Toronto eCondos | 195.67m | 58s | Bazis | Rosario Varacalli

The north tower podium is not cute. Looks like an above ground parking lot. Does anyone know why townhouse style podiums are not more common in Toronto's condo vocabulary?
 
This was one project where I was very skeptical that the finished project would look anything close to the renderings. Glad to say I'm very pleasantly surprised. They really followed-through.
 
There are 528 parking spaces in the development apparently - but they service both the north and south towers.

That maintenance is quite high. Here I was thinking my total parking spot rental was expensive at $160/month. I can't imagine paying $150 a month in maintenance on top of the mortgage for the space!
 
The City is at the stage where they now regularly grant reductions compared with what the bylaw requires… so it's probably time to rework the formula in the bylaw. You do get people coming out to consultations to oppose relaxed parking requirements at various developments though, declaring that the new residents will fill every space on the street when they cannot park at their own building. Just saying that re-writing the formula would be contentious.

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depends on the part of the city. Downtown may as well have zero parking requirements given projects are now getting approved with car share spaces only, and rarely have more than 0.3 spaces / unit.

The further you go into the suburbs, the less you see projects vary from the base by-law. And the base by-law increases requirements the further out you are too.

Now of course, with Vaughan seeing projects with 0.3 ratios.. Toronto could probably do 0.0's.. I certainly wouldn't oppose a minimum space elimination in the City of Toronto, or at least most of it, for residential development.

Maybe a "0 parking required if within 500m of a rapid transit station"?
 
Drop a 0 from that and they might agree. As soon as the building is more than a direct entrance away from a staton, they'd still want some parking.

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Getting rid of parking minimums doesn't mean developers would just stop building parking. They could still build however much parking they'd like.
Oh of course - but what it would mean is that the total amount of parking would likely drop significantly.

Parking almost never makes money for a developer - even when they can sell them for $80k like they are downtown these days.. It's a loss leader they provide in order to sell the larger units which usually struggle to sell without one.

Right now, many condo garages sit half empty since there are way too many spaces to meet minimums. I know my garage, which has by-law rate parking in the downtown, is about 50% empty.. By allowing developers to build only what they need, you will bring down the cost of housing as developers can reduce the amount of money losing parking provided, and let the market decide how much driving people want to do.

I would support retaining a certain amount of car-share spaces though.
 
Getting rid of parking minimums doesn't mean developers would just stop building parking. They could still build however much parking they'd like.

Perhaps not in America but in Toronto, the construction of parking garages would stop immediately. They're huge money losers with no positive financial upside.
 
Perhaps not in America but in Toronto, the construction of parking garages would stop immediately. They're huge money losers with no positive financial upside.
Depends where in Toronto. You probably won't be able to sell many units in Scarborough without parking spaces.. but Downtown? Yea - not many spaces would be built any more.
 
Perhaps, but generally parking is far less valuable than the cap rate so it's always a money losing scenario. Hence why, in the states, without laws that say it has to go underground (like in Toronto), it ends up in MASSIVE parking garages above the ground floor. Chicago and Miami are particularly bad for this (the latter also because the water table is so high).
 

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