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TTC Eyes Towers at Stations

I'm trying to think if there is any reason why a condo couldn't be built on leased land. Office building are routinely built on leased land, and a typical provision of such a lease is that the land be returned to the owners at the end of the lease cleared of any buildings. Yet no one reasonably assumes that in the 2060s First Canadian Place will be torn down and the lot (actually, several lots) cleared and returned to the freeholders. I'm not sure why a condominum building would be any different, exept that in 99 years or whenever the condominium corporation would have to negotiate a renewal of the lease.
 
In Britain it is common to have leasehold flats in apartment buildings and renovated houses. Generally they're cheaper than freehold.

The clock ticks away the 99 year leases of the Toronto Island community - though they still have to pay property tax at the same mill rate as the rest of us, which seems somewhat unfair.
 
A list of key TTC sites was identified back in 2002, after commissioners directed staff in 2000 to develop a marketing plan "as soon as possible."

I love it, it's now almost 2007! I guess this is as soon as possible for Toronto City Hall.
My choice for most wasteful non use of prime TTC land is the Rosedale Station on Yonge Street.
 
A nice spot of greenspace linking the ravine to the park is hardly a waste.
 
The Star

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Link to article

The centre of a big TTC mystery
JACK LAKEY


December 20, 2006
Jack Lakey
Staff Reporter

A large section of the TTC's parking lot at the Warden station has been fenced off and filled with dirt, instead of cars, which has commuters wondering why.

To make it easier for people to get downtown, the TTC provides parking at some of its suburban stations, including Warden, where there's a huge lot at the northeast corner of Warden and St. Clair Aves.

Most days, it's full. Not long ago, the northeast quadrant of the parking area was surrounded by fencing and filled with soil, raising the elevation by a metre or so. Stakes have been pounded into the surface, as though something is to be built.

It's attracted the curiosity of people who park there, and particularly those who have noticed that there aren't nearly as many parking spots now.

Robert Fyfle sent us an email, saying, "We lost one-quarter of the parking spaces. No one seems to know what the construction is all about. They want us to take the TTC to work but they are eliminating parking spots for the future, when there will be more cars."

He also mentioned two trenches dug last week across the entrance to the lot, which was causing vehicles to bottom out.

We checked it out Monday and found a construction crew doing work at the entrance; the trenches were gone.

But the fenced-off area looks as if it has something to do with new housing being built north of the lot, on the site of the former Warden Power Centre.

STATUS: Dominic Garisto, the TTC's acting manager of property development, said the city is building a new community centre and park in the fenced-off area, which is due to be completed in 2010. There's still parking for about 900 vehicles, he said, adding that the rest of the lot will be closed by 2010 and redeveloped.

A new lot with room for at least 850 vehicles is planned for an area near the southeast corner, which will also open in 2010, said Garisto.

So now you know.
 
Andreapalladio, what are you talking about? The park is across the street from the station. The big "lawn" in front of the Rosedale station doesn't connect anything.
 
There was a plan to put something on that lawn years back IIRC. The citizens of Rosedale got that stopped pretty quickly.
 
"Are there any current examples of condos going up on leased land?"

The closest example I can think of in Toronto is the Colonnade, built on land leased from Victoria College, but I believe that that's an apartment.
 
Think of the Rosedale Station "lawn" as part of a de facto "greenbelt" connecting Ramsden Pk w/Rosedale Valley, et al. As such, leave it be. Buffer zones are good...
 
www.thestar.com/News/article/168610

From The Star:

How TTC will pay its way

The commission plans to dispose of properties around subways that it deems either surplus or prime for development

January 07, 2007
Kenneth Kidd

It would not spring to mind as a natural building site, much less one for an eight-storey condominium complex. There's the irregular shape, for starters – a property that resembles a pizza slice, with a narrow tongue extending out beyond the crust.

The tongue, now home to a couple of tennis courts, is really not so much land as a concrete roof covering the above-ground Bloor-Danforth subway line as it enters High Park Station from Runnymede to the west.

Temporary fencing already surrounds the site, enclosing a dumpster, a portable toilet and two mobile homes-cum-construction trailers. Out front, big signs from Monarch Development Corp. announce the looming arrival of "Twenty Gothic," which will actually straddle the subway tracks.

Unusual, perhaps, but it may be the first of many such developments as the Toronto Transit Commission embarks on what amounts to the Great TTC Lawn Sale – a bid to dispose of more than a dozen properties it now deems either surplus or prime for development.

They range from the small, like the lawn in front of Rosedale subway station, to the four-acre site of the old Lansdowne Garage, recently demolished, between Bloor St. and Dupont Ave.

This won't be the first time the TTC has sold property. In the past decade, the transit authority has unloaded several small parcels of land, mostly old trolley bus loops. And some other properties have been the subject of (mostly failed) development proposals in the past.

But Councillor Adam Giambrone, the TTC's 29-year-old incoming chair, now wants the sell-off to proceed in earnest. In December, TTC commissioners even formed a special committee to propel the disposal – a committee that will meet for the first time later this month.

"This committee will probably meet monthly," says Giambrone. "The idea of the committee is not just to talk about it, but to drive the process forward, like a working group.

"If you say there's a problem around zoning, this committee needs to work through those issues, tackle them head on and resolve them to the extent they're resolvable, compromise where compromise is needed and just generally push the whole file forward."

At first blush, there could be much demand for these properties. "You can't make more land, so anything they can make available is already enticing for developers and investors," says Raymond Wong, national director of research with CB Richard Ellis Ltd.

"There's tremendous demand for sites, especially infill sites or brownfield sites in the city. Infill development over the last 10 years in Toronto has been quite strong."

When Canadian Tire Corp. recently sold off surplus land at Leslie St. and Sheppard Ave., for instance, the price worked out to $3.8 million per acre.

Public policy has also helped fuel demand. With as many as 150,000 people moving into the Greater Toronto Area each year, both provincial policy and the city's official plan call for intensive residential development around subway stations and major transportation corridors – a way of curtailing urban sprawl.

But while Wong says, "the potential is there" for the TTC's coffers to get a boost, he's not sure the sell-off will amount to anything like the giant windfall some councillors might have in their dreams.

It's not just the peculiarity of some sites, like having to build over top of a subway yard at Davisville station, that makes predicting prices difficult. (The High Park deal involved a land swap.) There's also the need, in many cases, for potential developers to accommodate existing and future TTC operations. The buses, after all, still need to get to the station.

Nor is raising immediate cash the sole aim for either the TTC or the city, notes Vincent Rodo, the commission's budget chief. "When we're trying to develop these properties, we've got several goals. One is, obviously, proper utilization of a public asset. You want density over subways. We're hoping to get ridership out of it."

There's also elevated property tax revenue for the city in future. But in many cases, a sale would mostly help defray the costs of something the TTC would have to do anyway, such as replacing the original bus terminal at Eglinton station, which had to be closed several years ago after engineers deemed it structurally unsound.

And that's along with all the usual hoops. "If you've got to do a planning study, a planning study can easily take a year-and-a-half, two years," says Rodo. "You've got to craft a (request for proposals) and go out for public meetings and make sure the development is in keeping with the community.

"You might even have an environmental assessment. You might have legal complications if there are easements and things of that nature."

All of which makes it difficult to predict how many properties may ultimately be sold, and how much cash might then flow to the TTC.




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
But a deal already in the works at Islington station may provide a partial template. At that station, there is currently a bus terminal, a passenger pick-up and drop-off area and a commuter parking lot on a triangle-shaped piece of land. Mississauga buses now use Islington to connect with the subway, but the TTC bus terminal is aging and needs to be replaced within the next decade or so.


Enter SNC-Lavalin in a multi-layered deal effectively brokered by the TTC. The engineering firm is expected to pay around $8.1 million for what roughly amounts to the parking lot area, on which it plans to build its Ontario head office.

But that's just one aspect of a $58-million project that would see a new, inter-regional terminal built further west, at Kipling subway station. This would become the new subway connection for Mississauga buses, as well as the destination for Mississauga and GO buses operating on their own rights-of-way, or busways. Kipling is already home to a GO train station and funding, if approved, would come from Mississauga, GO and the province.

Back at Islington, meanwhile, the old bus terminal would then be replaced by a smaller facility that would handle only TTC vehicles. "The city would take the net proceeds from the SNC-Lavalin deal to help pay for the city's share of the [new] Islington terminal," says Rodo. "SNC-Lavalin is here today. It just gives you the opportunity to consider doing something today that you might not do for five years."

There are also long-term benefits. With the Islington deal, says Giambrone, "the estimated tax revenue is about $4 million a year and the TTC gets a new bus terminal out of it," says Giambrone.

"And we get an office tower basically sitting on top of a subway station.

"In this case, they've got up to 1,400 employees. If that drives transit ridership, it's an incredible boon to the system."

Other stations listed as possible development sites: Davisville, Eglinton, Finch, Greenwood, Lawrence, Leslie, Rosedale, Sheppard, Warden, Wilson and York Mills.

As Giambone puts it: "When you look at Rosedale, you sort of ask yourself, `wow, that lawn looks really nice, but is it the most appropriate site in terms of having that large open space?' That would seem to be the ideal place for some sort of residential [development]."

But at Rosedale and other stations bordering low-rise neighbourhoods, developers may also face fierce community opposition. In the late 1980s, for instance, a proposal to build an office tower over Rosedale station was ultimately rejected by the Ontario Municipal Board.

"It got turned down because the Rosedale area was kind of the gateway to the park and the ravine there," says Rodo. "You've just got to find out how to do a development that's in keeping with the community."
 
Meanwhile, in Hong Kong...

The Standard

Link to article

mtr.jpg


tko.jpg


Developers set to lock horns on $8b MTR site

Danny ChungandRaymond Wang

Saturday, January 06, 2007


Land hungry developers are likely to show keen enthusiasm in the MTR Corp's (0066) HK$8 billion Tseung Kwan O Area 56 development project after the company asked developers to register to tender.

The railway company invited expressions of interest Friday from developers for the project atop its Tseung Kwan O station.

The site, with an area of 430,452 square feet, offers a gross floor area of between 1.11 million and 1.81 million sqft for residential, commercial and hotel use. The maximum number of residential units is 1,150 while the hotel is limited to 1,290 rooms.

An MTR spokesman said there was no timetable for the tender yet. "If everything goes smoothly, we hope to start work within this year."

The land premium negotiations with the government are expected to be concluded soon. In railway tenders, developers submit their best offers, including the profit-sharing scheme, and bear all the costs of development, including land premium, construction and financing costs.

Henderson Land Development (0012) and Wheelock Properties (0049) said they would study the project.

Surveyors reckon the land premium could reach up to HK$54 billion, equivalent to an accommodation value of HK$2,976 per square foot if the upper GFA limit is used.

"With such a large investment amount, it can only be the big developers," said chartered surveyor Pang Siu-kee of SK Pang Surveyors, adding it was premature to say if the MTR would pay half the premium as it did for the first
phase of Dream City in Tseung Kwan O's Area 86 in early 2005 to attract smaller developers. In the end, that tender went to Cheung Kong (Holdings) (0001).

Midland Surveyors director Alvin Lam Tze-pun said on completion, the flats could sell for HK$5,000 psf.

Developers have until next Friday to submit their expressions of interest.

(Note: $1 HK= $0.15 CAD)

*****

These days, subway stations and depots in Hong Kong are built to anticipate high-rise developments on top of them. Tseung Kwan O MTR station, mentioned in the article, is mostly a concrete shell above ground, just waiting for a development to come along and hide it all up.

P1000410.jpg
 
first time I've come across this thread as it looks like its been dead for a year... sounds like a lot of great ideas and talk. Hope they can make things happen. I think the SNC Lavalin project sounds confirmed for Etobicoke....
 
AoD's second link is the most interesting. It lists all the different possible sites. I can definitely think of a few more, though. Who owns the parking garage above Wellesley? It seems like a pretty prime redevelopment site. St. George Station on Bedford, too. Unfortunately, a lot of the Danforth stations are on low-rise residential streets, but they might still be able to support a residential building of four or five stories.
 

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