44 North said:
To the supporters: So a total of 433 stories spread over six buildings is okay? But how would you feel about an alternative scenario of twenty 20-storey buildings? All built at the same time, all by the same designers. Doesn't sound so great, does it? Just picturing that can remind people of Soviet microdistricts (blocks), the failures of mid-20C urban renewal efforts, the ghettos they created, the poor integration with the city, and the demolition of these slums across the US, Great Britain, and even in places like Regent Park.
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What would be wrong with 20x20storey buildings? If they literally spammed the same block twenty times over then maybe, but that's a straw man argument (how are 20 uninspired clones of eachother comparable to 6 unique and, so far, high quality towers?). An area of 20 highrise buildings of consistent quality and design is not something i stay awake worrying about.

It's a really stupid argument. I could just as well argue that 90 midrise buildings built by the same developer at the same time would look like Regent Park's low rises section, which it wouldn't. They could just as easily look like Paris. You're substituting an argument against density with an argument against bad design, and nobody here is in favor of bad design.


44 North said:
It does seem like a slippery slope argument to say these will end up as slums. But the reality is that even in their "prime" location the buildings are poorly integrated, are next to a crumbling elevated highway, and more than likely will be designed to exclude families. It's a ghetto in the making.
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It's more like a waterslide...

To pick one flaw, families aren't being 'excluded' from these buildings. Developers don't have some kind of vendetta against family housing. The issue is any new constructions project in the area will have costs >700$/sf. Very few families (not none, but very few) can afford that. Large units (3bdr, which are still way smaller than 'average' Canadian dwelling sizes) are way harder to sell or rent than 1 & 2brd units. In my building (right north of 1-7 Yonge, on the Esplanade) 3bdr units usually don't even go to 'families' at all but rather roomates or simply really rich people.

You can talk all you want about "quaint European midrise cities" but no European city of Toronto's size has families living 200ft from its CBD. No Berliners move their families right next to Friedrich-strasse. They move a bit further out and take the S-bahn like normal folk. Now, no European ('cept London) builds super tall residential buildings downtown anyways, but the same dynamics are at play. The CBD's land prices are always higher then peripheral areas, which invetiably pushes larger family units away from the CBD. I'd challenge either you or RC8 to find a single >1m pop European city which has significant concentrations of family housing in its CBD.

The real issue for families is that non-condo residential space downtown hasn't kept up with demand for decades. A small, termite ridden shack in Parkdale will be over .5m now. Many families are priced out of all of the downtown shoulder areas which could be attractive for urban families. There's hardly any new construction so prices just keep going up.


44 North said:
...and it's bound to fail.
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Then why hasn't the waterfront area failed already? We've been building highrises there for decades. The earlier developments were actually pretty bad in a number of respects (crappy relationship to streets, not much retail). But it's hardly a failure. Statement's like 'bound to fail' are just ridiculous.
 
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^ not only very few families in big European cities live by the CBD, but also those families usually live in much smaller apartments in the "shoulder areas" rather than detached or semi detached houses that Torontonian families feel absolutely entitled to.

If "families" are willing to give up their spacious single family house lifestyle and accept condo apartment living, of course many of them will find ideal accomodation near downtown. In reality most families expect separate livingroom and family room, preferably a dining room, and big washrooms with double sinks. Not sure many European families have those.
 
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Well, first of all the project in question isn't even in the CBD. Rather, it's actually somewhat distant.

But even if we stretch that term to mean "the core", there are still lots of single family homes both on the arteries and on side streets. And lots of regular old-style neighbourhoods. Yes, they've been somewhat marginalized into pockets, but they're still there. The Victorians rowhouses, the Edwardian homes across from the AGO, the older condos spacious and affordable enough for families to live in. No one needs to commute on some S-Bahn, they can just step out their front gate and walk across the street to work.

Many major European cities don't have that. Many major North American cities don't have that. You have businesses areas, and residential. And now a few condos in between. This is the vibe I seem to get from some of you, that this is what TO needs to strive for (even if it means obliterating century-old homes). But unfortunately Toronto doesn't fit into that SimCity model. It doesn't have to be too costly to live with a family downtown. Why? Because people are already doing it, and have been for quite some time. It's only the recent advent of the new style of building where the idea of a family in a condo is something unheard of, and clearly for the super-rich.

Why does it have to be soooo expensive per square foot? Why does a derelict corner 1km from the CBD and beside a hwy be someting a family is steered away from living in, either through price-per-area or just the demographic they're aiming to sell? And why are people so against the notion of communites downtown that aren't glass skyscrapers?
 
Would mid rise brick buildings or replica Edwardian townhouses at 1-7 Yonge St. be affordable for families in your view? I mean families not named Weston or Thomson or something like that.
 
44 North: calling this piece of land distant from the CBD is quite the leap. It's next-door to it. A short walk. In fact, the CBD seems to have vaulted the tracks, and is now vaulting the Gardiner and growing towards this site. That's what One York and WPP III bring to the area: a new arm of the CBD. That arm's artery will be the overhead PATH in the area, and you'd have to be in complete denial to disagree.

Another arm of the PATH system will extend through 45 Bay, reach under the Gardiner, and pop up at 1-7 Yonge. Voila, another extension of the CBD.

Everyone else knows it, so that's why this land was so expensive, and that's why the densities are being proposed at this scale.

42
 
44 North -

I'm honestly a bit confused by what you're trying to get at.

1-7 Yonge is definitely in the CBD. Millions of square feet of office space are going up around it, it will have PATH, it's right next to Union Station. It's in the CBD. Calling it a 'derelict corner' and such makes it seem like you're just being willfully ignorant of why the area is very expensive. It's not a conspiracy that 1-7 Yonge is expensive, you're just purposefully ignoring all the traits which make it desirable. If you did build row houses it would still be extremely expensive. The individual town homes would all be well over one million dollars surely.

The 'city' is a big place. Recognizing that the center of a major city like Toronto probably justifies high rises isn't the same as saying 'families have no place downtown' or that row houses are somehow never justified.

You're also romanticizing previous urban forms. The Edwardian houses around the AGO are hardly the indisputable epitome of built form you make them out to be. People who live in these homes still have to commute, the homes are still unaffordable for most (does anyone even live across the AGO except for Steve Mann?). Hardly anyone, in any city, get's the luxury of walking out their house and across the street to work. Except for workers at Foxconn.

I also don't understand what you're getting at with the business vs. residential comment. 1-7 Yonge will include a bunch of uses, residential, commercial and retail. It's very literally mixed use. By contrast, most of downtown's shoulder areas are actually very segregated in terms of usage (commercial main street, residential side streets). Nonetheless, there's no inherent relationship between built form and land usage. Any given neighborhood could have seemingly any mix of height and land usage diversity.
 
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Well, I guess I am romanticizing a bit. But many of the housing styles I mentioned are now converted to triplexes (=lowrise and high density)...I'm not advocating large single family homes. Regardless, we have newer neighbourhoods that are built for families with the same distance to the CBD as this project. Their prime location doesn't gouge people out of living there. Maybe it's the commie in me that's advocating co-operative housing, but look at the Esplanade neighbourhood surrounding David Crombie park...family-sized homes, and virtually the same distance to the CBD as 1-7 Yonge.

And I was arguing against Dimunitive's post where it was mentioned that no major European city has people living 200ft from its CBD

I just don't like the notion that any development NEAR our CBD has to be the highest density, and has to be glass skysrapers. We have 1000 acres of brownfield waterfront being developed, there's little need to create such a serious amount of housing 700m from the nearest subway station - esp one plagued by crowding, and will be even after its revitalization. The project is simply too much, too big, and puts too much demand on a strained and congested downtown. Cut the heights in half, and I'd still feel the same way.
 
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44 North said:
Well, I guess I am romanticizing a bit. But many of the housing styles I mentioned are now converted to triplexes (=lowrise and high density)...I'm not advocating large single family homes. Regardless, we have newer neighbourhoods that are built for families with the same distance to the CBD as this project. Their prime location doesn't gouge people out of living there. Maybe it's the commie in me that's advocating co-operative housing, but look at the Esplanade neighbourhood surrounding David Crombie park...family-sized homes, and virtually the same distance to the CBD as 1-7 Yonge.
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I know what you're saying, but I think that the economics might be against us. I think it's difficult to pull off something like the St. Lawrence neighbourhood today, and not just because all levels of government have effectively pulled out of the housing game. When St. Lawrence was first developed in the late 1970s, the value of that land was practically worthless. It was the remains of a disused railway marshalling yard on the edge of a downtown that few people cared about. Today, that land would be hard to convert to affordable, family-friendly townhomes, and I think that high density apartments is the only profitable option. If you want families to live in urban areas, I think the better bet is to get governments to allow density and mixed uses and also rebuild streets for more pedestrian-friendly uses on the "urban" edge: places like South Scarborough, the Queensway, Weston and Mt Dennis, parts of East York, etc. - and build the next generation of Bay and Gable-and-commercial strip neighbourhood there.

I also think you're still romanticizing the conversion of Bay and Gables to triplexes too much. Frankly, the reason they're being converted is because we are undersupplied with apartments (i.e. non-family housing) in the core, and we are resorting to turning formerly single family housing into apartments. There are two problems with this: the first is that those 100 year old semis were never meant to house 4 units and the conversions are shoddy and structurally poor (this is especially true of basement suites in buildings where the basement was merely supposed to store firewood). Secondly, and perhaps less importantly, converting Bay and Gables to multi-unit apartments often destroys the beauty of these buildings as facades are marred by ad hoc balconies and staircases built to service all those units.
 
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The images and text from BlogTO are the first that I see the mention of a theatre of 1000m2. I wonder how many seats that translates into? Really like the idea of another performing arts space on Queens Quay. I think that the density is appropriate and should enliven what was, only a few years ago, a dead area, especially at night. Bring it on!
 
rdaner said:
The images and text from BlogTO are the first that I see the mention of a theatre of 1000m2. I wonder how many seats that translates into?
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According to this capacity calculator, an area of 1040 square metres can hold around 1177 people in theatre-style seating. This is consistent with the other mid-range theatres I have checked, which average out to around one person per square metre capacity. Of course, much of that area might be back-stage and unavailable to theatre-goers, but a figure of 800-1000 seats sounds reasonable to me.
 
It would be nice to have some new cultural or entertainment venues, especially on the waterfront and in the Entertainment District. A great city cannot thrive by just building more and more condos. Those new condo dwellers need something to see, hear, feel, taste and enjoy.
 
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Torontovibe said:
It would be nice to have some new cultural or entertainment venues, especially on the waterfront and in the Entertainment District. A great city cannot thrive by just building more and more condos. Those new condo dwellers need something to see, hear, feel, taste and enjoy.
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Agreed entirely. This is especially true if the Princess of Wales theatre disappears in the Mervish Gehry development.
 
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I just don't like the notion that any development NEAR our CBD has to be the highest density, and has to be glass skysrapers.
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Why shouldn't it be the highest density? Presumably the thousands of people who have moved into the highrises around this area like the advantage of relatively cheap housing in the core.

We have 1000 acres of brownfield waterfront being developed, there's little need to create such a serious amount of housing 700m from the nearest subway station - esp one plagued by crowding, and will be even after its revitalization.
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Doesn't this suggest it's not an either/or situation? Like I said earlier, the city's a big place. It's possible to have really high density sites like 1-7 Yonge as well as more midrise developments like the WDL as well as lower rise density elsewhere. And, like HD said, the more people we can warehouse in places like 1-7 Yonge, the less demand to subdivide older houses and such, which should make them more affordable than they'd otherwise be.

Also, people at 1-7 Yonge are far more likely to walk to work than just about any other address in the City. Areas farther out (St. Lawrence, the DD, WDL, wtv) are far more likely to have residents using overcrowded streetcars, overcrowded roads or overcrowded subways. If Union or downtown is strained beyond capacity, better to put residents where they walk rather than rely on other forms of transit.
 
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