In a fourth-floor conference room at the Board of Trade's Adelaide Street headquarters, a well-heeled group of Toronto's city-building elite watches a slideshow of the city's mission impossible.
The clock is ticking on one of the most ambitious residential projects in the city's history: a billion-dollar athletes village for the Pan American Games that will eventually be transformed into 2,100 housing units. Developers are intrigued - and leery of a model that's largely untested here.
Building an athletes village doesn't sound like a big deal. Except when it's three times the size of the one that saddled Vancouver with an unexpected price tag and is one of Toronto's most challenging residential projects in terms of units and the tight time frame. It comes with an armload of prerequisites (including hundreds units of affordable housing and an as-yet-undetermined mix of student housing, rental and market-rate condos the developer will provide) and a long list of people to please.
"I thought it was extremely ambitious. That's a lot of housing to be built in one fell swoop," says Howard Cohen, principal of Context Development. Like just about everyone else at the information session, he'd like to know what exactly the plan will be. And, specifically, where the money to finance the construction will come from: Traditionally, developers sell the majority of their units in advance - it's difficult to get bank financing otherwise. But for a village that will be first leased out to more than 8,000 athletes, coaches and officials, that could get complicated.
"If we're to build these things and assume the liability, then it's quite a risky proposition for a builder to come along, build the entire building and then sell these things after the Games," said Joe Cordiano, a partner with Cityzen condo developers.
Even Waterfront Toronto doesn't yet know how this project will roll out. A "market-sounding" exercise, headed up by consultants from Deloitte and Scotia Capital, launched on April 23. The aim is to test the waters of Toronto's notoriously overheated housing market and determine whether there will be demand for 2,000 units of high-end waterfront condos five years from now.
The recommendations they bring back will inform the plan Waterfront Toronto brings to city council and, ultimately, the task handed to developers early next year, said Waterfront Toronto president John Campbell. Once the contract is awarded and design completed, the developer will have just under three years to sell, finance and build the village, not necessarily in that order.
When Toronto was awarded the Games last November, it kicked a dawdling, multi-decade urban reinvention project into high gear: A 25-year timeline shrunk to five; the city has until early 2015 to hand over a completed athletes' village it hopes to showcase to the world.
John van Nostrand, the principle architect behind the original bid design that helped Toronto win the Games, has big things in mind for the residential community that will help define the long-dormant Don Lands after the athletes pack up and leave.
What he'd really like to see in addition to the 20 per cent affordable housing planned is "affordable ownership" that gives lower-income families a chance to own their homes, usually by having a third party take out a second mortgage.
It's a complex model Toronto is testing - the Daniels Corporation is partnering with Habitat for Humanity on a couple of developments in the city; ArtScape is trying to do the same thing with live/work spaces for artists.
"It needs special consideration. ... That's a relatively untested concept here," Mr. van Nostrand said. "London and New York get involved because that kind of housing houses the teachers, the nurses, the bus drivers, the garbage truck drivers. And you want those people to be able to live in the city. If they can't afford to live in the city, you're in trouble."
But it's still not clear what the 20 per cent "affordable housing" pledge will mean.
"Affordable's a very loaded term," Mr. Campbell said. "Our definition is about average rent. It's to ensure that when we're building a community there's housing for everybody.
It's an exciting project, Mr. Cohen says. But in many ways it's a first for Toronto, and the country.
"We haven't had very many of these in Canada. The Olympics in Montreal, all the housing was built by the Olympics organization and then sold off afterwards," he said. "This is the biggest concentration of housing, ever, in Toronto to be built all at once.
"So it's really ambitious. And I hope it's done well."