Plans for Ontario’s largest co-op housing project in 25 years include one mid-rise and two high-rise buildings. The middle-sized tower is a market condominium, which will help pay the costs of the other two, where 612 co-op units will be split between affordable and market-rate rental.Handout
Toronto is back in the housing business. This week the city’s government announced a new housing development near Kennedy subway station in Scarborough, and it is big. Big in scale, with 918 homes – making it the largest co-operative housing project in Ontario in 25 years – and big in ambition.
Led by first-rank designers, the project is a strong start for Mayor Olivia Chow’s bold housing agenda, and it carries two important lessons: Size matters, and so does design.
The Co-operative Housing Federation of Toronto will lead the project, along with the city’s CreateTO and private companies Civic Developments and Windmill Developments. They hope to begin construction in 2026.
The plan consists of one mid-rise and two high-rise buildings, at 20, 34 and 43 storeys. The middle-sized tower is a market condominium, which will help pay the costs of the other two, where 612 co-op units will be split between affordable and market-rate rental.
With 800,000 square feet of floor space, the project “is a direct response to the need for housing in this country,” Matthew Cohen, managing partner at Civic Developments, said in an interview. “It’s our ambition that this project offers an example of what an ambitious mixed-tenure project can look like.”
All this will be shoehorned into a 1.16-hectare triangle of land at 2444 Eglinton Ave. East, across from Kennedy Station, where the Crosstown LRT will intersect with the subway’s Line 2. Now mostly a parking lot, this is a weird, forlorn place: Elevated hydro lines extend along one side, railroad tracks run next door and Eglinton traffic roars past on an elevated overpass.
The development is proposed for a site across from the Toronto Transit Commission's Kennedy Station, where the Crosstown LRT will intersect with the subway’s Line 2.Handout
Happily, the designers are up to the task. Vancouver’s Henriquez Partners Architects have long experience designing social and mixed-income housing, including the innovative Woodward’s development on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The landscape architects are Montreal’s brilliant CCXA.
“This is one of the most challenging sites, in terms of livability, that you could imagine,” Gregory Henriquez of HPA acknowledged on a call from Vancouver this week. (Mr. Henriquez’s firm has opened a Toronto office, and they plan to move into the Mirvish Village development for which they were lead architects.)
In response they’ve made one big, unorthodox choice: The site’s parking will be aboveground, from the second through fourth floors. A shared amenity space links the co-op buildings at the fifth floor, and the apartments rise from there. People will live and relax above the road overpass, finding light and air up in the sky.
Meanwhile, on the ground, the designers plan for shops and some sort of community centre (still to be determined). This will be served by a courtyard and a driveway that’s designed to slow cars and favour pedestrians. “We are making sure that the site is part of a larger pedestrian movement system,” Mr. Henriquez says.
Greenspace plans for the site envision landscaping that will ram up to connect with a terrace at the fifth floor.Handout
Pedestrian routes head south toward the station and north to the hydro corridor. CCXA, formerly led by the late Claude Cormier, imagines the corridor remade as a set of formal gardens, in which plantings define circular “rooms” surrounded by crops in a community garden. The circles in the landscape echo the circular grid that the architects are planning for the towers – though Mr. Henriquez said that geometry could still change. The architects imagine that the landscape will ramp up to meet the terrace at the fifth floor.
The construction would also be faster, cheaper and less carbon-intensive than a typical high-rise, because it avoids the cost and concrete associated with underground parking. Mr. Cohen says the savings are $25-million. If the rezoning process goes quickly, the developers say they are ready to build in a hurry.
If it all goes as planned, the project promises some of the best urban design Toronto has seen on a suburban site. And it would represent a leap for Toronto’s Housing Now program. Introduced five years ago, the mixed-income housing scheme has only seen one project start construction. The others have been hobbled by pandemic shocks, but also by the city’s own bureaucracy and questionable designs: Many of the proposed buildings are too small to be economically viable.
At Kennedy, the city has found the right recipe. This proposed project would have more than 300 homes an acre. This is four times as dense as the St. Lawrence Neighbourhood, the 1970s mixed-income development that’s often praised by local housing advocates. In today’s city, high density is required to make affordable housing happen. And thoughtful design helps make it work.
And if that is good for central Scarborough, it is also good for the central Toronto neighbourhoods that are increasingly redoubts for the rich. With luck, Ms. Chow’s government is prepared to make such big moves there, too.
Alex Bozikovic