Mark Richardson, Op-ed –
As Toronto school students are starting their summer vacations, a prime 3.5-acre parcel of transit-served development lands on the northeast corner of Shuter and Parliament – a former school – is spending another season chained off from the community.
The site of the former Regent Park–Duke of York public school at 20 Regent Street is bereft of any active plan to proceed with a proposed integrated school and housing co-build development. The school was closed in June 2012 and sold to the Toronto Catholic District School Board, which demolished it a decade ago. For a while, the TCDSB leased the site to local car showrooms, but that use appears to have ended.
Those now-vacant scrub lands are within 500 metres of both the new Moss Park and Corktown underground transit stations on the Ontario Line, which places them inside an area identified for intensive redevelopment by the province.
Toronto’s two school boards are now finally starting to adopt the ‘school-in-podium’ model of redevelopment in transit-oriented communities, such as having a 3700 square-metre elementary school built into the podium base of a 40-storey residential tower development. TDSB has similar plans at Sugar Wharf on Lakeshore Boulevard, and at Don Mills Crossing near the Eglinton Crosstown LRT interchange-station with the Ontario Line. TCDSB has an active proposal in North York near Bayview Village.
A ‘school-in-podium’ solution could be delivered at Shuter and Parliament, but it would require intergovernmental cooperation between the city, province and the Catholic School Board. ‘School-in-podium’ designs require municipal rezonings and a minimum $45-million capital investment from Ontario’s education ministry.
It would also need a long-term stable financial partner to provide $200+ million in construction capital for the residential towers.
A recent Civic Action report on “The Human Story of Workforce Housing” documents that teachers often commute more than two hours daily because they cannot afford to live in the communities they serve. One option would be for the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and its real estate development arm, Cadillac Fairview, to partner with the TCDSB to finance the new apartments above the planned Regent Park podium school.
In addition, lease agreements with Toronto Elementary Catholic Teachers could make housing available for young teachers at the start of their careers. This model would be aligned with the corporate social responsibility standards the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan promises to its members.
The Ontario government could provide “workforce housing” development subsidies to these kinds of apartment developments or support preferential tax structures to encourage local investment in creating new apartments for newly graduated teachers, close to the communities they serve and close to the new transit stations. This would help mitigate the increasing costs of teacher retention, staff turnover and substitute staffing.
That empty lot at Shuter and Parliament has lain fallow for a decade in the middle of Canada’s largest city in the middle of a housing crisis, while brand new transit lines have begun to be constructed nearby. The site holds a huge potential.
Will 2025 be the year that Ontario’s Education Minister, Paul Calandra, and Housing Minister Rob Flack see the site as a place to deliver an innovative co-build model for urban elementary schools and housing for teachers?
Mark Richardson is chief technology officer at Rich Analytics and pro-bono technical lead on the HousingNowTO affordable housing development-tracking project
