The simple way to save Toronto’s heritage
Every building is protected and no building gets torn down until the city has a chance to see if it has historical value.

thestar.com
By EDWARD KEENAN
April 3, 2017

Some things that city hall deals with are complicated. How to solve the problem of housing affordability in Toronto, for instance, is tricky in part because it’s devilishly hard to be certain what it is that’s driving prices up and to determine what measures will bring them down without crashing the housing market and causing a recession.

The solutions to other problems are simpler. So simple it’s hard to understand why they haven’t been adopted already. For instance, we’ve had a problem recently where property owners act quickly, sometimes in the dead of night, to legally demolish beloved landmark buildings while the city tries to determine whether those buildings are worthy of heritage protection. It happened recently in the case of a 110-year-old bank building near Yonge and Eglinton. It happened to the former Stollerys building at Yonge and Bloor. It’s happened in a lot of cases before that, and unless we do something it is likely to happen again soon.

And every time it happens, it is as if everyone in the city is blindsided: how could this have happened, everyone asks. There must have been some mistake in the paperwork, or miscommunication between city departments, politicians say. It’s a shame we can’t do anything about it, they frown.

But the truth is we know why and how it happens. And a possible solution to the problem is very simple. Just automatically protect any building that might have heritage value and require the city to sign off on it before a demolition permit can be issued.

A group of prominent architects and heritage advocates will make that basic argument in a letter to the city’s Planning and Growth Management Committee to be submitted at a meeting Wednesday.

“To save Toronto’s built history we recommend the city prioritize a shockingly simple approach: do a survey for the entire city, indentify all the potential heritage buildings and list them,” the letter from Michael McClelland, Ken Greenberg, Margie Zeidler, Cathy Nasmith and Geoff Kettel reads. “Bizarrely this has never been done; the result is that we lose buildings to wrecking balls even though everyone agrees they are culturally valuable.”

The suggestion here is not to make it difficult or impossible to ever tear down or replace any building in the city by giving them all a heritage “designation.” Instead, it’s just to “list” them as having potential heritage value so that before any permits are issued, the city has the right to take a look and weigh in.

This distinction already exists in heritage laws: a “designated” building is protected in all kinds of complicated ways, while a “listed” building is basically a candidate for possible designation.

The thing is that designating a building is a long and complex process, while listing one can be simple. And if the aim is to stop building owners from preemptively destroying buildings to prevent them from being looked at for designation, then preemptively listing any building of possible value appears to be an elegant, straightforward solution.

The letter’s writer’s point out that Hamilton has already begun a similar list, “using municipal staff and community volunteers to sweep across the city and identify all the historic, interesting or culturally significant structures.” Ottawa, they say, is going to do the same.

Personally, I think it’d be even simpler to just create a blanket rule that says no demolition permit can be issued without a cursory heritage sign-off - someone in planning or heritage preservation taking a five-minute look to say “no possible heritage concerns” or “heritage review needed.” After all, as I pointed out before, this need for case-by-case affirmative consent applies already to all kinds of mundane things such as tree removal and liquor licensing. Even to renew your license plate sticker, you need to first pass a check into whether you have unpaid parking tickets. It certainly seems sensible to me that a similar check box should be ticked before you can irreversibly alter the historical streetscape of the city.

But what do I know? Certainly it seems to many people that my solution is too much of a blanket that would smother development and redevelopment of private property. Perhaps with staffing issues in the city and the nature of bureaucracy, the simple “possible heritage” check-box would take too long to tick off, further slowing down an already backlogged planning process.

If so, the solution put forward by McClelland, Greenberg, et al - basically, to tick that box in advance, yes or no, for every building in the city - is the best, simplest fix.

Mayor John Tory met with the group recently and is open to the idea. “Mayor Tory believes we need to do more to protect heritage buildings in our city. This city-wide survey approach has worked in other cities and the mayor looks forward to hearing from city staff and the Planning and Growth Management Committee about whether this idea could work here,” his office said in a statement.

It’s so obviously worthwhile that we should have done it a long time ago. Does that mean the city will obviously adopt it? Well, we’ll see.