Council members and staff find attainable housing inspiration in GTA mixed-use developments

Main photo: Dr. Mitchell Kosny from Ryerson University (fourth from left) discusses Toronto’s Regent Park neighbourhood with (from left) Mayor Scott Aitchison, Councillors Jonathan Wiebe and Nancy Alcock, Samantha Hastings from the District of Muskoka, Denise Corry and Derrick Hammond (hidden) from the Town of Huntsville, and Jackie Mattice from the District of Muskoka (Photo: Melinda Zytaruk, Fourth Pig Worker Co-op)

There’s no question that Huntsville is in dire need of attainable housing solutions, nor that the Town and District can’t meet that need on their own. With that in mind, members of council and Town and District staff made a road trip to some of Toronto’s successful mixed-use developments to learn how they came about and what was needed to make them happen.

On the itinerary for the July 5 trip, which included Mayor Scott Aitchison, Councillors Nancy Alcock and Jonathan Wiebe, Town staff Denise Corry (CAO) and Derrick Hammond (Director of Development Services), and District staff Samantha Hastings (Commissioner of Planning and Economic Development) and Jackie Mattice (Director of Programs), were walking tours of the Regent Park, St. Lawrence and Parkdale neighbourhoods, and discussions about land trusts, public-private partnerships, and innovative mortgage models.

It was an eye-opening experience on many levels, says Alcock. “We all got excited about the next steps. We will be meeting again to talk about how we move it from ‘this is really cool stuff’ to ‘what can we do in Huntsville?’…The critics will say enough of the talk already and I get that. That’s one reason why we wanted to see how it looks on the ground and how it got there.”

Their first stop was Regent Park. The area was a social housing project that began in the 1940s, but has been undergoing a multi-phase revitalization that includes mixed-use development and housing that is both subsidized and at market value. The group learned some historical context from Dr. Mitchell Kosny, Interim Director of Ryerson School of Urban and Regional Planning.

“When they built the original Regent Park, planners and the social developers and funders and the governments never thought they were doing something wrong, they thought they were doing something that was fabulous,” says Alcock. “But what they did was cut off the streets and created this island. There was a lot of green space and lots of buildings but no commercial anything, just affordable-type housing. People like chaos in an urban area—they like to walk out their door and not feel like they are an isolated island. And when you don’t have a grocery store, you don’t have a bank, you don’t have a Tim Hortons you start to feel cut off even though you’re in the heart of the city. So it turned into kind of a ghetto and a place where people didn’t want to be. We don’t want to reproduce that—I recognize the scale is different (compared to Huntsville), but it’s the lessons we can learn from it.”

Some of the highlights of the new Regent Park are its public areas: the parks and walkways, a main square and a community centre considered to be one of the best in the city.

“There are things that we couldn’t afford to do, but the other public realm spaces, they’re just really nicely designed,” says Alcock. She related it to two areas in Huntsville that are currently under discussion: Kent Park on the corner of Brunel Road and Main Street East, and a proposed attainable housing development on Sabrina Park Drive.

“(In) Kent Park, we want to make it a space where people go and enjoy and sit and take pictures and have lunch,” says Alcock. “At Sabrina Park…we want the developer to look at not only the site, but the surrounding area and the connectivity to the downtown. I know it’s only about eight acres but it’s how do you encourage people to come outside and be part of their immediate community and their surrounding community.”

And she stressed the desire of all involved, and Mayor Aitchison in particular, to avoid the stigma that surrounded the original Regent Park. “The new Regent Park has both market and affordable housing—you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference. It’s that blending into an area where we all want to live there. It’s about creating a really cool place.”

The above photos show some of the public and commercial areas in Toronto’s Regent Park (Photos: Melinda Zytaruk, Fourth Pig Worker Co-op)

So what does it mean to have a mixed-use development? It means affordable ownership and affordable rentals amidst those at market value, and mixed types of housing like apartments and townhomes, says Alcock. And it means public spaces that people want to spend time in and walkable access to retail areas that provide both services and places for people to meet like cafés, markets, restaurants, banks, shopping, and grocery stores.

A prime example, and another stop on the group’s tour, is the St. Lawrence neighbourhood. Developed in the 1970s, it is often held up as a model for urban development done right. “The important part from my perspective was to show incredibly high density that doesn’t look high density. You have people paying market rent and rent-geared-to-income in the same building. It doesn’t have to be an affordable housing building, we can do this mix. And it has this wonderful public realm,” says Alcock. “It’s to this day one of the most successful developments in the city, and it has aged well.”

She pointed to an article in the Globe and Mail by Dave LeBlanc, in which he writes that St. Lawrence is “the best example of a mixed-income, mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly, sensitively scaled, densely populated community ever built in the province.”

LeBlanc noted that to transform the area at the time, “many strange bedfellows had to get under the covers: the federal and provincial governments for funding, private owners to surrender their land, co-operative boards and forward-thinking architects had to be courted, while the old-guard, block-busting developers had to be handcuffed.” (You can read the full article here: 35 years on, St. Lawrence is a template for urban housing.)

The group’s tour and discussion raised a similar, important point: governments can’t go it alone.

“The big takeaway is partnerships—you do not do this in isolation. I know that’s obvious,” says Alcock, “so the next question is what kind of partnerships. What do they look like, and how are they done?”

They met with Joe Deschenes Smith, a representative from Trillium Housing, an initiative that invests in development of entry-level housing and provides financing that enables modest-income families to own their home.

“There are people having a really hard time…who want to get into home ownership but they can’t be saddled with a massive mortgage that makes it unaffordable,” says Alcock. Under the Trillium Housing model, they provide a second mortgage that the home owner doesn’t have to pay back, which makes the homeowner’s first mortgage manageable. Trillium recovers the second mortgage whenever the house is sold. “The owner comes out having built that equity, so they are now in the market and can continue,” adds Alcock.

The group also attended a meeting co-ordinated by Melinda Zytaruk of Fourth Pig Worker Co-op, a sustainable construction non-profit, with members from the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust (PNLT). According to its website, “Through the community land trust model, PNLT will acquire land and use it to meet the needs of Parkdale by leasing it to non-profit partners who can provide affordable housing, furnish spaces for social enterprises and non-profit organizations, and offer urban agriculture and open space. Also, PNLT promotes community participation in guiding how land is used to benefit the community and keep Parkdale affordable and diverse.”

Their walking tour included the Parkdale Activity Recreation Centre (PARC), a multi-service anchor institution with drop-in, food bank, supportive housing and more; Edmonds Place, a former condemned boarding house that was redeveloped by PARC into 29 units of supportive housing; multiple at-risk rooming houses; vacant land purchased by PNLT to be developed as urban agriculture space; and vacant land to be developed into supportive housing.

“Their housing component is still in its infancy, but they’ve been doing other things like locally grown food,” says Alcock.

One of the outcomes of the overall tour, says Alcock, could be the continued implementation of a land trust, either at the municipal or District level. “Where does the District fit in all of this? They provide the provincial flow-through dollars…so it’s really important that they are engaged. Personally I would like to see the land trust be for Huntsville but maybe it makes sense to be (all of) Muskoka.”

Alcock and Wiebe shared details of the tour with Huntsville’s Planning Committee at its July 11 meeting.

“A really good take away for me was how important the mixed element and the common element and the green space are,” said Wiebe. “The two other big things were the different strategies for funding—I find it a really exciting angle toward achieving more affordable, attainable housing by not actually subsidizing the buildings themselves but more subsidizing families and their mortgages—and thirdly, the land trust. It was a very dynamic discussion that pertains to how public-private partnerships can occur with land and development… I found it very valuable, but I believe it’s something that requires more discussion to see how we can implement some of those strategies.”

Alcock noted that the group will meet again in August to discuss next steps, one of which could be a workshop that brings together Huntsville’s Planning Committee, local developers and some of the representatives they met on the tour.

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