A group of developers wants to transform the privately owned Flemingdon Park Golf Club into housing and approximately 40 acres of public parkland.Don Valley Partners
Toronto’s housing shortage is being felt everywhere. Now it’s coming to the city’s golf courses.
A group of developers wants to convert the privately owned Flemingdon Park Golf Club, in Toronto’s Don Valley, into 2,500 homes and a major new public park. In principle, this is an excellent idea – and the city’s government should follow suit with Toronto’s publicly owned golf courses.
The Flemingdon Park course is located on the Don River, a short walk from the corner of Eglinton and the Don Valley Parkway. And it has that magical quality of all golf courses: It is largely unnoticed and yet huge. In a city where builders will trade trucks of cash for scraps of land, the course is about 16 hectares.
The developers involved in this project – Cityzen, Tercot Communities and Greybrook – are proposing using 5 per cent of that land for development, and giving up the other 95 per cent for the park.
The proposal calls for four towers from 42 to 56 storeys tall. The architects are the prominent firm Hariri Pontarini. The ace landscape architects CCxA (led by Claude Cormier) will design the area around the buildings. Meanwhile, the rest of the course, a vast expanse on either side of the Don River, would become the park, with initial design work by landscape architects DTAH. That park would form a missing link in the proposed “loop trail” around Toronto, an important piece of the city’s cycling network.
“We’re looking at using a very small portion of the site for residential development,” said architect David Pontarini. “It’s trying to make a compact new community that is linked to transit.”
The City of Toronto could do the same thing with its five public golf courses. But it isn’t. Early in 2022, city council decided to leave the courses intact, rejecting a staff recommendation that just half of one course be converted to general-use parkland.
That course, Dentonia Park, sits next to the Bloor-Danforth subway and the high-density apartment neighbourhood of Crescent Town. Toronto’s government could take a small fragment of the course and build thousands of homes.
The Flemingdon Park proposal demonstrates this. While I have not seen detailed plans, the outline is clear. The four towers (with oval or pillbox shapes) would occupy a slice of the course’s high ground. The rest of the land, which is largely in the flood plain of the volatile Don River and therefore unsuitable for homes, would be public.
There is a caveat: to redesign and maintain such a big park would require a serious infusion of funds over years. Still, the development team argues it would provide public and ecological benefits. “Today, not many people have seen the lands unless they play golf,” said planner Craig Lametti of the firm Urban Strategies, which is working on the project. “But it’s a pretty manicured landscape. Here the plan is not only making the lands available for public use but also to create a regenerative landscape.”
This is plausible. Golf courses are space hogs and aggressively managed landscapes. They are dominated by a few species of grass, artificially irrigated and drenched in pesticides and herbicides. “Green” and “natural” are very different things.
While the Flemingdon Park development hasn’t begun the city’s approvals process yet, it has a certain planning logic. The new Eglinton Crosstown LRT is a five-minute walk away – albeit uphill – and the Ontario Line will stop nearby. A tsunami of density is now rolling in, including in the heavily immigrant communities of Flemingdon Park and Thorncliffe Park. Mr. Lametti estimates there are 17,500 homes already coming to the area.
This development pattern is unjust. Neighbourhoods full of apartment dwellers feel the brunt of new construction, while Riverdale and Rosedale remain untouched.
But the Flemingdon proposal is in nobody’s backyard. And it comes with 16 hectares of public space to share with everyone else. That could be a remarkable opportunity for the city’s parks system and for the ecological integrity of the Don Valley. It’s also a valuable lesson for the city. Housing and parkland are important. Golf is not.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article included an incorrect number of Toronto golf courses and an incorrect description of Flemingdon Park.