Toronto | 25 Sewells | 32.91m | 9s | Brenyon Way Charitable Foundation | SvN | Page 2

HousingNowTO · Sep 10, 2021

For comparison, some new affordable-housing from a recent London, UK trip are in this thread, we need those larger floor-plates on every floor to "fit in" all of the things that the City wants/needs...

https://twitter.com/x/status/1429490449300000780

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ADRM · Sep 10, 2021

DavidCapizzano said:
TBH this is like, the most current and in style building proposal I have seen in Toronto in ages. This look (opaque, bricky, saturated) is more in line with most european housing developments than anything we've seen pop up in the city in quite a while.

Exactly. This is straight out of the contemporary Western European mid-rise handbook, and I mean that in a very complimentary way. I’m thrilled that SvN are at least trying out that standard — it would be a most welcome one for a city that has been in recent years utterly dominated by crappy (and environmentally unfriendly) window wall, aluminum paneling, and proliferous spandrel.

HousingNowTO · Sep 11, 2021

Tramways said:
I'm sorry but this looks like it might belong in the old Regent Park -- the one that was recently torn down -- or the current Lawrence Heights neighbourhood. Affordable housing does not always have to look like "warehousing for the poor". It seems like minimal effort was given to this design when it could have been at least a little more imaginative.

I'm not sure what "warehousing for the poor" is supposed to mean, but most of the "imaginative design" is in making the buildings energy-efficient, family-friendly and wheelchair-accessible on the INSIDE...

Why does TikTok hate this affordable housing development?

The new multifamily buildings in your neighborhood actually slow displacement.

www.vox.com

Tramways · Sep 12, 2021

People have mentioned that it doesn't look anything like the most recent buildings downtown.
But this proposal is not downtown. It's in Malvern/Scarborough.
A quick check of Google Streetview show existing buildings along Sewells are almost identical in their "slab-ness".
If the intention of this proposal was to conform, then it's a success -- it will not stand out in any way.

Some specific objections, as a former apartment dweller:
- it seems the common space will always(?) be in the shade of a building -- how does that bode for healthy trees?
- what's the point of a balcony, when it's unusable for half the year? Personally, I would have preferred the extra space INSIDE the apartment and I wouldn't have had to constantly shoo away the pigeons that had decided to camp there.

Good points: bicycle parking -- but only if it's done right and it's not a ghetto for abandoned bikes.

HousingNowTO · Jul 25, 2022

"The development proposed at the site of the former Malvern Emmanuel United Church would consist of a pair of apartment buildings, nine storeys apiece, with a mix of 317 subsidized units, moderately affordable homes and average market-priced rentals, some fully accessible.

But with a loan of more than $80 million required for the larger, 201-unit building alone, Brenyon Way Charitable Foundation board president Thomas Burns says the prospect of paying millions more in interest, along with the rising costs of building materials and skilled labour, has them reconsidering starting the smaller building, which is meant to have 116 units."

https://twitter.com/x/status/1545369870086197248

interchange42 · Jul 29, 2022

HousingNowTO said:
"The development proposed at the site of the former Malvern Emmanuel United Church would consist of a pair of apartment buildings, nine storeys apiece, with a mix of 317 subsidized units, moderately affordable homes and average market-priced rentals, some fully accessible.

But with a loan of more than $80 million required for the larger, 201-unit building alone, Brenyon Way Charitable Foundation board president Thomas Burns says the prospect of paying millions more in interest, along with the rising costs of building materials and skilled labour, has them reconsidering starting the smaller building, which is meant to have 116 units."

https://twitter.com/x/status/1545369870086197248

Non-profit affordable housing developers should not have to go to the commercial banks for loans to create these buildings, there should be government financing so to avoid major interest being added. Without that, there's not much of a serious commitment from our supposed leadership to tackle the housing crisis. The system is totally broken if bank shareholders are taking as much profit from such endeavours as they do from more typical business ventures.

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