Vaughan's downtown landmark set to rise

Yorkregion.com
Oct. 9, 2014
By Adam Martin-Robbins

When Mitch Goldhar, owner of SmartCentres, teamed up with a few partners to buy 100 undeveloped acres at Edgeley Boulevard and Hwy. 7 nearly 20 years ago, he envisioned it as the future home of a big-box-store plaza with a sprawling parking lot.

That is, after all, the type of development he’s been building for more than a decade since teaming up with retail giant WalMart to expand its presence in Canada.

City council’s vision, at that time, was much different.

It was pushing for that area to be developed into a downtown-style business district comprised of corporate office towers.

The two visions were clearly at odds.

But everything changed a decade later when the decision was made to extend the Spadina subway line to Vaughan - more precisely, to Goldhar’s land.

Now the vision for that 100-acre site, situated at the heart of a much larger emerging area dubbed the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre (VMC), is a vibrant, modern and dense urban core featuring a mix of condo towers, corporate offices, shops, entertainment venues, restaurants, cafes, parks and transit hubs.

By 2031, the VMC is expected to be home to at least 25,000 people and more than 11,000 jobs, of which 5,000 are supposed to be office jobs.

Goldhar says he’s “fully committed” to helping make that happen.

“Once the subway infrastructure was fully committed by the federal, provincial, regional and municipal levels of government, I personally was fully committed to the idea that a city centre of world-class proportions could be achieved here in the VMC,” he told a large crowd gathered at the site last week for a “groundbreaking ceremony” to celebrate the first step in realizing this new vision - construction of a 15-storey, 365,000-square-foot office tower at the site.

The landmark building, already well under way, is named after anchor tenant KPMG, the global accounting and consulting firm.

It is intended to be a LEED-gold certified building with two levels of underground parking, a direct link to the VMC subway station and a short distance from the Viva bus rapid transit station on Hwy. 7.

The building is also set close to an eight-acre central park and a large civic square, big enough to rival Yonge-Dundas Square, in downtown Toronto.

“The master planning of this future city, this future economic engine, mark my words, will be admired and envied from a distance by other cities this time,” Goldhar said. “Today, we are here for the groundbreaking of the KPMG building, but it’s more than that. It’s the groundbreaking of a new face of development we’ve never seen before in Toronto or Vaughan or Ontario or Canada."

KPMG expects to have about 500 employees working out of the building, which is scheduled for completion in October 2016, around the same time as the subway is slated to be up and running.

“Obviously, the Vaughan area is a fast-growing part of the GTA, but at the end of the day it will allow us to better serve the GTA from three locations, here in Vaughan, our mid-town location and downtown,” said Frank Boutzis, partner in charge of KPMG’s GTA enterprise practice. “It gives us a better footprint to better serve the GTA.”

The groundbreaking ceremony was attended by several prominent business people and local dignitaries including Silvio DeGasperis, owner of TACC Construction and one of Goldhar’s partners, former finance minister and former Vaughan MPP Greg Sorbara, Mayor Maurizio Bevilacqua, a handful of city councillors, and Premier Kathleen Wynne.

“I think this is a real milestone in the evolution of Vaughan,” Wynne said. “I grew up just north east of here, in Richmond Hill, and so I was at these intersections many, many times in my growing up. And the remarkable transformation that has taken place, in this community, is really quite outstanding. Vaughan’s become a flourishing community for so many. ...This is the kind of project we can all point to and say, “You see. You see how good it can be, how this can all work.’”

Bevilacqua also showered praise on the project.

“What we’re starting today is really transformational,” he said. “It is transformational and speaks to our great ability as people to share in a common goal, pool our resources together and make things happen. So as we celebrate this day, we are indeed participating in a historical event, one that generations upon generations of citizens here, in York Region and in the city of Vaughan, will be talking about for many, many years to come.”