Election Promises Sparked Development Talk in 2014

2014 was an interesting year in the GTA — Ontario held a provincial election that returned the Liberal party to power with a majority and the province also held municipal elections, which got John Tory in the mayor’s seat and again brought up the entwined topics of downtown development and public transit.

The April Ontario election brought the expected results: the Liberals took the majority of seats in the Golden Horseshoe and Ottawa area — two prominent power islands in a sea of Tory blue that laps at the shores of NDP sand-yellow to the northern reaches of the province.

Real estate development became an important point when the Tories accused Premier Kathleen Wynne of secretly initiating a bailout of the MaRS (for Medical and Related Sciences) towers development project in downtown Toronto, which has recently been pegged at $308.8 million (with the possibility of going higher), but includes plans for the government to move offices into the currently mostly unoccupied space.

Announced by the Ernie Eves PC government in 2002, the MaRS project was intended to house entrepreneurs, researchers and developers in an environment designed to stimulate the development of new products, ventures and ideas in technology, health sciences and energy.

There was also a rash of affordable housing announcements leading up to the Ontario election, with the Conservative spin being that they were meant to buy Liberal votes.

The Municipal elections at the end of October brought up the many issues the City of Toronto faces as it continues its growth. Perhaps not unexpectedly, the main point centred on the need for an extensive subway system, which becomes essential as the city continues its drive for increased densification (creating more residential, commercial and retail space within the same city footprint).

The main candidates (eventual winner John Tory, Olivia Chow and Doug Ford) had differing views on the various housing issues facing the city. Newly elected mayor Tory said he was willing to revisit the development charges and land-transfer tax debate, if the development industry could come up with feasible alternatives.

John Tory

Chow proposed setting aside a more significant portion of collected development charges toward increasing the affordable housing percentage of new residential developments. She also proposed raising the land-transfer tax by one percent for homes over $2 million in order to fund student meal programs.

But as usual, the debate came down to public transportation, with Tory promoting a surface “subway” called SmartTrack, predicated on new development taking place from Kipling and Eglinton to the Dundas West Subway Station; down to Union Station and then up to Main Subway Station and on to Unionville. He predicts that the project will take about seven years, and so far, it’s on track.

Chow stuck with the traditional transportation routes (buses and subways), including an extended Light Rail Transit stretching east and west along the Lake Ontario shoreline, but not north to the 905. She says that construction on the new infrastructure would have begun within four years.

For his part, Doug Ford stuck with the family plan of building 32 kilometres of subways at an estimated cost of $9 billion, without a plan to pay for them.

Despite it all, the industry continued its growth in 2014, with home renovation and construction today employing nearly 200,000 and accounting for $2.3 billion in investments. Residential transactions are up 2.6 percent through the first 11 months from the previous year, and sales revenues are up 6.6 percent.

Downtown Toronto also accounts for a quarter of all the new office-space development in Canada and the downtown core is growing four times faster in terms of new projects than the rest of the city, according to a November National Post story. The trends are in line with city growth projections of 3.19 million people and 1.66 million jobs in the City of Toronto by 2031.

I can hardly wait for 2015 to come steamrolling in.