You'd think that, with Toronto staring down the barrel of the fiscal gun, the city's public agencies might be shucking big ideas and grand schemes.
Not Toronto Community Housing Corp. (TCHC).
With 58,000 units of housing under its management — making the corporation one of North America's biggest residential landlords — TCHC is forging ahead on all fronts. The $1-billion redevelopment of the Regent Park social housing complex is speeding forward. Plans are afoot to perform the same kind of sweeping revamp on the Lawrence Heights housing project, which straddles the W.R. Allen expressway near Yorkdale plaza. And between 15,000 and 20,000 new units are proposed or on the drawing board for sites across Toronto.
But what makes this surge of development interesting is not just its large scale. It's also the fact that TCHC is recruiting accomplished Toronto architects to do the work.
A sketch of 60 Richmond St. East. Workers in the hospitality sector may be the primary residents, so the building will incorporate a teaching kitchen and cafe. (TEEPLE ARCHITECTS)
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This is a novel switch. Public housing projects have traditionally been architecturally dull and oppressive places, like jails, meant to encourage tenants to move on as quickly as possible. As a result, beautiful dwellings for low-income people are virtually unheard of.
But Toronto will be hearing a lot about such buildings, if TCHC development head Mark Guslits gets his way.
"It's partly due to a perfect storm of personalities," Mr. Guslits told me last week. "We happen to have people here at the corporation who really, really like good architecture, so we just decided we would push architectural excellence." (Mr. Guslits is himself an architect.) This "perfect storm" has come as TCHC is taking a hard look at its options.
"The typical project in our portfolio, built in the 1950s or 1960s, has used up its life as a useful building, and the repairs are starting to cost more than the opportunities for renovation or redevelopment. We have 13 communities right now that could bear redevelopment. They are low-density; there are social problems galore.
"A lot of the public violence that's happening in the city is happening in these communities, which are almost uniformly low-income. So we have wondered if there's an opportunity here for new architecture, new community development, new houses, new schools, new banks. By improving them, we can be catalysts for new communities — something we believe is already happening in Regent Park."
Mr. Guslits is a devout believer in mixed-income, mixed-use — mixed everything — initiatives in the public housing field. In Regent Park, the corporation's flagship experiment in this kind of development, a line-up of well-known local architectural firms has been brought on board. The list includes architectsAlliance, Diamond + Schmitt, Kearns Mancini and core.
The buildings they are fashioning will contain a grocery store, a coffee shop and other amenities — the things, in other words, that can be expected to attract a far more diverse clientele than uniformly low-income Regent Park ever did.
But renovated Regent Park is only the beginning. A project with 1,000 new units of social housing, by architectsAlliance, is slated for Concord Adex's vast CityPlace. And Jon Neuert of the firm Baird Sampson Neuert is designing market-rate and subsidized apartments and townhouses for Waterfront Toronto's West Don Lands development.
"We intended to expand the notion of Regent Park," Mr. Guslits said. "It's created the desire in us. We didn't want to be like every other developer in town, who just does whatever is needed to make money. One thing we could do would be to develop for-sale housing along with affordable housing — street-related, oriented toward families. Sustainability was another factor. Toronto is far behind Europe, and much of North America, on the issue of energy efficiency. We wanted to see what we could do in pushing the green elements. We are pushing the architects to do things they're not normally asked to do. We're pushing architects to work in a more sculptural way."
But will all Mr. Guslits's pushing bring Toronto much really good new architecture?
The buildings now under way in Regent Park are solid, steady-as-she-goes examples of modernist design — responsible, but also unremarkable. Better is architect Stephen Teeple's fresh little project destined for Richmond Street East. And perhaps best of all in TCHC's current crop — the design has not been finalized — is Mr. Neuert's energetic and sensitive complex in the West Don Lands. Clearly, TCHC is moving in the right direction, toward increasingly inventive designs — though it could surely do so more decisively and quickly.
But, as Mr. Guslits said: "We are feeling our way forward."
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