Growth Plan – City of Toronto Style

The province has successfully implemented an intensification program over the last 5 years by limiting where new developments can be located.  Urban areas have experienced significant mid-rise and high-rise intensification as a result of the lack of greenfield development lands arising from these policies.  Adam Vaughan, City of Toronto Councillor, has developed his own municipal growth plan by requiring builders in his Trinity-Spadina ward to make 10% of their high-rise units family sized or 3-bedrooms suites.   The resistance from builders to this proposed policy is not anything philosophical but pragmatic.  Canadian urban dwellers have not adopted the European philosophy that families can be brought up in apartments.  Condominiums are still acquired primarily by single or double income couples, or empty nesters.  Generally, couples, once they have children within 1 or 2 years seek a single family or townhouse home.   In addition to the philosophical resistance of Canadian and Torontonian purchasers, it is simply prohibitive for young families to purchase a 3-bedroom condominium units of at least 1,000 sq. ft. at $600-$700 a square foot and up.   Ryan Starr in his article in the New in Homes & Condos section of the Toronto Star on August 13, 2011 interviewed Adam Vaughan and a number of high-rise developers regarding the proposed policies.  Those developers who have been saddled with implementing these requirements have in fact either built or planned to construct nearly 700 units of family housing.  However, according to these developers, most of them are vacant and will probably have to be sub-divided to sell.   Although in the movie Field of Dreams "if you build it, they will come" worked for deceased baseball players travelling to a fictitious baseball stadium, it will not necessarily work for prescribed condominium family housing in Toronto.