"Which many would say has a certain charm and would be a shame to lose"

[kathleen_dailey]

Modest, graceful apartment buildings--and their accompanying trees and gardens--are steadily disappearing from my neighbourhood so that towers can be built. Today I saw a bumped thread on the Urban Toronto website outlining the development proposal that threatens one of my favourite residential buildings. (Scroll down to the second photo, which is captioned "while parcel 3 is this," to see it.)

Every time I walk past that building, I imagine the people who've lived there and what the neighbourhood was like in the past. The area east of Jarvis, west of Sherbourne, and south of Bloor is, for the moment, a leafy enclave of SFH, semis, and small apartment buildings--a compact version of an east-end Annex, in a way. If you live in Toronto, take a walk (when the weather permits) in the area around Casey House--Huntley, Earl, Linden, Isabella--and enjoy the experience while you can.

Oh, and one of the posters in the UT thread mentioned the trees on Earl and how good they smell in the spring. True!

Comments

[jenab]

It's such a great area for walking and I've seen so many signs about new condos replacing the older buildings. I'm going to miss the look and feel of the area when the condos come in as they also tend to be very bland in design.

I wouldn't mind so much if it was actually more high rise affordable apartments instead of condos being built.

[kathleen_dailey]

I wouldn't mind so much if it was actually more high rise affordable apartments instead of condos being built.

Agreed 100 percent, though I think we're destined for more disappointment on that count. There are some proposals for development (for example, this one on Isabella) that say they'll offer both affordable rental and condo accommodation, but I'm skeptical in the extreme that "affordable" will mean what I think it should mean. (Or that the interests of the renters will necessarily align with the interests of the condo purchasers, but that's another topic altogether.)

[senmut]

I am firmly on 'rehab empty buildings, control cost of living better, and stop building new'

[kathleen_dailey]

Yes! And what's especially frustrating is that the structures in my area that are slated for condo redevelopment aren't empty--they're occupied and generally (to judge from the outside, at least) in very good repair. Their crime is that they're moderately sized and they sit on land that's now worth a fortune and then some.

Shawn Micallef wrote a very good article about a building in my neighbourhood. It's an attractive, well-maintained, fully occupied mid-last-century rental building. It was designed by Bregman + Hamann, and it's a friendly 11 storeys tall. It's typical of the area, and I feel sure that its days--like the days of so many apartment buildings near it--are numbered.

[the_siobhan]

I don't think we can avoid building new. Our population keeps growing and we need a place to put them.

What I would like to see is planned building. Designate an area that could use increased density (like say, along the Sheppard or Downsview Park subway lines) and plan a mixture of building types, green spaces, additional transit options, etc. Developers always want to build in close to the core where there is already high population density because they can charge more for the finished units. Instead the city should be telling them where they can build and how much.

I also think we should get rid of forced "back to the office" and re-purpose the empty office buildings. Offices do make sense for people who can't work from home, but it makes no sense to force people to move back into the city just so they can get into an office they don't need in order to do their job.

[kathleen_dailey]

I also think we should get rid of forced "back to the office" and re-purpose the empty office buildings.

This would make so much sense. Developers whine about how difficult and expensive it is to do office-to-residential conversions as opposed to construction from scratch, but I'd like to see some actual figures that compared the two methods. (It isn't easy to find such data, in my experience, but then I'm not a professional.)

[the_siobhan]

I wouldn't be surprised if it is more expensive. But you know, if they make one million dollars on a project instead of two, I'm ok with that.