Sometimes a tall building can be a good thing, even in Toronto

Loathing of new condos and other tall buildings can reach a weird pitch in today's Toronto. Consider what is happening at an address near Dufferin and Queen.

Six Noble Street is the home of a Parkdale institution, the Pia Bouman School for Ballet and Creative Movement. Both my daughters have danced there. Pia Bouman is a Toronto treasure, a Dutchwoman who came to the city one bitter February day in 1967, fell for the freedom and open spaces of Canada and built a life teaching girls and boys to dance.

In her world, everyone who wants to be a dancer should have the opportunity. "There is no wrong body, there is no wrong shape," she says. "If you have the passion, you can do it."

With a European sense of discipline, she puts her dancers through their paces at the barre and on the floor. Go around to 6 Noble most days and you will find her, an elegant woman of 74 with the straight-backed posture of a dancer and a sparkle in her eye.

She is a demon for work and, at a dance school, the work never stops. She and her fellow teachers have just finished putting on the school's year-end production, Let's Dance. Soon, for the 31st time, she will start organizing the annual Christmas production of the Nutcracker.

But for the past few years, a shadow has been hanging over the school. The old industrial building that it moved into in 2003 after years in a Parkdale church was a prime target for development, just steps from gentrifying Queen West. When the news came last summer that the building had been sold for $6-million, "I got a big lump in my throat," Ms. Bouman says. Perhaps, she thought, "this is it." The school would be left homeless, in a city where suitable space is costly and rare.

Then something surprising and almost miraculous happened. Ms. Bouman poked around a bit and found that the man behind the purchase was named Dermot Sweeny. Hadn't a Dermot Sweeny been the father of one of her young dancers?

He had. She went to see him, nervously practising what she would say. She needn't have worried. A well-known architect and developer who raised his family in Parkdale, he told her that he loved the school and planned to build her a brand new one on the bottom floors of the residential building, with a theatre thrown in. He has even offered to help find her temporary space during the construction. Amazed, Ms. Bouman called a meeting of parents and volunteers to tell them that they had found a fairy godfather and that – hosanna – it looked as if the school would be saved.

Of course, Toronto being Toronto, there is a hitch. At a public meeting last month to present plans to the community, residents complained that the effect of the new building would be to fill the overcrowded streets with traffic, gobble up street parking and overshadow neighbouring buildings – the standard charges flung at new projects. The local city councillor, Gord Perks, said that, at 14 storeys, "this is just way too big."

The trouble is that if the usual thing happens and the developer has to shrink his building to satisfy complaining residents, he may not be able to build enough units and make enough money to cover the cost of including the school. Blinkered NIMBYism could ruin Ms. Bouman's fairy-tale ending.

That would be an awful shame. Mr. Sweeny is a solid citizen, one of a new breed of good-guy developers who wants to give something back to the city. His plans call for rental units, not condos, and he is exploring whether he can build in affordable housing, a boon for low-income Parkdale.

His early plans call for a sustainable building with two- and three-bedroom units for families, lots of bike-parking spaces, a rooftop community garden and stepbacks on the upper floors to keep the structure from looming over the neighbours. The worries over traffic seem overblown. The project is steps from the Dufferin bus and Queen streetcar routes. Many residents won't need a car for commuting.

So this is hardly some towering glass monstrosity plunked into a residential neighbourhood. It will stand a stone's throw from a big railway line. Other tall-ish buildings are going up on the other side of the tracks. It seems a perfect place – near a transit hub, next to a main-street corridor where city planners aim to foster growth – to build a little urban density.

"I personally don't fully comprehend this incredible phobia behind height in the city," says Mr. Sweeny, the son of Irish immigrants, whose firm designed the much-praised new Queen Richmond Centre West. "Height itself is not a bad thing." Besides, "I'm not asking for 40 storeys. I'm asking for 14."

If Mr. Sweeny can only overcome the misplaced neighbourhood objections, everyone can come out a winner. Queen Street storekeepers and restaurateurs get more foot traffic, Parkdale gets some badly needed rental housing and, of course, Pia Bouman gets a place to teach another generation about the power and the wonder of dance.