Outcome of 2500 Bloor St. Ward 13 Community Meeting
[New poster - please be gentle!
]
I will not be immediately impacted by development at 2500 and 2490 Bloor W., but I wandered naively into the community meeting last Thurs. out of curiosity. I am not familiar with planning in the GTA. However, I was stunned by the height of the proposed developments. Anyone else who is familiar with the site have any opinions on this? - maybe I have it out of perspective. The planning docs are
here.
My take - if you cross the Humber on Bloor heading east, as you approach the top of the hill, the sites are located on your left (north). As such they are on a geographically prominent location anyway as this is some of the highest land in this area of the west end. The highest buildings in the area are opposite the site across Bloor and they are 6(?) stories high - everything else is 3 storeys. The proposed buildings are 16 and 13 storeys max, and the podiums are 10 and 11 storey I think (I'm a psychologist, not an architect so I might not be reading the elevations correctly.)
The land to the north of the sites seems like a particular problem as the land falls away very quickly to residential areas of two storey houses. Trident have done all sorts of shadow studies etc. and have "sculpted and molded" these buildings, but still I can't imagine standing in a backyard which is a couple of storeys below grade of these buildings and looking up at 16 storeys. My neck feels sore thinking about it
Tridel didn't present any renderings from this vantage point - they were all from somewhere on S. Kingsway.
These two sites are on the Bloor Avenue - and that section has not had its avenue study done yet. Looking at the studies that have been done, I don't see anything higher than 10 storeys as a max. Does the collective expertise of UT think that densification to the degree of 16 storeys @ 2500 Bloor is reasonable/to be expected or do developers play "games"? - I wondered whether Tridel was just pushing high rises in the hope of "splitting the difference" with residents and getting a pair of tall mid-rises in the end. I was really impressed that Tridel had held all these community consultations, but then they kind of ignored all the comments of the various residents groups and proposed really big buildings that don't seem to have any connection with the buildings that are already in the area.
Tridel also want to realign one of the local residential streets to align it with S. Kingsway which produced furor. Maybe traffic control can be used to prevent too much traffic infiltration (new word I learned at the meeting
)
I am just not sure what to think about the proposal. I know that I hate the look of the buildings, but that it just my uneducated personal opinion. Does anyone know whether the avenue mid-rise study would have any impact on planning decisions about high-rise condo blocks?
