Quayside going in a different direction
Waterfront Toronto ditches high-tech vision, focuses on long-term care
Waterfront Toronto is ditching the vision of the high-tech, sensor-driven smart district that Sidewalk Labs wanted to create on Toronto’s eastern waterfront.
In an interview Tuesday, developer Steve Diamond, chair of the tri-government corporation Waterfront Toronto, said it plans to go in a different direction, one that incorporates a “post-COVID-19” vision that sets aside data collection as a priority and focuses more on housing affordability and longterm-care housing needs for seniors.
“We’re looking at innovative ways, with our government partners in terms of long-term care and seniors living,” Diamond said in a telephone interview.
Early next year, Waterfront Toronto plans to launch a new request for proposals for a partner to develop the 12-acre Quayside property near Queens Quay E. and Parliament Street.
Waterfront Toronto hopes to have a partner named by next summer. Before that, it will launch consultations with the public and community stakeholders.
The new RFP will be the second launched by Waterfront Toronto, the first one issued in 2017, with Sidewalk Labs being the winning bidder.
The latest move comes after Google sister firm Sidewalk Labs announced in early May that it would be dropping its proposal to build a residential and commercial development at Quayside that would have featured data collection and technological innovations to make urban living more efficient for residents there.
Sidewalk dropped the project citing “unprecedented” economic uncertainty around the world and in Toronto’s real estate market.
Sensors and data collection were to be used to measure things like pedestrian traffic, weather conditions, energy and garbage disposal habits and more.
Sidewalk Labs also wanted to create a district where all residential and commercial buildings would be made of timber. A new timber factor was to supply the wood.
That’s out now too, Diamond says, adding an entire district of wood buildings was “perhaps just a little too aggressive” given Sidewalk proposed buildings taller than the allowed provincial limit of six storeys, proposals that would have required changes in provincial regulations.
Maybe a proposal calling for one building that is wood-based and taller than six storeys “we may take a look at that for Quayside,” Diamond said.
“But we wouldn’t want to base an entire proposal on a legislative framework that wasn’t in existence.”
The Sidewalk Labs project ran into controversy when citizens groups, privacy advocates and some elected leader raised concerns about privacy and the data collection implications.
Waterfront Toronto’s board met last week and a new course for the revitalization of Quayside was brought forward, Diamond says.
“One of the issues that has really come to light now, amid COVID-19 is that integrated home care models for seniors, where you can go from living in a unit on your own, to assisted living, into long-term-care facilities currently is rarely, if ever, available.
“We want to pursue models with government partners to determine whether that might be an opportunity” in terms of the Quayside site.
Waterfront Toronto says it will work to “accelerate public funding” for housing developed at Quayside.
Housing affordability and creative ways to achieve that will be a bigger priority now for Quayside, Diamond says.
“We are looking at our most vulnerable communities and have begun some discussions with some of our Indigenous partners we have dealt with in the past in terms of determining their needs for part of the project,” Diamond said referring to the affordable housing goals.
Diamond pointed out that creating a “next generation” district with innovation and technology is still part of the goal for Quayside’s future and so there will be an opportunity for home grown tech firms to jump in and provide services.
He said for that a company might, for example, want, to propose technology that would enable a resident to use an app to figure out how many people are on the next elevator in a building, or propose innovative and efficient heating and air conditioning systems.
“I’m not saying the project won’t be innovative, it just won’t be data driven,” Diamond said.
The data collection and regulation of data “aren’t necessarily what we see today as being supportive of the city in a postCOVID environment,” Diamond said.
Another key goal of the project will be helping to spark economic revitalization after the coronavirus, Diamond says.
Diamond says if a developer for the site is secured by next summer, optimistically speaking a marketing and site plan could be in place in the fall of 2021 with shovels in the ground in March 2022.
The project would probably take three or four years to complete, he says.
Diamond thinks with many of the aspects of the Sidewalk project no longer on the table, the project might be less expensive to produce.