Mega-projects reshaping Mississauga sprawl
Mississauga is embarking on a historic period of urban growth, with $45 billion of construction, much of it vertical, in the next 15 years

TheStar.com
Oct. 20, 2016
San Grewal

At an international biotechnology conference in Philadelphia last year, Mississauga Mayor Bonnie Crombie heard that a Brazilian multinational pharmaceutical company was looking to set up an operation in New Jersey.

“So I pitched them on the GTA — Mississauga,” says Crombie, talking about her city’s growing confidence as a global player, while an unprecedented number of multibillion-dollar projects get set to launch in Canada’s sixth largest city.

Crombie went to Brazil and met with officials of the company, Biolab. “They rolled out the red carpet. Then they grilled me on Mississauga,” she says.

After hearing about the LRT project along Mississauga’s central commercial corridor, a new institute of management and innovation and a new medical research facility at the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus, as well as a number of large, vertical residential projects in the city, Biolab was sold. It is investing $56 million in a new Mississauga research and development facility.

The city is undergoing an unprecedented transformation, with an expected $40 to $45 billion of new construction investment over the next 15 years, according to senior city staff, more than double the recent annual rate of construction investment in Mississauga.

Some of the projects either underway or being planned for the near future:

• A 10-tower, $1.5 billion downtown highrise condominium project spearheaded by a real estate company created by the Rogers family, better known for its leadership of Canada’s telecommunications giant.
• A 250-acre waterfront reclamation around the site of the old Lakeview coal-fired power plant, which will feature a mix of residential and commercial development, arts and culture venues and conservation land.
• About 125 acres of new development, including marina water lots, at the centre of Port Credit. Part of the site, where there was once an Imperial Oil refinery, will be converted into mixed-use development.
• A 200-acre parcel of land in the city’s centre, along the LRT corridor, which will include a planned 166-acre urban farm, including the historic farm buildings, and about 33 acres of midrise residential development featuring street-level cafes, restaurants and boutiques.
• The $1.3 billion LRT, funded by the province, with major developments along the Hurontario corridor, including public art spaces, cultural venues, major transportation terminals and intensified residential and office construction by current property owners.

It’s startling departure for Mississauga after decades of urban sprawl, which featured wide single-family housing in vast subdivisions and low-slung commercial buildings in strip-mall-style plazas surrounded by acres space for parking.

“It’s a combination of different factors,” says Ed Sajecki, the man in charge of planning and building in Mississauga, explaining the historic changes taking place. He says Mississauga’s current success is partly because it is embracing an urbanism that is somewhere in the middle, on more of a human scale — not the car-dominated sprawl that has defined post-war North American suburbs, and not the hyper-verticality of many walled off concrete and glass cities rising upward around the world.

“The public has been very clear, council has been very clear, we’re looking at more of a midrise form of intensification down in those areas. The plans do provide for a tiny bit of deviation, but it’s been very clear (in our waterfront) documents, if we do entertain some higher buildings it would have to be something that we would all be very, very proud of.”

Ray Tomalty, a University of McGill adjunct professor of urban planning, holds Mississauga up as the North American example of dynamic suburban evolution.

“The U.S. doesn’t really have anything like Mississauga, in the sense of a major suburban municipality with major highrises and increasingly diverse transit options,” he told the Star. In his book, America’s Urban Future: Lessons from North of the Border, Tomalty, who is also a principal of consulting firm Smart Cities Research Services, describes how Mississauga is reinventing itself, refusing to spiral into the type of dreary, big-box commercial decline of many American suburbs.

“It is a good example of where suburban municipalities should be heading, in terms of re-centering . . . Mississauga is kind of like an indicator of what needs to happen more.”

Sajecki says residents are driving the rapid changes.

“The market is demanding these things. They want rapid transit. We have residents from around the world, millennials who are buying their first place, others whose children are grown up now and don’t want to live in a big house anymore. Young people don’t want to pay $60,000 just for a spot to park their car.”

Sajecki says the city’s previous model of growth would have been difficult to sustain, with the cost of infrastructure to service sprawl that could not be supported by the property tax base.

Crombie says she doesn’t plan to stop with the current list of multibillion-dollar projects currently redefining her city. “I don’t see why we can’t compete with Toronto,” she says.

She talks of Japanese and German companies she’s currently trying to recruit and ambitious plans to expand the city’s airport corporate centre which already employs about 300,000 people around Pearson airport.

Crombie says the city still has a lot of work to do to create arts and cultural experiences, and build other features that increasingly cosmopolitan residents expect.

“There is a feeling of anticipation that everyone has right now. This is the right time,” she says.

During an interview, Sajecki apologizes for having to end the conversation.

“I have to get upstairs,” he says, explaining why he’s in a rush. “We’ve invited all of our landowners in the downtown to a meeting. The mayor is upstairs right now with several of our councillors so that all the land owners can get an idea of everything that’s going on.”