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Throughout October UrbanToronto is featuring a special State of Housing editorial series to examine the pressing housing challenges facing Toronto and the Greater Golden Horseshoe.
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If you tell a millennial today that in 1960, you could purchase a four-bedroom, detached home with a large yard in the heart of Lawrence Park for $25,000, they simply won’t believe you. Affordable housing in Toronto seems like a pipedream to most and with apartment rents sky-high, simply the right to have a decent roof over your head is increasingly challenging.
For the record, affordable housing in Toronto is defined by the City as housing where monthly shelter cost (gross monthly rent, inclusive of utilities for heat, hydro, hot water and water) is at or below the lesser of one times the average city of Toronto rent, or 30% of the before-tax monthly income of renter households in the city.
A possible solution to the affordable housing crisis may lie in a return to co-op housing — short for cooperative housing, largely abandoned in the 1990s — with an example best served by the Kennedy Green residential project at 2444 Eglinton Avenue East across from Kennedy subway station. The development team selected by the City's CreateTO arm for this site includes Civic Developments, Windmill Development Group, and the Co-op Housing Federation of Toronto, so the development proposal included a commitment to deliver co-op housing on the site, with one-third of the units to be affordable rental.
Designed by Henriquez Partners Architects, the three-tower development will be built in two phases beginning in November, with Phase One including two towers of 40 and 18 storeys, with a 31-floor tower added in Phase Two. In total, Kennedy Green will offer 918 residential units, of which 612 units will be categorized as co-op housing, with one third of the overall total, or 306 units, priced as affordable, with rent-geared-to-income.
Kennedy Green is a transformative project for the Toronto housing landscape as the largest co-op housing development built in Canada in 25 years, and as a result, had to be eye-popping in design and unique in livability. “This is a landmark project, being the first co-op housing development in Ontario in a generation,” said Jennifer Mallard, Principal at Henriquez Partners Architects. “The project had to be a celebration of this achievement. Often, affordable housing is designed to be less special than market rental housing projects, but our approach was the opposite. At Kennedy Green, there is no difference in the design between affordable rental, market rental and condominium units. Everyone deserves to live in a beautiful environment.”
To address rapid population growth, governments across the land have committed to building more housing faster and eliminating regulatory barriers, with the Canadian National Housing Strategy to build 156,000 affordable housing units and repair close to 300,000 existing ones over the long term.
There are a couple types of co-op housing. In some co-ops, residents collectively own and manage a building or property. Instead of buying a unit, each resident purchases a share in a non-profit cooperative corporation which owns the building, and these shares come with the right to occupy a specific unit. This type, however, is a rental co-op. Rather than being owned by a landlord or individuals like rental buildings or condos, the co-op owns the building and residents become members who work together to create a strong and engaged community. Members are able to live in their home as long as they like, and rents, referred to as housing charges, are based on the real costs of running the building versus making profit. This is how rental co-ops are able to remain affordable and offer members a secure place to live.
Cooperative housing first appeared in Canada in the 1930s, with Toronto’s Regent Park marking the country’s first public housing campus, completed in 1949. This legacy continued in the 1960s and 1970s with the infamous Rochdale College on Bloor Street built for University of Toronto students. Basically a glorified dormitory, Rochdale made headlines for all the wrong reasons as a nest of drugs and bad behaviour for students living alone for the first time.
It made developers think twice about co-op housing and damaged the ‘Co-Op’ brand in the eyes of the public. But times are now changing and with the affordability crisis in Toronto, developers are taking a second look, with the encouragement of local governments. In fact, many financial incentives are being offered to builders to build not only more affordable housing, but also co-op housing, along with incentives to renovate existing housing, which reduce construction costs.
The City of Toronto offers several programs, such as the Multi-Unit Residential Acquisition (MURA) Program, to support co-op housing development by providing funding, fee waivers and property tax exemptions for both new construction and the acquisition of existing housing.
At Kennedy Green, the value of the financial incentives and fee waivers provided by the City of Toronto for this development has been estimated at approximately $40 million. Included in that is approximately $15 million for waived development charges and a waiver of planning, permit and parkland dedication fees. It also includes approximately $13.2 million in waived municipal and school taxes over a 99-year term.
“The decrease in funding for the development of affordable housing was a political decision in the 1990s,” explained Mallard. “Contrary to public opinion, existing co-ops in Toronto are the foundation of many vibrant neighbourhoods, including The Esplanade in the St Lawrence Market neighbourhood, and the Bain Co-Op in Riverdale. Residents invest their energies in the places they live, creating pride of place and strong communities.”
With its honeycomb design to the windows and a building façade inspired by Ontario flint corn colouring, Kennedy Green will be one of the most distinctive residential projects in Toronto, built on a triangular site on Eglinton East once thought to be ‘undevelopable’ as a vacant industrial property and a TTC commuter parking lot. It is an example of the City releasing unused land to encourage developers to build more housing in locations many had not previously considered, and Kennedy Green is being developed as part of the City's Housing Now Initiative to create affordable and cooperative housing.
“The Henriquez team were inspired by the rough nature of the adjacent Hydro corridor,” says Mallard. “Its peace and tranquility are a sharp contrast to the bustling action at Kennedy Station. We envisioned a green blanket pulling up from the corridor to cover the podium and towers emerging from this raised ‘field’, with the project having sustainability targets exceeding the City’s mandate. Flint corn has been grown locally for millennia and provided a powerful and colourful metaphor for the design team.”
The development also features above-grade parking, which raises the lowest level of resident units to be above the Eglinton overpass and further from train lines, resulting in a higher quality of life for residents.
That quality of life, according to Mallard, has a different and very palpable feel in a co-op building. “The community that is formed in a co-op is different than a typical group of tenants in a rental building,” she observes. “Co-op members all contribute in a meaningful way to the livelihood of the group. The emotional investment and collaboration results in a tight-knit community and residents often stay in a unit for longer. Many co-op residents wouldn’t live anywhere else because of the bonds made with their neighbours. At Kennedy Green, the uses of the amenity spaces were reviewed with a group of co-op residents to meet their needs. Lounge spaces can open up to accommodate a larger group for their community meetings.”
Co-op housing is in high demand and there is already a waiting list at Kennedy Green. Site Plan Approval documents were submitted to the City in September in anticipation of seeking permits to begin construction. In a city facing a crushing affordability issue, solutions may lie in innovative thinking and where you look.
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EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been republished with an expanded and clarified explanation of the two types of co-ops, and how this one works.
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UrbanToronto's research and data service, UTPro, provides comprehensive data on construction projects in the Greater Golden Horseshoe—from proposal through to completion. Other services include Instant Reports, downloadable snapshots based on location, and a daily subscription newsletter, New Development Insider, that tracks projects from initial application.
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Thank you to the companies joining UrbanToronto to celebrate State of Housing Month.
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