Mixing it Up

Few phrases are more omnipresent in the descriptions of condominium developments these days than “mixed-use.” It has become a given that a mixed-use development succeeds far more often than a straight-residential approach. Giving people a place to wander, to sit, to eat, to shop keeps them close to home when it comes time to spend, and spending is what keeps neighbourhoods healthy. Theoretically.

What we seem to be missing, though, is the big picture. What we’re building these days isn’t the sort of mixed-use we need to shoot for. We have this myopic fixation on single-use residential towers with some retail thrown in at ground level. It can work, creating a desirable sidewalk experience that makes people want to park their cars (or, better yet, get off the bus) on the outskirts of a neighbourhood and spend some time strolling through it, but it can also mean imposing specific uses on a neighbourhood that doesn’t suit them.

There’s a condo in Pickering that springs immediately to mind. The ground floor retail has one tenant, a drugstore chain (and not THE drugstore chain – another one). The other units have been empty for years. The condo is located on a stretch of a busy thoroughfare near the lake, which doesn’t give residents or visitors any reason whatsoever to walk around. I suppose nearby residents in need of prescriptions probably drive to it when they have to, but there isn’t even a particularly compelling reason to drive to it. It’s a location far better suited to strictly residential development. And you know how these things go – once tenants get a whiff of failure, these spots turn into vacuums incapable of sustaining retail life.

Nearby, the Pickering marina area thrives, hitting just the right mix of upscale townhomes, services such as chiropractors, restaurants and quaint boutiques, all with a Cape Cod look that makes it worth visiting just to see the pretty buildings.

There’s an inherent Catch 22 in new development, of course. Infill developments benefit from the established neighbourhoods around them, whereas a completely new community can set the tone for the future. While the developer may have visions of art galleries and cafés, the only willing tenants may be, say, a dentist and a paralegal. It doesn’t exactly make for an exciting afternoon’s excursion, and it can be a death knell for the neighbourhood as a “destination.”

A successful mixed-use community is a blend of old and new, retail and services, residential and office space – buildings with diverse purposes in close proximity, not 36 floors of residential on top of a few retail spaces.

If we’re going to do mixed-use right, we need to start thinking about really mixing it up. Even above the podium, our new condos tend to be too singular of purpose. One giant, impressive party room for the entire building is intimidating to some, useless to many, and can become a lot of empty space that needs to be heated, cooled, and paid for through maintenance fees.

If your private space is limited to 600 sq. ft., what are you more likely to covet? A place to throw a party for 40 or a Thanksgiving dinner for 12? Some new condos are coming at it at least partially from this angle, putting smaller entertaining spaces off the lobby, for example, but they’re not quite taking it far enough. Instead of huge, grand spaces that look good in the brochure but probably don’t fit into an average life, we should be putting a practical-size dining room every eight or 10 floors. Instead of retail on the ground floor, how about a nursery school on the third floor, a community greenhouse on the 15th, and offices on the 28th and 29th? How about a kids’ playroom every few floors, an indoor running track around the perimeter, a library in the middle or a doggie park on the roof? When will we start thinking outside what’s been done before?

Give the ground floor over to those who will pay a premium for a patch of lawn, instead of to unpredictable and potentially fickle retail tenants, and mix it up on the upper floors.

The last time I bought a new car, I was torn between small/sporty and larger/more comfortable (ergo more practical). The sales guy said, “Don’t buy it for the 10%. Buy it for the 90%.” Meaning, of course, buy the car you need 90% of the time.

Similarly, let’s start building for the things we need 90% of the time – places for our kids to play, our dogs to pee, our legs to stretch and our minds to expand.

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In Toronto Star columnist Christopher Hume’s column last week, he talked about the Manhattanization of Toronto (something I wrote about a couple of weeks ago), and makes both a good point and a poor one. He says we must embrace our status as a Big City, instead of pretending it isn’t so – let’s “passionately embrace” our density. Yes, let’s. (How? See above.)

But he also says: “To begin with, builders must pay a greater share of infrastructure costs. To ensure the continuation of civic services that make their condos so desirable, higher development charges must be levied. Few builders would agree, of course, but ultimately it’s in their own best interests to contribute to the well-being of the city that has made them rich.”

And here we part company. Development charges are not paid by builders. They are paid by buyers. Levying yet higher development charges is only going to begin to erode the price advantage that makes condos so desirable. We should actually be doing the opposite. Multi-unit dwellings are more efficient than single-unit. We should be incentivizing condo purchasing, not punishing it with higher fees.

It certainly is in the best interests of developers to contribute to the well-being of the city that has made them rich. But higher development fees are not the way to do it. How about, instead of forcing them to put big, potentially ugly, statues in front of their buildings, we compel them to build schools inside them?

How would you incentivize denser living?