October 14 meeting report
I attended the meeting this evening. It was a relatively small room and it was packed, with lots of people forced to stand in the back. I was unable to easily take notes because of the crowded conditions, so these impressions are from memory. It ran three and a half hours, from about 7 to 10:30. Adam Vaughan, a city planner whose name I didn’t catch, a representative from TCHC whose name I also didn’t catch, and Peter Clewes were the four main speakers and moderators. (PS, Clewes bears an uncanny resemblance to David Caruso! I’m tempted to ask him to wear sunglasses, then take them off in a dramatic manner and say something witty.) The crowd was generally hostile to the tower and Vaughan had to intercede at the beginning to tell people to wait their turn to speak or they would be asked to leave. There were quite a few “I let you make your point, now let me make mine” exchanges between various people throughout the evening.
The low-rise portion consists of 1) one of the schools in a U shape along the south; 2) one of the schools in an inverted U along the north; 3) the day care at the northwest corner; 4) the seniors’ residence along the north IIRC; 5) the community centre along the north IIRC. The west side merges into the park and is meant as a general play/spillover area for the children, without any buildings in order to maintain a north-south view corridor from the lake deep into the north part of the city. There is an east-west open public way through the centre (ie separating the U from the inverted U) aligned with the east-west corridors through the West One / N1 block and the Harbour View Estates block.
The main point of contention was the 43 (?) story affordable housing tower at the southeast corner of the project. Suffice to say, there was a lot of disagreement about the basic principle of public housing with the usual arguments about whether it is a disincentive to work and unfair to those paying their own way etc. If I remember correctly, this will be a self-financing operation where the rents are indexed to 80% of fair market rate. There were also the standard concerns about falling property values, crime, ghettos etc. The planner eventually tried to focus discussion on the built form, since ultimately the public housing is mostly set in stone and not changeable in this forum.
I wouldn’t know how to critique the tower professionally, but from my layman’s perspective I liked it. It is very thin and oriented north-south. The east face has no balconies. The west face has very large and interesting balconies that jut out a ways, with high glass walls to reduce wind. There are some sort of gardens inside aligned with the elevators to create public spaces and improve air circulation? They are aiming for silver or gold LEED and it has geothermal systems, rainwater harvesting, etc. They are aiming for lots of large family units. Amusingly, someone complained that it looked different from the other Cityplace towers and they preferred a uniform look, to which Vaughan poined out that in the earlier phases of Cityplace many people complained the towers were too uniform.
The people in West One or N1 were very annoyed at losing part of their view and felt the zoning should remain at roughly 7 stories as they felt this had been “promised” and marketed to them. I have some sympathy for them, but at the end of the day I love tall buildings and it’s hard to take people seriously who already live in 40 to 50 story towers in
downtown Toronto that were objects of contention themselves when planned, and then act shocked and surprised that zoning is getting changed to put up another tower beside them. There was definitely a strong sense of entitlement, and also naivity at thinking that zonings never get changed. I should say in fairness that I don't live immediately beside the project so I'm not impacted.
There was a lot of discussion about the constraints of trying to fit the full density into the space, and that doing it as a low-rise while superficially geometrically feasible creates various other problems such as family-sized units where all bedrooms have windows, etc.
Also, someone had to ask what TCHC was, they thought it was a private developer!
