Air Ambulance flight path is likely a big reason this isn't higher, sick kids heli-paid is quite close. Agree with @70Challenger about that massive parking lot to the north, who owns that?
The flight path restrictions only look to affect the parking lot, but they still have at least ~162m to work with if they wanted to build something there.

UT.png

Source: Page 14: https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2017/pg/bgrd/backgroundfile-106156.pdf Note: red lines added to show the area in question.
 
Simply, the rules that apply to those projects are not the same as the rules that apply here. Anything behind the courthouse is almost certianly outside the view corridor, it's too far West. Also those projects aren't approved yet. There could be view-related changes if needed.

As for the project at 483 Bay, the reason it sits on the East side of the site is to keep it from being behind the Clock Tower on Old City Hall, which is the view that is protected there. It's also too far south to have any impact on the view corridor for City Hall.

Essentially the rules are about what heights are allowed in specific areas behind City Hall as not to overwhelm it in the postcard view. Mostly this means anything directly north of City Hall, and maybe a little to each site of that. As such, this site is absolutely one of them. And as a City agency, CreateTO was not going to propose something that breaks the City's rules in the way a private developer might.

Just be glad this isn't the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, which have a 137 page document about all the rules covering protected view planes. The rules here are thankfully much simpler.
To add some visualization to this, buildings cant breach the silhouette line (Red one in the pictures below):

All view corridors:
image-003.jpg


View Corridor A:
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View Corridor B:
image-006-jpg.486353

image-007.jpg


View Corridor C:
image-008.jpg
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View Corridor D between the buildings:
image-010.png
image-011.jpg

Height permitted:
image-022.png

Pulled from https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2018/te/bgrd/backgroundfile-118130.pdf which also shows other protected view corridors like Old City Hall and St. James Cathedral.

Based on the angle, the area between the proposed buildings might be in the view corridor of the much more restrive point D and be limited to the height at some point between the 62m Dundas St W and 115m Gerrard St W markers.
 

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Interest within Toronto’s development community is high as the city prepares to redevelop an iconic site, the former Toronto Coach Terminal at 610 Bay St. and 130 Elizabeth St.

Sixteen teams participated in the stage one Request for Expression of Interest with a number of top developers emerging on a seven-team shortlist that was approved by city council June 14.

The shortlisted firms — Capital Developments, Hines Canada, Kilmer Group and EllisDon, MOD Developments, TAS Developments, Tricon Residential, and Tridel Group and Woodbourne Capital Management — will be invited to participate in a Request for Proposals that will be issued soon. The winning proponent is expected to be unveiled later this year.

CreateTO development director Peter Harron said the city agency is satisfied the redevelopment process has elicited enthusiasm and sparked creative proposals.

“As an organization, I think we’re quite happy with the response that this received, and we were quite impressed by the submissions as well,” he said.

“There was a lot of really good proposals, good visions for the site.”

The seven submissions were presented to council in confidential documents. Harron explained the process is competitive and the planning team will not be making documents public during this stage for fear of compromising the process.

Priorities for the site as approved by council include creation of affordable housing, delivery of a paramedic services multi-hub and inclusion of employment uses associated with the life science and biomedical sectors, given the site’s proximity to the city’s health sciences district.

The housing component will be a mixed-use highrise with a mix of market and affordable units. The target is for at least 33 per cent affordability.

“From our perspective, we did try to provide quite a bit of guidance in terms of what type of city-building objectives we’re looking for on the site or what the guiding principles were for the site,” said Harron. “I think we got a lot of proposals that really did focus on a lot of those guiding principles, those city-building objectives that we were looking for.”

Before its decommissioning, the site was used as Toronto’s hub of intercity bus service for nearly 100 years. The terminal opened in 1931; it’s on the city’s heritage registry.

Harron said the preservation and adaptive reuse of the bus terminal with its multiple bays was viewed as a unique opportunity by the participants.

“The response we got was quite positive,” he said. “They talked in quite good detail about retention, adaptive reuse of the heritage building, and the bus shed facade as well.”

The offering is for the Toronto coach terminal, at 610 Bay, as well as the annex building, at 130 Elizabeth, which gives the designers more space to combine the proposed multiple uses.

“There has been, I think, a commitment to deliver on all of those objectives,” said Harron. “We’ve done a fair amount of background work before taking this out, in terms of preparing conceptual plans, facility fit, feasibility plans as well, just to make sure that there was an opportunity to hit all these proposed uses in one form.

“We’re definitely looking for creativity from the development community on how they’re delivered.”

The site was one of eight identified by the city as part of its ModernTO Workplace Modernization Program.

The sites were deemed underutilized and CreateTO was assigned the task of “unlocking value” to meet such city-building objectives as creating affordable housing, undertaking public realm improvements and identifying employment opportunities.

CreateTO held two pop-up public forums last year and the planning team said there was particular interest in the decommissioned bus station.

It was “meaningful for many people we talked to — they shared stories of their experiences travelling through the site, either coming to Toronto or leaving the city,” the planners reported.
 
The street scape looks to be kept largely intact. Sure why not... Now if we could just get someone to develop that ugly parking lot to the north...
 
Let's just hand it over to Hines or TAS here, the other 2 firms wouldnt do this site any justice at all.
 
Let's just hand it over to Hines or TAS here, the other 2 firms wouldnt do this site any justice at all.

How did you get the 7 shortlisted firms down to 4?

I'm not going to offer a blanket endorsement to anything unseen.

But Mod has done right by historical properties in the past.

****

I hope the intent is to make all the submissions public prior to arriving at a decision.
 
The 2024 budget submission of the Toronto Parking Authority, heading in report form to next week's meeting shows something interesting.....

It shows the parking lot here being decomissioned to ModernTO next year, in 2024:

https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2023/pa/bgrd/backgroundfile-239489.pdf (second last page).

Stay tuned.
The spread the decommissioning costs over 4 or 5 years and I am not sure if it starts on Year 1 or on Year 5 or whether this is just an 'accounting exercise'.
 
The spread the decommissioning costs over 4 or 5 years and I am not sure if it starts on Year 1 or on Year 5 or whether this is just an 'accounting exercise'.

I may be incorrect; but I didn't read this as 'decommissioning costs'; the title is operating impact of capital and I read this as net income no longer collected.

So if the lot were operating, those revenues would go back in; once you remove them, that number repeats indefinitely over the 5 year window and 10 year windows (that seems to add up).
 
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Everything I've seen to date has is proposing two towers from the 50s to the 70s in terms of height. The flight path does not affect these lands, only the Conservatory Group's holdings on the north side of the street, @Fervid Corona.

It looks like the new, expanded MZO flight-paths now appear to place a serious height restriction on the BAY street parcel, directly over the old Coach Terminal...???

Can someone with a more expert eye please confirm if my "BLUE cone is now a problem" assumption is correct..??? Thx!

SOURCE - https://cassels.com/insights/the-sk...l-height-of-development-in-torontos-downtown/

610 Bay - FLIGHT PATH MZO 2024 - Highlight.png
 
It looks like the new, expanded MZO flight-paths now appear to place a serious height restriction on the BAY street parcel, directly over the old Coach Terminal...???

Can someone with a more expert eye please confirm if my "BLUE cone is now a problem" assumption is correct..??? Thx!

SOURCE - https://cassels.com/insights/the-sk...l-height-of-development-in-torontos-downtown/

View attachment 538423
Yes, this impacts the site, and many more sites throughout downtown which may need to reduce height now.

It’s my understanding that there was an incident with a helicopter at one of the hospitals that triggered the need for these changes, so it’s all for good reason.
 
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