What is Manhattanization?

Last week, city council approved 18 new buildings, only three of which are office towers. City of Toronto Chief Planner Jennifer Keesmaat commented on the amount of approvals, calling it “mind blowing” and “astronomical” (in a good way).

Ever since Keesmaat took charge, she’s been making strides to improve the City of Toronto’s approval process for new development. Earlier this year in March at the Building Industry and Land Development Association (BILD) Building Futures Forum, Keesmaat presented the idea of the development permit system (DPS) to streamline the approval process. So the fact that council approved 18 buildings in just two days is a pretty big deal!

The 18 new buildings add up to 755 more storeys and 6,887 units for Toronto, and there are already 70,000 units underway in the city. That’s Manhattanization. Granted, Toronto is still no where near as dense as Manhattan, but if these recent approvals are any sign of the way proposals will be dealt with in the near future, Toronto could be on the fast track to becoming a huge tower city.

There are so many new developments that it’s becoming difficult to find the resources and manpower to build it all. “Quite frankly, the development industry is just waiting for cranes to become available, they’re waiting to be able to get the construction workers available to actually build their projects,” said Keesmaat.

Of course, with all this new development, the City really needs to focus on building infrastructure to support all the new residents that will someday call the downtown core home. “The biggest challenge from my perspective is that there are investments that are needed, in the public realm, in transit, in park space, that are going to be essential moving forward in the future, if we’re going to maintain the quality of life we have today,” explained Keesmaat.

Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam, who is seeing a large amount of development in Ward 27, said that there are plans to build more affordable housing and parks in her neighbourhoods. After all the recent approvals, Ward 27 secured $37 million in Section 37 fees (fees paid by developers to go towards new infrastructure to support all the new residents in a certain area).

Will Toronto ever truly resemble Manhattan? Only time will tell, and let’s hope that the powers at large strive to be even better than the city that Toronto is so often compared to.