New uses come at last to Toronto towers in the park
Inside Toronto
by Mike Adler
11 August 2017

Nothing new. Chinese cities have been doing this for decades.

Toronto’s tower-in-the-park apartments are products of The Boom, the decade bridging the 1960s and 1970s which saw 140,000 units built.

Some sprouted in the suburban middle of nowhere – Rexdale, rural North York, East Scarborough, with big surface parking lots and lawns.

Built when even nursing home patients were expected to have cars, they sometimes assigned each apartment two spots.

The towers were “sealed in a time warp for 50 years,” says Greater Toronto Apartment Association president Daryl Chong.

No mixed uses were allowed. Tenants were expected to drive everywhere.

Towers aged as the city grew around them. There were poorer tenants, fewer cars.

Enter Vinod Soman, urban planner. He’s installing a small grocery store in a Kipling Avenue highrise, expecting to start interior work this week.

“Our target is to open this year,” Soman says.

What made this possible is Residential Apartment Commercial (RAC) zoning, which the city, after years of delay, launched last month.

Finally, if landlords agree, dead spaces in more than 400 modernist towers containing 80,000 units, all pre-1985, can become tutoring centres, daycares, or nail salons.

A restaurant in Changchun that is on bottom floor of a condo building

Their lawns or lots can sport outdoor markets. Tenants, if fortunate, may finally get conveniences downtown condominium dwellers take for granted.

The closest supermarket to the Rexdale tower Soman’s working on is 900 metres away. Most tenants of the building and its twin take a car there; some take taxis, he says.

Soman sees a testing ground. Backed by partners, he’s interviewing tenants, many Middle Eastern or East Indian, about the products he’ll sell.

Some towers had tuck shops, but with interior doors. They were designed for tenants alone, often stocking junk food. Soman wants to sell fresh vegetables, quality stuff, in a shop open to the public.

“Let’s hope it works,” he says.

Around Pape and Cosburn, Jane and Finch, Kipling in Rexdale, Lawrence and Orton Park in Scarborough, East York’s Taylor Massey and Thorncliffe Park neighbourhoods, and Oriole in Don Mills, the city will approach owners, suggesting what RAC zoning can do for them.

Entrepreneurs can also knock on management doors, perhaps tenants themselves already “making something cool, exciting or tasty” upstairs, Chong says.

Comments
This is one program I agree with. It's about time that we started something that has been done for decades in Asia. It can give hope to businesses that are being kicked out of the downtown by high rents and high taxes. Let the downtown get all the big-chain franchises, the suburbs can enjoy the independents.

However, to be successful, the commercial units must look like conventional strip malls where the commercial units face the street and there is parking in front of the stores. (See the photos above.)
—CondoMadness

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