Downtown Toronto now: beautiful dense housing (@GH3architects and Claude Cormier)... which requires demolishing a 24-storey apartment tower. 1/
Proposal for 25 St Mary Street by the landlord/developer @TenblockTO. Beautiful. 2/
But this should not be a teardown. 3/
Really a textbook example of urbane high density and an attractive public realm. With a Godzilla-sized carbon footprint. 4/
To clarify one thing: City of Toronto does have a laudable rental replacement policy, so current tenants have the right to return on comparable terms. This is imperfect but meaningful 5/
Why this pattern? 6/
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Toronto; now one of the least affordable cities in the world, and its planning department is openly saying it doesn’t need to increase the pace of housing construction. 1/ #topoli
This analysis doesn’t even try to account for what things will cost or for how all this “housing” will be allocated. Hard to summarize how misleading this is. 2/
I can only assume this is meant to discourage the prov government from pushing (progressive, necessary, beneficial) infill goals on the city. But why would planners do that in the first place? 3/
Her interest in plants began in childhood, encouraged by her mother the horticulturalist and author Beate Hahn 2/
After escaping Nazi Germany, she studied at @smithcollege and @HarvardGSD, then worked with pioneers of modernist landscape architecture. This project with Dan Kiley and Louis Kahn, Mill Creek public housing in Phila, drawing via @ccawire 3/
My piece on Toronto schools and what should happen to them: keep them public (and if they are sold, sell them smart). theglobeandmail.com/canada/toronto…
These places have important public functions and government should figure out a way to maintain them 2/
News: the board’s real estate agency says they may have six or seven big sites for redevelopment. They floated this apparently theoretical proposal for 1 Danforth Ave. 3/
The First Parliament site is back in the Toronto news, so here’s a thread on be competing plans. 1/
Here’s the latest version that the province has flooded. The site to the north is currently a big box and car dealerships. The First Parliament site is to the south. 2/
The provincial plan (left), shows two buildings with larger footprints. The one to the west would have a library facing the park. City (right), smaller footprints. 3/
Here’s the city of Toronto, without anyone much noticing, banning tall buildings in most of its eastern downtown. Max heights mostly 30m or less. 1/ app.toronto.ca/tmmis/viewAgen…#topoli
This very consequential policy was finished through public consultation that attracted fewer than 300 people, total. 2/
This is profoundly bad policy in terms of economic development, efficient use of infrastructure, housing supply, climate resilience. 3/