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Toronto Waterfront Update Downturns Factored Into Build-out Schedule
March, 2009
By Barbara Carss
A 2,000-acre redevelopment scheme can hide activity in plain sight. Toronto’s waterfront may appear essentially the same today as it did in 2002 when a federal/provincial/municipal revitalization partnership was first announced, but behind-the-scenes work has prepared the way for an envisioned transformation.
“The public doesn’t see it, but there is a lot going on,” John Campbell, President and CEO of Waterfront Toronto, the arm’s length corporation serving as master planner for the project, told seminar attendees at the annual PM Expo in December 2008. “All the planning, design, the politicking – it is pretty much behind us now.”
The total redevelopment area has been divided into planning precincts to allow for phased development and varied approaches for differing situations and needs. The precinct now known as the West Don Lands, for example, comprises 80 acres of mainly provincially owned land that was designated in the early 1990s for a doomed affordable housing development known as Ataratiri, whereas the precinct dubbed East Bayfront covers 55 acres of primarily privately owned land stretching along Lake Ontario from Jarvis Street in the west to Parliament Street in the east.
Other precincts such as the Lower Don Lands and the vast 990-acre Port Lands are farther behind in the planning process. In contrast, existing built-up areas along Harbourfront and the central waterfront have become a showcase for some of the design concepts and urban features that could eventually typify the entire waterfront area.
The current economic downturn has also been factored into the 25 to 30-year build-out schedule. “We recognized that we were probably going to go through two or three business cycles,” Campbell noted.
Campbell and David Wex, the developer behind the first new mixed-use community slated for the waterfront’s West Don Lands precinct, provided listeners with some of the not-so-obvious details of progress thus far. Wex’s firm, Urban Capital, is the winning proponent of the first request for proposals (RFP) process to redevelop the vast stretch of largely abandoned former industrial land between the developed core of the city and the Lake Ontario shoreline.
Construction is expected to begin in 2010 on the first of the 6,000 residential units, associated community amenities and green space now planned for the West Don Lands site, while deals for commercial/institutional development – notably a new 500,000-square-foot campus for George Brown College – have been inked for the neighbouring East Bayfront precinct. Ultimately, strategists foresee 40,000 residential units, 3.25 million square feet of commercial/employment space, parkland, community, cultural and recreational facilities, and dynamic streetscapes to link it all together.
LEVERAGING RISING LAND VALUES
To do so, they’ll need to grow the initial $1.5 billion of seed capital from the federal government, Province of Ontario and the City of Toronto into an estimated $17 billion investment. This is to be accomplished through Waterfront Toronto’s strategic infrastructure investments aimed at boosting land values, drawing private developers and investors, and earning profits from land sales that can be ploughed into still more infrastructure.
“It’s revitalization, not redevelopment. You don’t need to create an agency like ours to basically peddle real estate on the Toronto waterfront,” Campbell asserted. “We envision ourselves as an agent for market transformation.”
Sustainability, affordability and design excellence are among the key principles. That means a diverse housing mix, with 20% of the total units designated as affordable rental so that the full range of workers the city needs can afford to live there.
Reconnecting the city to the waterfront is another longstanding Toronto planning goal that is to be realized through promenades, boardwalks, parks and other public spaces. “Quality of place also means the public realm,” Campbell reflected. “We think great cities are known by their public realm, not iconic buildings.”
Waterfront Toronto plans about $4.3 billion in new infrastructure and environmental remediation, protection and enhancement to support economic development and more environmentally sound lifestyles within the city. This includes a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold benchmark for neighbourhood development, transit-oriented development standards, and a district energy system. New communities will also have open-access broadband – an asset that has been shown to nurture startup companies and support employment.
A flood control mechanism, slated for completion in mid 2009, requires particularly intricate and environmentally sensitive engineering to accommodate a sewer below and a berm above, and it must be in place before development in the West Don Lands can occur. “The landform is supposed to be designed to last for 1,000 years,” Campbell reported.
Other ongoing and/or future environmental investments include: a series of parks and greenspace connections; cleanup of the Don River, surrounding shoreline and wetlands; and construction of a soil processing facility for remediation of the contaminated land that now plagues the waterfront. “We are adopting a no-dig-and-dump approach. We have to restore it [soil] and reuse it in the area,” Campbell said.
TRAILBLAZING NEIGHBOURHOOD
The first developers in West Don Lands will use a risk management approach allowed under Ontario’s Brownfield Act (see associated story, page ?) to deal with the contamination that foiled the provincial government’s earlier efforts to build affordable housing on the site. “The contaminated soils are not being removed from the site. They are being capped and controlled,” David Wex explained.
He outlined how and why Urban Capital – in partnership with the Irish company, Redquartz Developments – responded to Waterfront Toronto’s RFP, and offered some insight on the dynamics of working with the master planner, a design review panel and other oversight bodies on a redevelopment of this scale with so much public funding and interest involved. This will be the largest development to date for Urban Capital, which has built about 3,500 residential units in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal in recent years.
The burgeoning potential for a new centrally located neighbourhood and the planned infrastructure improvements drew the developers’ interest. “I think it is fair to say that this is a trailblazing opportunity,” Wex observed.
Arguably, though, there is not much to lure prospective residents to the current land configuration, which is bordered by railway tracks, the Don Valley Parkway and highway off-ramps. It is located east of the inner harbour, while hundreds of acres of obsolete industrial land separate it from the outer harbour. The developers’ designer,
Montreal based Saucier + Perrotte attempted to capture the urban authenticity of the surrounding landscape, but also reintroduce nature and create links beyond the site’s boundaries.
“It is really not a beautiful site today. It is not a waterfront site,” Wex acknowledged. “Our starting point for our design was absolutely the gritty, industrial nature of this site. We are embracing, rather than shunning the ramps.”
Campbell commended Urban Capital’s approach and its fit with Waterfront Toronto’s goals. “What we were looking for was a partner who got it,” he said. “It wasn’t about selling real estate. It was about building a community for the 21st century.
ABSORPTION UNDERLIES PROJECT TIMING
That new community is expected to emerge in four phases over the next 10 to 12 years. Development is also now underway in East Bayfront, which benefits from an actual presence on the waterfront.
The Toronto Economic Development Corporation (TEDCO) is building a 450,000-square-foot office building, which will also house the radio and television broadcast centre for Corus Entertainment Inc. This is scheduled for completion in the spring of 2010, while the new George Brown College campus is expected to welcome students in 2011.
Both ventures will draw a routine population that strategists calculate will also provide a market for new services and amenities in the area, and generate year-round activity in an area now more likely frequented during the warmer months. Notably, George Brown College will introduce 4,000 to 5,000 students and more than 400 faculty and staff. “That deal took four years to do, but it is important to get those students down there because they will be there in January and February,” Campbell said.
The economic downturn could affect timing of redevelopment since so much is premised on drawing investment that will increase land values and draw still more investment. “We have $1.5 billion of seed capital, plus we have land sales,” Campbell said. “This will proceed at the rate of absorption and we’ve been forecasting about 3,000 to 4,000 units per precinct per year. We can’t make a market, so currently we are all held hostage to market values.”
That said, principals with Urban Capital were still optimistic last December. “Our partners in this are from Ireland – a country that is in quite a lot worse shape than we are going to be in – and they see Canada as a safe place to invest,” Wex said.
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