How can Toronto keep privately owned public spaces safe?

'Property owners are ultimately responsible for their properties': city official

Toronto.com
July 31, 2019
David Nickle

Is it safe to walk to school in Toronto?

The young students who cross the bridge between their homes off Victoria Park Avenue to Crescent Town Public School might have wanted to think so. And luckily, no one was hurt when part of the bridge co-owned by the Toronto District School Board and Pinedale Properties (which manages apartment buildings at Crescent Place) collapsed early one weekend morning in November 2018.

As documented in a City of Toronto internal auditor’s report to Toronto council, the problems with the Crescent Town bridge that led to its collapse were not unknown to officials. The city had issued orders to address structural problems with the bridge as far back as 2015, but the TDSB and Pinedale were unable to co-ordinate repairs to the jointly owned structure until it finally fell apart -- and the city failed to enforce those orders.

It’s a good bet that when the bridge to Crescent Town is finally reinstalled, the city and the owners will keep a closer watch on it. But the incident raises the question: what about the rest of Toronto?

What about the pedestrian bridges, parking structures and other infrastructure that are regularly used by the public but owned by private entities? How do we know if they’re safe?

“Property owners are ultimately responsible for their properties and they’re responsible for maintaining their properties and making sure they’re safe,” said Will Johnston, Toronto's chief building official. “In order to proactively carry out inspections, the amount of resources we would need would be quite high; we would have to go out and check them on a regular basis.”

Following the bridge collapse, Toronto building officials decided to take a step in that direction and conducted the city’s first inventory of privately owned bridges. A team of 11 enforcement officers in the city’s building department were diverted to the project, and what they found was not encouraging.

Of 172 such structures across the city, 15 were found with structural problems serious enough to warrant a work order. And according to Johnston, short of a complaint about one of those structures, it's unlikely the city would have been aware of the problems.

The inspection blitz on bridges was what Johnston called “a workaround” of a gap in the Ontario Building Code Act that if filled, would make for a more comprehensive monitoring of public infrastructure like bridges, but specifically elevated parking structures.

Currently, the building act requires builders and owners to tell the chief building official when their building is ready for inspection at each stage of construction.

But there is no requirement for owners to regularly evaluate the state of their structures. In 2017, following the inquiry into the 2012 collapse of the Algo Centre Mall’s roof in Elliot Lake, the provincial government issued a consultation paper looking at establishing a building code evaluation program, specifically for buildings with rooftop parking and elevated parking structures, built before 1988.

The program could, if implemented, require owners to conduct regular inspections of their structures -- and if there are problems, report those to municipal officials.

In the wake of the Crescent Town bridge collapse, the city has written to the provincial government requesting those regulations be put in place -- and extended to pedestrian bridges, as well.

Beaches-East York Coun. Brad Bradford said the regulations are essential to ensure safety in a host of public spaces: in tunnels, shopping malls or decked-over structures on rail lands.

“Each day and month and year goes by, we remain vulnerable and what happened in Crescent Town is reflective of that,” Bradford said. “We’re taking matters into our own hands in Toronto because it’s clear we need to.”

Janet Davis, who represented the Crescent Town community on Toronto council until she retired in 2018, said the city also needs to see engineering from highrise owners -- particularly as the buildings age.

“Those buildings are 50 years old and we have hundreds, and the city and the province knows nothing about them in terms of their condition,” she said. “I think the building code needs to be strengthened to require building code condition reports to be conducted, and second to put the onus on any structural engineer who conducts any kind of inspection on a structure that finds it unsafe, they must report their findings.”

Johnston said he would be happy to see such reporting required for bridge owners and for elevated parking structures.

“At this point in time what jumps out in my mind is there is a need to do this in pedestrian bridges and parking structures,” he said. “There may be other systems we need to consider, but this is a good place to start. This would be a fairly significant change.”