A parking lot, a fire station and a condo proposal: How a tricky city-building chess game is bringing a much-needed park to Toronto’s core

Thestar.com
May 17, 2021
Jennifer Pagliaro

How do you build a desperately needed park in the packed downtown core?

As a new plan unveiled Friday for a parking lot on Richmond Street West shows: Slowly, over years, with painstaking negotiations by city officials, the relentless drive of a local councillor and by swapping a city-owned fire hall for condos with affordable housing.

That multi-step, multi-year bid to build the first major park in the east precinct of the King-Spadina neighbourhood in decades came to fruition this week after the purchase of the Richmond parking lot. The 2,245-square-metre site will be converted into a park about half the size of a football field.

“This represents creative, smart and bold city-building. It represents a new way of doing business in our growing city,” said local Coun. Joe Cressy (Ward 10 Spadina-Fort York). “This is growth paying for growth with no new net costs to this city.”

The announcement came just two days after city officials were shocked to learn a council decision to build a massive Rail Deck Park over the downtown rail corridor had been scuttled by a provincial planning tribunal. That decision has highlighted the challenges of redeveloping the fast-growing core to create livable spaces.

The parking lot at 229 Richmond St. W. before redevelopment

The bid to build a new park downtown began, like Rail Deck Park, in 2016. What resulted came from hundreds of hours of work of 12 city divisions, multiple council members and a private landowner.

Consider it a game of city-building chess.

It started with Cressy asking staff to look at potentially acquiring the Richmond site for parkland in 2016. Staff did an appraisal of the site and considered funding options.

But the value of that land -- upwards of $130 million based on highest and best use, staff later reported -- was money the city didn’t have.

The city wanted to make the commercial parking lot into a park, but its zoning allowed tall buildings, making the land incredibly valuable and exceeding what the city could normally afford if it used its budget for parks.

As part of the review, staff were asked to look at the whole precinct -- generally the blocks bordered by Stephanie Street just south of Grange Park to Adelaide Street West and Peter to Duncan Street -- for ways to implement the city’s policies on parks, community spaces and more.

That study identified Fire Station No.332 -- the Adelaide Fire Hall just south of the Richmond parking lot -- as a potential site for redevelopment. Toronto Fire Services agrees that old stations in need of refurbishment present an opportunity to reimagine them as part of community buildings rather than maintaining stand-alone sites.

In 2019, council, on staff’s recommendation, agreed to purchase the Richmond site outright when it came up for sale, using recoverable debt for $103 million.

At the same time, council declared the Adelaide Fire Hall site as surplus city property it hoped could be redeveloped to help finance the parking lot purchase. Staff were told to look for opportunities within that redevelopment to create additional community amenities.

In a recent move, the city partnered with CentreCourt, which owns the site next door to the fire hall, to redevelop both sites together as a condo. The move would allow for a larger building podium and tower -- more units meant a higher land value and more money, which meant more funds for the city to purchase the park site.

Plans for the Adelaide Street building include 652 residential units, officials announced Friday. But as part of the deal, the city secured 30 per cent or about 196 units for affordable housing -- something also hard to come by downtown -- along with a new EMS post and 10,000 square feet of community space.

“This is good news for many individuals and families who are in need of access to affordable housing in the city’s downtown core,” said Coun. Ana Bailao, Mayor John Tory’s affordable housing advocate, on Friday.

She said it’s another example of how the city leveraged its own resources -- city-owned land -- to build supportive and affordable housing.

And she praised Cressy: “He started putting the pieces together of this puzzle.”

About half of the Richmond site will be financed using what are known as parkland dedication funds.

Consider this as the rook in this chess game -- a reliable, straightforward way to get where you want to go.

Under what’s called section 42 of the provincial Planning Act, the city has to be able to leverage either land or money for parks.

The rules typically allow the city to require developers of new buildings to dedicate a piece of land for parkland, either on site or nearby, or pay cash-in-lieu of that land.

Because the footprint of tall buildings downtown is often not very big -- tall sites on narrow plots -- city officials often opt to take the cash instead of settling for postage stamp park sites scattered throughout the city.

While some on council and even Premier Doug Ford have accused downtown councillors of amassing “slush funds” this way, the reality is that each new site may only net a few million dollars at a time -- not the tens of millions needed to buy a site like the one on Richmond.

So it takes time to save enough to get a larger, valuable site for a park downtown where they are most needed.

For example, a city staff report from 2017 calculated the city had collected a total $260.5 million in cash-in-lieu funds over the course of the preceding decade. Though the pace of development since continues at an unprecedented clip, raising the money to afford $100-million sites still takes time.

The parkland funds will cover 43 per cent of the costs of acquiring the Richmond site.

Tory said that when it came to this unique opportunity, the city was lucky money had been set aside over time.

“That’s the way the system is meant to work,” he said.

But the chess game didn’t end there. What to do with the busiest fire station in the country -- to save it from being a sacrificial pawn?

Staff found a solution for that. The plan is to relocate the fire hall to the south side of Metro Hall fronting on Wellington Street just south of its current location. The redevelopment of the Adelaide site will pay for this brand new station as well, along with the costs of relocating child care and other services within Metro Hall.

Tory praised fire services for being innovative as part of the complicated plan.

“It’s got us into a multiple-win project that is imaginative, it is sensible and it is good city building,” he said.

And as the finishing move, the Toronto Parking Authority is looking to build and operate a below-grade parking lot at the Richmond site, keeping parking in the mix for those travelling downtown -- often a contentious issue with suburban councillors -- and raising more revenue for the city.

The east precinct this park will serve has become desperate for additional amenities, growing from around 250 residents in the 2000s -- when it was predominantly commercial space -- to an estimated 40,000 future residents. All those people need schools, daycares and more parks.

“Parks and public spaces, they’re not nice to have. In fact, for a great, livable, vibrant city they’re must-haves and that’s been truly affirmed and demonstrated during COVID,” said Cressy.

“I think this plan in front of us today at Richmond and Adelaide demonstrates the need to be more creative and bold in how we build those livable and affordable neighbourhoods.”