John Bentley Mays

June 22, 2007 — Creating Housing Goals the Market Can Live With

The Globe & Mail

Ambitious theories about how we can rejuvenate our stock of aging residential towers hinge on a willingness to give and take

Graeme Stewart is an energetic young man on an interesting mission.

A freshly-minted graduate of the University of Toronto’s architecture school and a designer with E.R.A. Architects, he is fascinated byToronto’s hundreds of suburban residential towers. Many of them are dilapidated old things from a half-century ago, stranded on shabby lawns and slowly rotting in place. Most observers searching for what makes Toronto special, I suspect, would give them no more than a glance, and no thought at all.

Mr. Stewart is different. He sees in these aging apartment buildings a brilliant opportunity for innovative restoration and the creative reuse of a standing resource. In his vision - the topic of continuing talks with public officials and private interests - the towers would be stripped back to their skeletons, then redressed in energy-efficient, attractive cladding.

Zoning restrictions would be relaxed to allow the construction of
libraries and schools and open-air markets on the now-empty land around the high-rises. “The high-density nodes speckled through the region are great opportunities, an incredible asset,” he told me recently. “If we could retrofit them for higher environmental standards and mixed-use development, right off the bat we could transform these currently neglected areas into socially sustainable neighbourhoods.”

Neighbourhoods: The word is sweet to Toronto ears. What citizen would oppose anything that strengthened them? And money is on the way to encourage owners to embark on restoration: In May, a consortium of investors organized by former U. S. president Bill Clinton picked Toronto and 15 other large cities around the world to receive $5.4-billion for energy-saving retrofits.

But not so fast. As I wrote in this column a couple of weeks ago, Mr.Stewart’s scheme raises, along with hope, a worrying question as well. What’s to become of the mostly low-income immigrant families in these suburban towers after their buildings are updated, gentrified, made more desirable to up-market dwellers?

My column drew a swift response from Mr. Stewart, who said he had answers. Last week, we talked in the downtown Toronto offices of E.R.A. “This isn’t about unleashing a flood of speculation,” Mr. Stewart said. “It’s about working with people to allow positive things to happen in a highly regulated environment. One of those stipulations could be that people living in the buildings would stay in them. Rents
would not increase. The city could be very strict about what happens.”

But if some tight public controls on the renovation would be
maintained, other present-day rules would be set aside.

“The most harmful way of regulating is to say you are not allowed to have a fruit stand, a hot dog stand.” Opening up ground-floor apartments to resident-run commercial uses and letting the land around the towers be developed “would allow a community garden or a halal market, small-scale entrepreneurship. This would be positive reinvestment in the suburbs.”

In my last column on this subject, I questioned Mr. Stewart’s
high-rise examples drawn from Russia and Eastern Europe, where much of his research has been done.

I said that government-run housing makes a poor analogy to Toronto’s free-market situation. I was dead wrong about Europe.

“The buildings were sold wholesale to the private market,” Mr. Stewart replied. “I found the buildings in Russia and Eastern Europe interesting because they were the ones where individual actors could make the most difference. The free market can allow for maximum ingenuity in all aspects of development. We can work for each site having its own voice.

“I was shocked to come back to Toronto and go to some of the worst areas, and realize our current prohibitive regulation is actually hurting these communities,” he told me. “You can see that, if they were allowed to take down the fences, to open up little shops, to have markets, something positive could happen right away. It’s all part of the give and take of development. And it’s definitely not about social engineering, being prescriptive. It’s about setting a hierarchy of goals the market can work with. These old buildings can’t be left alone any longer. They really need our stewardship in order to maintain themselves as a housing resource.”

Mr. Stewart sees the private/public partnerships crucial for these
renovations as a distinctly “Canadian way of doing things;regulation that’s also good for the economy. These projects could be lucrative, business-friendly things.”

Meanwhile, the discussion continues. “I think we are in a wonderful situation, right at the beginning. We are working with the city, with people from different groups, developers, owners - and all are saying their piece.”

POSTED ON: 22/06/07