Toronto 699 Lawrence West | 128.56m | 38s | Midtown West Residences | Core Architects

allengeorge said:
I'm certainly more sympathetic to this statement. That said, your main concern is that building towers can overload the local transportation infrastructure (using Bloor-Danforth as an example). Surely the solution here is better transportation and neighbourhood planning as opposed to simply limiting towers? That's probably far more beneficial in the long run.

My observation is that Toronto suffers from multiple interrelated planning/transportation issues:
  1. Retail has been forced onto strips or nodes.
  2. These retail strips or nodes are separated by fairly large chunks of non-porous (sometimes unwalkable) residential.
  3. New builds have (through a combination of lending and lax policy) poor retail setups/choices.
  4. Toronto tends not to have multiple, redundant, prioritized transportation routes (i.e. separated bike lanes, bus ROWs, etc.)
The confluence of all these force people to have to travel a lot to do daily life activities. And because of (4) we don't have a lot of redundant, alternate, prioritized modes along major transportation corridors, so any issue causes people to default to using cars to compensate. Then, of course you're going to have a problem - regardless of whether you've towers or not. My take is that fixing these will leave us with a far more livable, resilient city that's able to take increased density in terms of towers, midrise, missing-middle and what have you.
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There's no doubt that better neighborhood and transportation planning would resolve issues to allow for greater amount of density without overloading existing infrastructure. The problem is: this is Toronto, where we plan things for ions and most of them never come to fruition or are severely alterted by the time they are built. We shouldnt allow for excess density just because one day something might be built (ie: transit) but nobody knows when. That's what's led us to numerous problems in various neighborhoods throughout the city.

Thus, we should be basing planning on what's currently in a given neighborhood and planned infrastructure upgrades that are actually fully funded, approved and imminent. The wishful thinking hogwash is a cute thing Toronto likes to do, but it never turns out well at the end of things.

In this particular case, again using the justification that 40-50 story towers should be built just because it's next to rapid transit is plain and simple bad planning. Should there be more density around the area because of rapid transit in the area: yes. Should that increased density automatically be 40-50 stories? No.

Now regarding your 4 observations above, I tend to agree with all of them. Unfortunately none of them will be changing anytime soon as the planning regimen seems to be content with it all.
 
Docs are up. Architect is Core:

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Application Details

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The tower itself is pretty decent, but that's about the only thing going right here.

The tower is just too tall for this site, the podium is massive, the streetwall looks dead, and the fact that they are attempting the "stepdown" at the rear is laughable when the tower/podium are already huge.
 
PMT said:
Docs are up. Architect is Core:

app.toronto.ca

Application Details

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View attachment 382402
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This is the image that has my eyes bugging out, LOL

Look at the massing concepts surrounding this building, both to the east and to the north on the Lawrence Square site.

I'm going to read the Traffic study when I have a moment.
 
Northern Light said:
This is the image that has my eyes bugging out, LOL

Look at the massing concepts surrounding this building, both to the east and to the north on the Lawrence Square site.

I'm going to read the Traffic study when I have a moment.
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Read it.

The Traffic Impact study suggests this development may make things marginally worse, and acknowledges there's already a traffic problem.

But there's the good bit, there is no consideration whatsoever of the impact of development at the scale shown above; something that would surely occur were this precedent granted.

Not acceptable. We need to see what the traffic impact of this precedent would be; and what measures, if any, would be required to address that.

Otherwise the impact study borders on a work of fiction.
 
Lol so only a 75/25 split between single and multi units, are they serious? Now im convinced they are genuinely confused as to which area of the city they are building in. They do know that this a fairly heavy family oriented neighborhood right?

As for the traffic impact study, im convinced that the city has no plan to address the issues around this area. I havent heard one peep about them making any kind of adjustments to the traffic flows in the immediate area. If they arent even going to take into consideration what the impact of this development (at this scale) would be, then im really at a loss for words.
 
Yeah, that was my first thought, too. The conceptuals are ouuf. Talk about block busting. Glad to see the low-ish parking ratio, but I'd push it down further for this location.

I wonder if it's possible to coordinate S37/TIF contributions to help pay for redoing the Allen.
Northern Light said:
This is the image that has my eyes bugging out, LOL

Look at the massing concepts surrounding this building, both to the east and to the north on the Lawrence Square site.

I'm going to read the Traffic study when I have a moment.
Click to expand...
 
Undead said:
Yeah, that was my first thought, too. The conceptuals are ouuf. Talk about block busting. Glad to see the low-ish parking ratio, but I'd push it down further for this location.

I wonder if it's possible to coordinate S37/TIF contributions to help pay for redoing the Allen.
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I'm a density crusader as much as the next guy on here, but this is 10 storeys too tall. Anyone trying to turn left out of here needs to sign a waiver. It's terrifying.
 
Site Plan Approval application filed:

699 LAWRENCE AVE W
Ward 8: Eglinton-Lawrence

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Application Details

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Site Plan Approval application to facilitate the redevelopment of the site for a 40-storey mixed-use building having a non-residential gross floor area of 162.78 square metres, and a residential gross floor area of 22,519.93 square metres. There are 360 residential dwelling units proposed and provide 135 parking spaces.
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