Vaughan's downtown starts rising from ground

400-acre city centre seen as key test of the province's Places to Grow intensification plans.

Thestar.com
Oct. 13, 2014
By Susan Pigg


When SmartCentre mall mogul Mitchell Goldhar first ventured to the City of Vaughan back in 1994 to look at a parcel of land for sale, he found a three-hole golf course and a driving range surrounded by fields.

From there, he could see the future. It was a sprawling, single-storey mall serving the growing Region of York.

The City of Vaughan, where the golf course sat on Highway 7 just west of Jane St., had another idea. Civic leaders wanted a corporate centre.

The debate over what to develop raged right up to the Ontario Municipal Board before Goldhar got a call in 2006 that would change everything.

It was from the Toronto Transit Commission.

“They said, ‘We have a new route we’re thinking of building and we see a subway station right there,’ which was right on the lands. They wanted to know how I felt about that and if we could work together.

“I got it before they finished their sentence. I just thought, ‘Wow, this may be the most interesting development I’ll ever do.’ ”

Last week, even Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne showed up at the groundbreaking ceremony for the first office building about to rise from that former golf course - the KPMG tower, which will anchor what’s since evolved into a 400-acre master-planned downtown known as the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre.

Wynne wasn’t there to celebrate yet another 15-storey office tower sprouting up on the GTA skyline. She was really there to salute a critical poster project of the Liberal government’s Places to Grow legislation, which, since 2006, has sent development across the GTA shooting up, instead of out, at breathtaking speed.

With staff expected to start moving into five floors of the KPMG tower in 2016, in time for the opening of the subway, those former golf course lands are well on their way to becoming the centrepiece of a dense new downtown and highly efficient transportation hub for a fast-growing part of the GTA that’s never had either.

If all goes as planned over the next 20-plus years, some 35,000 people will live and work on the VMC lands.

It will also be one of the most transportation-rich areas of the whole GTA: The most northerly station of the University/Spadina subway extension, now slated to open in late 2016; the centre of the new VIVA dedicated bus lanes that will connect Markham, Vaughan and Richmond Hill; home to the new York Region Transit bus terminal; and a quick drive to Highways 400 and 407.

“The VMC is not a suburban development like we are used to seeing,” says Goldhar. “It is not an area of low- or mid-rise buildings that may eventually give way to increased densities (taller buildings) through redevelopment over a generation or two.

“Here we are starting with the end product - a high-density, fully urban, mixed-use community.”

Vaughan will no longer be “the suburbs”: “The VMC is urbanization of the highest order” and is soon to become the busy epicentre of the GTA, Goldhar believes.

So does developer Peter Cortellucci, vice president of the Cortel Group, which will start moving residents into what’s now the tallest building in the area, the 39-storey first tower of its Expo City condo project on Highway 7 at Jane St.

Four more towers are planned for that two-acre site, just to the east of the new VMC subway station and city centre.

“With over $1 billion in new infrastructure planned for this area, we have an opportunity to put the latest and greatest planning principles into action, to create a live-work-play community with strong design and architecture that will make people stop and say, ‘That’s really interesting,’ ” says Cortellucci.

Goldhar flinches when told that the artists’ renderings of the VMC, with its planned Central Park, its civic square, its 12,000 residential units and six million square feet of office and retail development, looks much like another master-planned city centre - North York’s.

That is a fraction of the size of what’s planned in Vaughan, he points out, and was far more difficult to execute because the area around North York’s core was owned by so many different players with different ideas.

Dozens of owners control about 270 acres of the VMC lands. But Goldhar’s 100 acres is seen as the most critical, because it contains the transit facilities and first-stage residential and commercial developments that are expected to set the tone for any future redevelopment of lands to the south of Highway 7.

It’s so big - the size of London’s famed Canary Wharf - that Goldhar has now partnered with a handful of firms for different parts of the project, a list that includes publicly traded Calloway Real Estate Income Trust, as well as long-time developers Rudy Bratty and Silvio DeGasperis.

If superimposed on Toronto’s downtown core, says Goldhar, the 100 acres would stretch from Richmond St. south to Wellington St., and from University Ave. all the way to Church St.

“It’s very unusual to have this amount of land - a blank slate, rather than an infill site - and right up against (new) provincial infrastructure,” he says in a manner that is more incredulous than boastful.

“This wasn’t just the groundbreaking for a single building, it was the moment of birth for a new approach” to intensification.

It’s is a responsibility that Goldhar, with more than 250 SmartCentre malls under his belt, takes intensely seriously.

“I don’t look at this as just another development. I feel a real responsibility here to do something that will be for the betterment of the community,” he says.

During last week’s groundbreaking ceremony, Vaughan mayor Maurizio Bevilacqua lauded the co-operative approach that everyone, from the province to the TTC to Goldhar and his partners, is taking to the future of VMC.

The only sticking point, Bevilacqua quipped before the room erupted in laughter, is how many of those ubiquitous SmartCentre penguins are going to dot the site.