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Plans to build a mid-rise senior living residence on Toronto's Danforth Avenue just west of Main Street subway station, have advanced with an updated application seeking Zoning By-law (ZBA) and Official Plan Amendments (OPA). Known as Verve Danforth, the project from developers Tawse Realco Inc. and Verve Senior Living would bring a ten-storey, Sweeny &Co Architects-designed building to the corner of Danforth and Chisholm avenues.
The application is a resubmission of an earlier December, 2017 proposal seeking ZBA and OPA. Following the 2017 submission, the project team engaged in discussions with Toronto Planning and Urban Design staff. This led to a May, 2018 presentation to the community, where the project was generally well-received, though with some concerns laid out regarding height and massing. Next, the project hit a snag when the City adopted an OPA covering the stretch of Danforth the project occupies, resulting in the OPA being appealed to the Local Planning Appeal Tribunal (LPAT) in April, 2019. A settlement was reached at a July, 2020 LPAT hearing, resulting in the revised application now under review.
The revised application includes a slight height increase, from 38.24 metres to 38.6 metres (43.6 metres including a mechanical penthouse) while maintaining the 10-storey maximum height as settled on through the LPAT mediation. The current plan calls for 12,431 m² of gross floor area (GFA), reduced from the 2017 plan's 13,012 m². As with the previous plan, the current resubmission is primarily planned as residential space at 84.2% of the total GFA, reduced from the 2017 plan's 191.4% residential. The new plans is for 146 seniors' units with condominium tenure. The remaining GFA is planned as 924 m² of retail and 1,041 m² of institutional space.
The massing has been redesigned to extend across the entire site, replacing the earlier plan which included a separate four-storey seniors' rental apartment building at the north end of the Site fronting on Harris Avenue with a smaller two-to-three-storey extension that better addresses the low-rise conditions to the north. The three-storey area has been designed to form a dialogue with the existing Masonic Temple to the east.
Revisions have also been made to the parking provisions, with the 2017 submission's plan for a two-level underground garage with 74 spaces being reduced in line with the reduction in gross floor area. 55 spaces are now proposed on a single level of underground parking, including four accessible spaces. While a By-law for the site has no requirement for bicycle parking, 30 bicycle parking spaces are proposed.
You can learn more from our Database file for the project, linked below. If you'd like, you can join in on the conversation in the associated Project Forum thread, or leave a comment in the space provided on this page.
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| Related Companies: | Counterpoint Engineering, Sweeny &Co Architects Inc., Urban Strategies Inc. |
