Mirvish Village plan is positive model for city-building, for community democracy

City planners endorse Westbank’s creative reimagining of a downtown neighbourhood, but some residents voice concerns that it’s too much too fast.

Thestar.com
March 4, 2017
By Edward Keenan

“We talk a lot about the fear of negative development precedents. We also need to think about positive precedents, about a positive model of how we want the development community to engage with us,” City Councillor Joe Cressy said Thursday night at the Bickford Centre on Bloor St. W., just as a public meeting was beginning.

A few blocks away, the famous lights of Honest Ed’s were still blinking as the evening darkness settled in.

But the block-wide store is closed for good, its shelves empty and doors locked.

The restaurants, bookstores and galleries that were its neighbours on Markham St. were vacant and fenced off.

The prominent chapter in Toronto’s history represented by the celebrated Mirvish Village’s past was closed.

The meeting was to discuss the next chapter.

Cressy struck notes of optimism about the plans, and about the process that led to the current version of them.

A standing room-only crowd of several hundred turned out to hear from Cressy and fellow local Councillor Mike Layton, and see presentations from Westbank, the developer that now owns the Mirvish Village site, and from the city’s planning department.

The crowd was engaged and informed, and people attending had a variety of opinions on the proposal.

It wasn’t a typical meeting for a large development.

But this isn’t a typical large development.

Layton joked that this was the 750th meeting on the project, and produced a pair of small-print Power Point slides detailing the history in a long list. A show of hands revealed the large majority had attended a meeting about this proposal in the past.

Layton invoked the virtue of compromise, especially important, he said, because developers can often appeal to the Ontario Municipal Board and a community can be forced to accept things it does not like, things worse than a compromise would entail.

This developer, he said, had not done that, and as a result of negotiation, had substantially improved its proposal.

The plan didn’t look like it had been composed by committee to be barely tolerable and minimally acceptable to different interests.

It looked like a bold, creative, reimagining of a downtown block.

The plan has a “wow” factor. It has some playfulness. In a city in which too many redevelopment proposals seem to be simple glass towers rising from nondescript big boxes, this one resembles a neighbourhood.

The project includes 53 separate buildings, we were told, some of them tall and some of them less so. They are thought to mimic, in their size and variety, the kind of smaller-scale gradual development that characterizes downtown streets. The retail storefronts are meant to be similarly small and varied.

A substantial new park is included, as is a pedestrian marketplace, and an “Honest Ed’s Alley” will run through the centre and offer more small-scale retail storefronts.

Twenty-three heritage buildings - mostly, but not only, the big old houses on Markham St. - will be preserved much as they are, and renovated.

All the residential units in the project will be rentals, not condos, and they will vary in size from 400-square-foot studios to 1,200-sq.-ft.-plus three-bedroom units.

The proposal includes plans for a childcare centre, bike parking, and a cultural hub.

Details on a requirement stipulated by Cressy and Layton to have a certain percentage of units be affordable, subsidized housing were still being worked out, we were told.

What more could you ask for in a large development?

Not much, city planner Graig Uens suggested: “Our priorities for the site have largely been addressed,” Uens said.

He informed the meeting that the planning department would recommend approving the project when it comes to a city committee next month. His announcement was greeted with some applause.

Some in the crowd shad deep reservations, expressed in a long question-and-answer session. They wanted, speaking generally, less height, less density, fewer units. Less change.

On the whole, those who spoke of their support for the proposal were younger. Some said they hoped they could move into the neighbourhood, or stay in it. They had high praise for the fact it was composed of rental units: in a city, where downtown homeownership has moved out of the financial reach even for many professionals, such as a doctor who spoke, a family-sized rental unit in a vibrant neighbourhood on the subway line has become the new civic aspiration.

The meeting was civil.

“I gotta tell you, getting people to hear each other (I mean really listen to each other) is one of the hardest things in a democracy,” Cressy wrote me in a follow up email Friday morning. “I thought residents heard each other last night, and it was fascinating.”

If you’re looking for positive models, you could do a lot worse.