A denser city? In The Annex, neighbours say no

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It’s “as gentle as razor wire.” It is “a dangerous precedent.” It is a new apartment building.

But it is new apartment building in The Annex, on a street that is otherwise filled with houses. And so this proposal at 171 Lowther Ave. prompted some fiery rhetoric last week at Toronto East York Community Council.

The development does represent a significant shift in Toronto planning – for the better. For 50 years, the city’s house neighbourhoods have been a giant fortress. Apartment buildings have been banned almost entirely.

Now the politics of housing are changing fast. The federal government is working to deliver new density in cities across the country. Yet this meeting in Toronto showed that some people are not ready for that change.

“This project is in no way gentle intensification,” said the architect Terry Montgomery, representing the powerful local group the Annex Residents Association. “It will set a dangerous precedent for all areas in the city which currently [are zoned for] low-scale residential-buildings.”

It’s not clear whether that legal argument is true. At the meeting, City of Toronto planning manager David Driedger and director Oren Tamir – who, to their great credit, were supporting the development – said it would not set a precedent.

But if it did, why would that be “dangerous”? It is commonsensical. The Lowther site has two subway stations within an eight-minute walk. Toronto’s Line 1 and Line 2 intersect right here. This is one of the best-located, best-connected places in all of Canada.

That’s why this development is happening. In 2019, the Ontario government directed cities to plan for density in “major transit station areas.” That policy is both sensible and just. But Toronto City Hall responded with as little change as possible – at least in the poshest neighbourhoods – and the details are still in dispute. Meanwhile, some landowners are using the provincial policy to justify density.

At 38 Walmer Rd., very close to the Lowther site, the developer TAS is working with the Walmer Road Baptist Church to preserve its historic sanctuary and add a 20-storey residential tower. Next door, a landlord proposes to demolish an existing apartment building and build a 35-storey tower. One of those seems likely to be built.

And on Lowther, a local family who owns three houses is following suit. Working with Gabriel Fain Architects and the planners WND, they want to replace two houses with an 11-storey, 64-unit building. The architecture is handsome and witty. Its irregular, brick-clad base playfully evokes the neighbourhood’s Edwardian and Victorian picturesque houses. Its upper portion, lined in white metal and punctuated by vertical fins, nods to the jaunty Modernist apartment towers that joined the neighbourhood in the 1960s.

Yes, The Annex has towers: dozens of them, which occupy a small fraction of its land yet house the majority of its residents. Right next door to the Lowther site is a 10-storey apartment building that dates from around 1970. Houses and apartments. This is The Annex, and this is Toronto.

While the provincial policy changes seem clear, and the social imperative to build more housing seems equally clear, some people in the Annex seem to feel that this change shouldn’t happen in their backyard. Half a century ago, the Annex Residents Association fought hard against the area’s first towers. And this week, the words about “razor wire” came in a letter from the ARA, signed by co-chairs Elizabeth Sisam and Henry Wiercinski. At the meeting, ARA supporters struck a similarly alarmist tone. For them, allowing a set of houses to be replaced by apartments represented a dangerous collapse of order.

“This is a matter of breaking the rules,” said 40-year local resident Brydon Gombay. “If they’re broken on Dalton Road, which is a quiet street of affordable housing, then why not do it on all the streets west of here? We could become an area of high towers and I don’t think that’s what people want.”

These arguments are typical of antidevelopment rhetoric across the country. Existing residents often believe that they are entitled to keep their neighbourhoods the same. They often argue that new development doesn’t belong, is destructive, doesn’t fit, and is less “affordable” than what’s there. (For the record, the last house to sell on affordable Dalton Road, in December, fetched $2.7-million. The realtor’s sales pitch said it was “renovated to perfection.”)

A more sympathetic variation came from a younger resident, Rebecca Arshawsky. She spoke of the community in the rooming house where she lives with four roommates and a cat, and expressed her fears of being displaced. This redevelopment “will incentivize developers to buy up the surrounding properties, like my landlord’s,” she said, visibly emotional, “and kick me out of my home in the guise of more housing.”

Her feelings are entirely understandable. But her analysis of the issue was entirely backwards. Even if a developer bought her home for a redevelopment, she would be entitled by Toronto planning policy to compensation, and possibly even a brand-new apartment at low rent.

The alternative – the status quo – is far more dangerous to tenants like her. If Ms. Arshawsky’s landlord chooses to sell the house, she can be evicted with minimal compensation. Then the house’s new owners will almost certainly renovate the house into a single-family home.

This is what has happened in this neighbourhood over and over since the 1970s. That’s why Ms. Arshawsky’s block has lost a third of its population, according to Census data, from 800 residents in 1971 to 519 in 2016.

The whole neighbourhood is down about 6,000 people over that time, a period in which the Toronto region tripled in population. As the geographer Anna Kramer pointed out in the 2019 book House Divided, which I co-edited, such shrinking neighbourhoods are endemic in Toronto.

This latter narrative is nuanced. And it doesn’t fit the familiar 1970s story which has shaped local politics and the planning profession: the story of evil developers and underdog neighbours, of modest houses and looming apartments. David and Goliath.

But that story was never entirely true, and today it’s just false. Among the neighbours complaining about the new building was a Greg Sorbara. “There are currently applications for redevelopments that would place nearly 600 hundred new residences at this one small intersection in our area,” Mr. Sorbara complained.

But Mr. Sorbara should understand the planning picture as well as anyone. He is a wealthy real-estate developer who served as Ontario Finance Minister in the Liberal government that introduced the Places To Grow Act. This is the anti-sprawl law that now protects Ontario’s Greenbelt. Now it could reshape his backyard. In public comments in 2022, he argued that another new tower “does not fit” and does not belong.

Will the Lowther tower be approved? Councillor Dianne Saxe, clearly besieged by the public response, punted on a decision; it will now be decided by City Council in April. Almost certainly that will be a rubber-stamp. As it should be – even if some people want to line their neighbourhoods in razor wire.