Tall buildings burn less energy than their counterparts with sprawling suburban lots and two or three cars in driveway.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
In 1973, a reform-minded Toronto City Council led by a vigorous new mayor, David Crombie, brought in a two-year moratorium on downtown buildings more than 45 feet tall. That was almost 50 years ago, but it seems like forever.
Look at Toronto now. Tall buildings scrape the sky all over downtown. Cranes constructing dozens more rise left and right. A building boom that seems to allow no pause has changed the skyline beyond all recognition. Mr. Crombie might just as well have held up his hand to halt the tides.
The latest economic bulletin from City Hall says that, according to one private survey, “there are 238 high-rise and mid-rise buildings under construction in Toronto as of December, 2019, which is 26 more than a year ago.” Another survey says three buildings of more than 70 storeys are under construction and another 13 proposed.
Just this month a developer, Pinnacle International, announced that a new condo tower would rise 95 storeys at the foot of Yonge Street. More than 1,000 feet tall, SkyTower would exceed the old Crombie limit by more than 20 times. Pinnacle calls it “the country’s tallest condominium.” A couple more towers would go up beside it, one of them 65 storeys.
Many Torontonians are conspicuously unimpressed by the city’s tall-building boom. Too much construction, they complain. Too many look-alike glass towers. Too much traffic. Too many shadows darkening city streets. Grumbling about all the condo towers is as common as complaining about the Leafs.
In fact, the rage for height is a positive, indeed an inevitable, result of Toronto’s progress. With its strong tech, financial and service sectors, the city is drawing newcomers from all over North America and the world. A third of the 340,000 immigrants who came to Canada last year settled in the Greater Toronto Area.
Tall buildings help house them without resorting to the endless urban sprawl that blighted cities in the past. People who choose to live downtown or in other high-rise hubs often walk or take transit to work, which means less traffic, not more. They burn less energy than their counterparts with sprawling suburban lots and two or three cars in driveway.
Along with a lot of the cookie-cutter glass-and-steel architecture that people love to hate, Toronto is getting some unusual, even exciting stuff, such as the proposed office tower with hanging gardens on its roof. It is getting some vibrant high-rise neighbourhoods, too.
In CityPlace, the big high-rise complex between Front Street and the Gardiner Expressway, shops, restaurants and grocery stores have moved in to serve the growing population. The complex has an excellent public library. Two new schools just opened, after much delay.
A few minutes walk away in King-Spadina, a little Manhattan is rising in an area that used to be dominated by empty lots and old warehouses. Over by the site of SkyTower, a hyper-urban district has grown up in the once-barren zone between Union Station and the waterfront.
The virtue of these districts is that they aren’t monocultures, either all about work or all about high-rise living. They mix the two. That means that they are full of life around the clock. Toronto’s downtown doesn’t empty out at 5 p.m.; not any more.
Office towers are rising side by side with condo towers. Near the site of the future SkyTower, banking giant CIBC is building two towers with three million square feet of commercial space. A big developer, Oxford Properties, announced last summer that it planned to construct a $3.5-billion project near the CN Tower with a mix of apartments, offices and stores. It would stand just down the street from yet another huge mixed complex, the Well, under way on the site of the old Globe and Mail building.
Even Toronto satellites such as Mississauga, once the domain of endless low-rise subdivisions, are embracing height. Last month Oxford proposed to build a gargantuan 37-tower complex near a popular mall, Square One, that is currently ringed with parking lots.
Tall buildings aren’t for everyone. Toronto is still blessed by many comfortable, stable neighbourhoods of single-family homes, quite a few of them close to the centre of the city. It could use more of the modestly sized “missing middle” housing that is a compromise between low-rise and sky high.
But tall buildings – and lots of them – are part of what makes the city such a remarkable success. Rather than grouse about them, Torontonians should step back, drink in the glittering skyline and marvel at how their city has grown up.
Marcus Gee