and we want the parkette in front.’”
When Rockport moved ahead with the project—a 27-storey, 230-unit rental building with 20,000 square feet of retail space housed in the old post office—it had the full support of the community, which felt it had had meaningful input. “It was all about communication and making the effort to work with them,” says Winberg.
Frank Giannone came to understand the benefits of community outreach over the two decades that his company, FRAM Building Group, has been developing Port Credit Village, near Lakeshore and Hurontario Rd. in Mississauga. During the project’s earlier phases, FRAM experienced opposition from ratepayer groups that disagreed over proposed density and building heights. Regatta, a six-storey building delivered in 2003, was only built after being green-lighted by the Ontario Municipal Board following a contentious appeal process.
Before FRAM went to work on the most recent phase, a 22-storey condo tower, it tried a different approach. The site had been approved for construction of a pair of 10-storey buildings, “but we felt there was a better solution,” Giannone says—a single taller tower would occupy a smaller footprint. The builder launched a workshop series to share its vision for its plan. The approach worked, the community supported the plan and Mississauga council approved the tower.
As part of its community engagement efforts, FRAM shifted funds it had earmarked for advertising toward supporting events around Port Credit, including the waterfront festival, a jazz and blues festival and a local busker festival, plus movies and music in the village piazza it built in an earlier phase, which became its advertising program. “We helped make it an active, busy place for our purchasers and for the existing community,” says Giannone. “With the community’s support for the revised plan, FRAM funded the creation of a community foundation to carry on the local event support after the completion of the project. It was our gift back.”
Community workshops have now become the standard for FRAM in Port Credit and at its other developments, including the condos FRAM has been building at CF Shops at Don Mills. “Working closely with the community helped us a lot there,” says Giannone, who encourages ratepayer groups to be proactive, versus reactive, in dealing with development.
“Don’t just oppose it,” he says. “Control your destiny and infl uence things for the positive by being part of the solution.”