Will a ‘city within a city’ at Woodbine ever happen?

Woodbine Entertainment Groups says a “shovel could be in the ground” by 2018.

Thestar.com
May 8, 2017
By Ellen Brait

Discussions about what to do with the Woodbine Racetrack lands have been happening for at least four years now. And you might be wondering why we don’t just get on with it.

But with a 275-hectare site and plans that potentially include a new music venue, hotels, condos, shops, offices, and sports fields, the scope is equivalent to a development the size of downtown Toronto.

“If you think of downtown Toronto from Spadina to the lake to Church Street to Queen Street, so basically everything in downtown Toronto…that fits within Woodbine,” Jim Lawson, CEO of Woodbine Entertainment Group said. “So when we say to people the long term 15, 20, 25 year vision here is to build a city within a city, your mind can wander.”

Now, in order to increase cash flow and expose a new generation of people to horse racing, Woodbine Entertainment Group has released big development plans. So big, in fact, that Lawson estimates the entire project will take 20 to 25 years.

“We have this big, beautiful physical plant with four race tracks and a great place to train horses but it comes at a big cost,” said Lawson. “It’s one of our biggest strengths and one of our biggest weaknesses.”

Woodbine’s privately owned 275-hectare site will “continue to be the ultimate destination for horse racing and gaming” with 81 hectares devoted to horse racing operations, according to a news release. But it will also include “entertainment and cultural offerings, food and dining, hotel, shopping, office space, post-secondary education, recreation, health, wellness, and urban residential living.”

The development, led by Woodbine Entertainment Group in collaboration with others, will be a “city within a city” and Lawson said they expect visitor numbers to rise from about six million a year to 12 to 14 million. The plans have been divided into phases, Lawson said, with the first phase including the expanded gaming district, along with entertainment and hospitality venues.

Lawson said a “shovel could be in the ground” as early as the end of 2018.

Ward 1 Councillor Vince Crisanti and Ward 2 Councillor Michael Ford have both been vocal about their support of the plan, as they believe it will provide the area with jobs and development it badly needs.

“Jobs are something that I hear about all the time in the north end of Etobicoke and the west end of the city and this will drive or create jobs of all levels,” Crisanti said.

But Matti Siemiatycki, an associate professor in Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto, said the development is still “a double edged sword.”

While there’s an opportunity to bring jobs and development to an area “in need of investment,” Siemiatycki said when developments are built around casinos they pose “risks in terms of the impact of gambling and gambling addiction.”

He also warned that casinos and large-scale developments such as this tend to be “inward looking” as they want to keep activity on their site.

“I think the idea of thinking of it as a city in an urban sense is positive but we want our cities to be integrated and to connect and to be able to interrelate.”

This is not the first time a race track has looked to expand its reach by adding other amenities like entertainment and additional gambling facilities. The Stronach Group, who owns Gulfstream Park, a race track in Florida, also added a casino and a retail and office complex to the property, with plans to add hotels and condominiums in the future.

Tim Ritvo, chief operating officer of the Stronach Group, said since the inception of their plan over the past six or seven years, they’ve seen an increase in the amount bet on races each year from $500 million to $1.7 billion. But this is not indicative of revenue, he said.

But their “biggest win,” he said, was attracting new clients.

“We’re marketing to a whole gamut of people: husbands, wives and kids can all go to the race track and do different things all day long. Someone can go to the races, someone can go to the casino, the kids can go shopping,” he said. “Then everyone can meet up for dinner and it’s a quality day together.”

Ritvo said they “commend Woodbine” for their similar development plans.

“We believe if only one facility does a good job at trying to promote racing, it doesn’t help the sport. So we encourage all of our other facilities and competitors to raise the bar so that it raises it for all of us,” he said.

While Woodbine hopes to reach a new generation with their development like Ritvo claimed they have, Lawson said what they’ve done at Gulfstream Park is “just a portion of hopefully what we can achieve at Woodbine.”

But despite these lofty goals, similar development plans at Woodbine have failed in the past.

In 2013, a Baltimore developer scrapped plans for Woodbine Live!, a massive shopping and entertainment complex. Hopes of replacing Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation slot machines at Woodbine with a full casino were also dashed later that year when council rejected that along with a downtown casino. Council later reconsidered, opening the door to a casino by a 25-19 vote amid fears for the track’s future.

Now, OLG is finding a private sector service provider to operate the Slots at Woodbine Racetrack site and to propose an expanded entertainment development, consistent with the City of Toronto’s conditions. The private sector provider is expected to be named in September, Lawson said.

Then they can move forward with the development. About six to 10 residential developers have already approached Woodbine Entertainment about building on the northwest corner of their land, according to Lawson, but for now they’ve turned them all down.

“We’ve said no because we want to plan this out properly and make sure it fits,” Lawson said.

“The area is so vast. The nice part is that we’re a single land owner which is so unusual…we can plan it out ourselves and create a vision so that everyone that we lease the land to or sell the land to, they’re consistent with the vision.”

But some are less confident the development will work out. Siemiatycki said he “never likes to say never” but “a lot of proposals to redevelop that site have been brought forward a number of times over the years.”

“These are in many ways about capturing lightning in a bottle,” Siemiatycki said. “All of the different factors have to align to make these projects viable…this is going to be hundreds of millions of dollars stretched over many years, plus political approval, plus the housing market has to remain buoyant.”

But unlike in the past, Lawson said, he’s confident these development plans will be seen through because the gaming expansion is “the trigger needed to generate a lot of excitement and economic activity around Rexdale.”

Lawson also cited the potential for more public transportation in the area, including talks of Pearson International Airport becoming amega huband the Finch West LRT extending to Woodbine.

At this point there have been no official plans for either. Anne Marie Aikins, a spokesperson for Metrolinx, said “there has been some study (Metrolinx & Toronto) about extending Finch but no commitment as yet.”