This goes to committee at Markham tomorrow and then council next week (then it has to be approved by the OMB since this has been before them during the negotiating process).

That sales office is close to opening. With the Globe ad and official council site plan approval looming, it must be really soon.

The Markham report has the exact wording of the TTC clauses that have to be included (e.g. ..."may result in noise, vibration, electromagnetic interference, stray current.." etc.)

There are a lot of conditions attached to it and before proceeding they need written confirmation from CN. Given the height and distance I don't imagine train noise would be a major issue. It will likely be more of an issue for the offices and the hotel since they directly abut the tracks...

Looks like Phase 1 will be that office tower + the retail + 1 Yonge tower and the podium. Then the second res tower. After all that they would do the two other towers on Meadowview/Doncaster, but not til servicing is freed up.
 
Seems like this lazy real estate agent (Ken Yeung) has been just ripping off images that our UT members have been posting in this forum for his own website promoting this project ... you would think this guy could at least source or scan his own images?? geez :rolleyes:

http://www.kenyeung.ca/World_on_Yonge_Condos/page_2265766.html

:mad:

Let's create a Hall of Shame section and post his picture up. I'm sure he's probably an active user on this site.

If you are reading this, Ken, please don't copy from this site without sourcing it (or just don't copy at all).
 
Website Live ~

http://www.libertydevelopment.ca/worldonyonge/vip/

Site Plan and Renderings are provided on this site, together with floorplans for the office + retail components only ... the residential floorplans are yet to be released

From what I could see, the retail 'mall' proposed LOOKS to be promising ~ *fingers crossed :D
 
It does look promising. One thing you can see fairly well on that pic is the topography, since the site slopes a lot from the north to south end.

That view would be looking northwest from the CN tracks.

What you see on the left is basically a service road running off of Meadowview that will allow at-grade access to the underground parking because of the slope. You can also see the green roof on top of the retail section which basically turns it into a big park.

The current mall is a black hole (especially in terms of "Design") aside from the Galleria which hopefully will stay somehow. Overall, the whole thing looks like an improvement - especially if they build the subway.

And I hate to pick on the marketing but it's not THAT close to Hwy. 400 and Hwy. 404 except in that it's Yonge Street and, thus, obviously rather in the middle of things.
 
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http://www.yorkregion.com/News/Vaughan/article/96916

September 24, 2009 10:21 AM

by David Fleischer

After three years of wrangling and negotiation, Markham council is on the verge of approving plans for a massive Thornhill condominium project.
The town's development services committee heard a presentation Tuesday on Liberty Development's plans to replace an outdated plaza with World on Yonge, a mixed-use neighbourhood on Yonge Street, north of Steeles.

Still known to many as the Hy&Zel's plaza, 7161 Yonge Street will eventually house four condominium towers with heights from 18 to 31 storeys and a large retail and office complex.

A public park will occupy the site's centre and all parking will be underground.

When built, the 10 acres will provide more than one million square-feet of residential space and housing about 3,000 people.

There will also be 414,000 sq. ft. of office and residential space, including a 117-room hotel.

"I'm just really happy there was so much community involvement and it was evident we were working together," Ward 1 Councillor Valerie Burke said of the long process.

A working group allowed residents to work closely with Liberty staff to come up with the final plans and it has been a pleasant experience, Grandview Area Ratepayers Association president Marilyn Ginsburg said.

"I don't think we expected them be that easy to work with," she added.

Through the process, many outstanding issues have been resolved, though the main one remaining for residents is how to deal with the influx of traffic in an area already prone to infiltration.

"It's not just a convenience issue, it's a safety issue," Ms Ginsburg said, noting many children cross local streets to get to school and many residents have hard time getting out of their driveways at rush hour.

"We don't want our own Don Valley (Parkway) here," she said.

Liberty appealed to the Ontario Municipal Board in late 2007, but both parties continued to negotiate.

At an Oct. 13 board hearing, staff will tell the board if they have endorsed the project.

The plan has changed substantially since its first iteration in July, 2006.

"It really shocked the community and upset everybody," Ms Burke recalled of the initial plans.

Since then, building heights have been reduced, promises were made to meet LEED Silver environmental standards and more green space was added.

"It's come a long way," Ms Burke said.

At her suggestion, there will also be features to ensure migrating birds do not strike the buildings.

In response to Liberty's proposal, the town initiated a study of how to intensify the entire Yonge-Steeles corridor and Vaughan is following suit for its side of the street.

One question still up in the air is whether or not the corridor will be served by an extension of the subway or by bus rapid transit.

The residents don't want the latter option, Ms Burke said.

"They want the subway and they're very frustrated the funding hasn't come through."

Attached to the approval is a list of 49 conditions earmarked by the town. They include everything from the times when lanes can be closed for construction to ensuring YRT service is easily accessed while the work is ongoing.

As residents have been keen to point out, sewers in the area are overtaxed and flood-prone.

A new sanitary sewer will be built to handle the influx and options of how to do so are under consideration.

The town will also receive $2 million for community services in Thornhill.

The first phase will include 714 residential units in two Yonge Street towers, along with the office-hotel building and all the retail.

Two towers along Meadowview Avenue will be part of a later phase.

The sales office for the project has been taking shape at a former Wendy's restaurant and a website has been active for several months.

Liberty reports back to the committee next week on outstanding issues with the ground-level streetscape and what would be required to attain LEED Gold certification.

If the committee is satisfied, Markham council can approve the project Sept. 29.
 
The inner retail portion reminds me of the shops @ Don Mills a bit.
 
Yea it definitely looks like shops @ don mills, but I wonder what will be the demographics of the store here? High-end again? As long as it's doesn't get turned into another pacific mall type with only 4 different kinds of store I'd be happy.

Regardless by having this shopping complex it should help to encourage revitalization of the stretches between steeles and finch.
 
Article in the Post here:

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/...hill-project-will-transform-yonge-street.aspx

Also - I just have a more general question:
Is there a law about at what point in the planning process you are allowed to open a sales office?
This is still technically at the OMB so obviously you can sell units without FINAL approval but surely you can't just start selling as soon as a development plan is filed, right....?
 
Yea it definitely looks like shops @ don mills, but I wonder what will be the demographics of the store here? High-end again? As long as it's doesn't get turned into another pacific mall type with only 4 different kinds of store I'd be happy.

Currently this plaza is dominated by a huge Korean superstore (groceries, cafe, appliances, etc), if that helps -- nearby plazas are mostly Korean and Persian restaurants/groceries/specialties with side-helpings of Chinese restaurants, Red Lobster, Nino D'Aversa.

No telling whether the higher-end landlord of this new development will want to go for national chains to reduce his financial risk, but I would have thought so. This is, unfortunately, the downside to large developments, it seems to me: they are better able to command less-risky tenants and, therefore, we wind up with less interesting and less diverse retail.

Regardless by having this shopping complex it should help to encourage revitalization of the stretches between steeles and finch.

Um, this complex is north of Steeles, while the first stretch north of Finch (to Cummer) is revitalizing plenty on its own.

If you mean Cummer to Clark, then I agree -- everyone's been holding out for final determinations on transit before doing much, so let's hope that ball is starting to get rolling.

Yonge/Steeles, in particular, is a real embarrassment, seemingly entirely due to transit uncertainty. It almost makes me wish they would hurry up and cancel the Yonge Extension already, just so we can all move on. (Yes, I am a Yonge Extension doubter, notwithstanding my view that it is entirely logical, needed, desirable, etc. :eek: )
 

Interesting:

Some buyers camped out overnight in their cars to ensure a prime spot when the sales office opened this week.

“The response has been honestly overwhelming,†Marco Filice, vice-president of Liberty Development, said yesterday, noting the project was designed to capitalize on the increased transit service in the region. Most units have only one underground parking spot allocation, while some of the bachelor units lack parking entirely.

Sad:

At 20 storeys, the office building will be the tallest in York Region, the developer says.
 
The office building isn't even really 20 storeys as 1/2 of it will be a hotel. Strikes me as a slightly odd hotel location but the people at Liberty probably know better...

There are probably lots of office buildings in the 15ish-floor range right now but it's not really SAD - it's just the suburbs. It's only now we're seeing the first round of 30+ residential condos going through the planning process, after all.

I agree it would be nice to see the Korean Galleria stay (Pharmacy 2? Not so much...) but I guess bigger chains are more likely. That's progress....
 
There are probably lots of office buildings in the 15ish-floor range right now but it's not really SAD - it's just the suburbs. It's only now we're seeing the first round of 30+ residential condos going through the planning process, after all.

Good point. If Yonge-Finch can have hit 25 storeys of office towers years ago, it's jarring that nothing north of Steeles is even at 20 -- but I guess it's true that the Xerox towers as an officey employment node are more of an exception than anything else in the northern suburbs. More prevalent are the plazas, office parks, and industrial campuses (Markham), all of which are pretty darn horizontal.

The office building isn't even really 20 storeys as 1/2 of it will be a hotel. Strikes me as a slightly odd hotel location but the people at Liberty probably know better...

As long as it's not too ambitious in scope, it kind of makes sense to me. There are really very few places in the area to put out-of-town guests for large wedding-type events of the type that are common among nearly all the ethnic communities in this area. Novotel, Yorkdale Holiday Inn, the Markham hotels out east on Highway 7 are some of the choices I have typically seen, and they are nowhere close. I'm not sure how much business use there will be of the hotel, though it's central enough that perhaps some of this will crawl out of the woodwork -- don't know.
 
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Other people have mentioned this in the past, but it'd be good for the North York/Thornhill area if a high quality - and perhaps high end - Korean or Persian mall was built...a hybrid is unlikely, even though the retail strip near Steeles is very much a Korean/Persian hybrid. While it would be preferable to have a new "Little Seoul" or "Little Tehran" exist in a great urban strip, the building stock in the area is far too fragmented and incomplete and suburban to do this. A natural solution might be a small mall, particularly for Korean businesses, and especially because so many of the buildings currently housing Korean/Persian stores and restaurants will be replaced in the coming decades, and who knows what the quality of future retail spaces might be (little retail cubicles behind precast arcades, no doubt). There's an opportunity to shift to a different retail model and consolidate/brand the businesses, if entrepreneurs desired this.

Yonge & Steeles would be an ideal place for such a mall due to transit connections, but World On Yonge would work, too. Perhaps retail uses could consume some of the proposed hotel/office space - as it is, the planned retail scheme just seems to be essentially a strip mall with towers plunked on top. But if they have office tenants and a hotel operator lined up, I guess another site would work better.

Regardless by having this shopping complex it should help to encourage revitalization of the stretches between steeles and finch.

Um, this complex is north of Steeles, while the first stretch north of Finch (to Cummer) is revitalizing plenty on its own.

If you mean Cummer to Clark, then I agree -- everyone's been holding out for final determinations on transit before doing much, so let's hope that ball is starting to get rolling.

Yonge/Steeles, in particular, is a real embarrassment, seemingly entirely due to transit uncertainty. It almost makes me wish they would hurry up and cancel the Yonge Extension already, just so we can all move on. (Yes, I am a Yonge Extension doubter, notwithstanding my view that it is entirely logical, needed, desirable, etc. :eek: )

The stretch from Steeles to Drewry/Cummer won't be changed until they figure out what to do with the area. This process, as far as I know, has not yet started, even though the subway extension plans and redevelopment visions north of Steeles were all announced like 2 years ago. The city has not yet finished an Avenues study of this stretch, but that study applies almost exclusively to properties with Yonge addresses, whereas the Markham/Vaughan and North York Centre plans that bookend the area deal with the whole community: sites on Yonge as well as the road network, parkland, schools, the blocks off Yonge, etc. With a subway extension coming through, it makes absolutely no sense to line Yonge south of Steeles with a bunch of 5 storey buildings, particularly since hardly any existing buildings along Yonge are worth keeping (almost all of them are dumpy one/two storey retail huts with parking in front).

I hope the Beecroft and Doris service roads are extended up to or past Steeles and that all of Yonge receives a landscaped median...the Yonge & Steeles area will work better if the urbanizing vision is slightly grand, because intimate streetscapes won't work here. Maybe they will in Olde Thornhill or on side streets, but certainly not on Yonge.
 
Other people have mentioned this in the past, but it'd be good for the North York/Thornhill area if a high quality - and perhaps high end - Korean or Persian mall was built.

I think this area of Toronto is still very much in flux. It's hard to say which community will be dominant in the future or whether it will continue. By having a specific mall for each group would be a mistake. Best to just have a mall out there, and see what happens IMO.

I hope the Beecroft and Doris service roads are extended up to or past Steeles and that all of Yonge receives a landscaped median...the Yonge & Steeles area will work better if the urbanizing vision is slightly grand, because intimate streetscapes won't work here. Maybe they will in Olde Thornhill or on side streets, but certainly not on Yonge.

It would be good if such a thing happened, but it would take a TON of expropriation for it to work. I don't know if the city has much stomech for this. And of course once we get to the railroad tracks, that's about it.

One thing that I'd like to see for this area in the future is for Centrepoint mall to be completely redeveloped. Hopefully by the time all these developments are done, this will really be a bustling urban space. I can envision Centrepoint mall being redeveloped into a 5-8 tower complex with giant retail/office space built in, much like Yonge Eglinton Centre, but much bigger.

I believe there would be less opposition to high-rises in this area, if only because so many have already been planned, and because those massive apartments just south-west of Yonge/Steeles have been around for 25+ years.
 

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