From The Toronto Star:
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...l=968793972154
Waterfront revival begins
Demolition begins on derelict area
5,800 new homes, school, parks to rise
Mar. 27, 2006. 08:44 AM
KERRY GILLESPIE
QUEEN'S PARK BUREAU
Today, an old cement block warehouse will come tumbling down on King St., east of Toronto's downtown.
The demolition of 15 other derelict buildings and dead factories between Parliament St. and the Don River will follow.
But this isn't the end of a neighbourhood, it's the beginning. From the rubble of this industrial wasteland the new West Don Lands community will rise.
There will be 5,800 new homes, an elementary school, a recreation centre and parks — all within a five-minute walk of a new public transit line.
"This is an area that has been abandoned and left behind for a long time. I think people are really going to enjoy having a community there and a beautiful park," said Cynthia Wilkey, who lives just north of the area and has long been involved in redevelopment plans.
Construction on the first homes and the centrepiece 17-acre Don River Park and flood protection berm are scheduled to begin next year and people should be living there by 2008.
"How can you not get excited about something like this? It's city building," said Ontario's Public Infrastructure and Renewal Minister David Caplan.
It's also the first really big and visible step on the much larger project of revitalizing Toronto's waterfront.
"After a long time of talking about it, we're really getting on to seeing shovels in the ground, new park space, new homes, new businesses. (West Don Lands) should make people ... a lot more hopeful that more of this is on the way," Caplan said.
It's been five years since the City, Queen's Park and Ottawa unveiled a grand vision to remake 46 kilometres of Toronto's lakefront into vibrant neighbourhoods full of homes, businesses, parks and public transit.
They committed $1.5 billion of taxpayer money, they created the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation — and they did a lot of talking. But until recently there's been little to see.
Today, all three levels of government are once again coming together. But this time, there will be construction equipment on hand to get started on the waterfront's first residential community.
Toronto Mayor David Miller, Caplan and John Baird, president of the federal Treasury Board and the federal minister responsible for waterfront revitalization, all plan to attend today's West Don Lands kick-off event.
While the cost of the waterfront project as a whole is shared equally by all three levels of government, the commitment on each project varies.
The province owns most of the land in the West Don Lands and it is paying $120 million of the $230 million cost to demolish buildings, clean contaminated soil, build parks and community buildings, create flood protection measures and develop the light rail transit line along Cherry St. (The city and Ottawa will split the rest.)
That makes it "our baby" says the province, which expects to garner international attention with this development.
"We used to have urban planners from all over the world come and look at the St. Lawrence neighbourhood and use Toronto as an example of doing things right, and they haven't done that now for decades and this is a chance once again to establish our leadership," Caplan said.
Establishing leadership means:
Building on former industrial land instead of ploughing under farmers' fields
Creating a community with housing densities that will support transit
Making a quarter of the homes affordable to lower-income earners
Including commercial space so people can live and work in the same community
Leaving more than one fifth of the whole development as parks and public space.
"It just makes sense," Caplan said, summing up the redevelopment.
Politicians haven't always thought so.
This isn't the first attempt to develop these lands into a residential community. In 1988, premier David Peterson and Toronto mayor Art Eggleton announced plans to build Ataratiri, a new community where 12,000 people would live.
Four years later, after spending more than $350 million on the project, the provincial NDP government killed it over the inability to get anything done and the skyrocketing cost of cleaning up polluted soil and building flood protection.
"In retrospect, it was an ill-conceived megaproject that simply exceeded the capacity of both levels of government involved and overwhelmed the regulatory framework," the province said when it killed it.
There are some who wonder if the same isn't true of Toronto's megaproject — waterfront revitalization.
The Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp., tasked with turning the grand waterfront vision into reality, has been beset by delays, spiralling costs, government infighting and disagreements about the right mix of residential and business development and public green space along the waterfront.
Lately, things seem to be moving.
"This is the first concrete step and the birth of the revitalization of the waterfront," said local councillor Pam McConnell.
"After 20 years of incredible disappointment around these lands ... we're going to build a neighbourhood that people can be so very proud of," McConnell said.
"The exciting part about this, besides building a new community, is taking a derelict downtown area that has been a wasteland and now being able to turn it into a location where people are going to want to come to live, to work, to play and to visit. It's going to be a people place," she said.
The West Don Lands project, 32 hectares (79 acres) straddling Front St. E. between Parliament St. and the Don River, will be built in phases and is expected to take at least 15 years to complete. The first part to be developed is known as the McCord site at King St. E. and Bayview Ave.
When complete, some 11,000 people are expected to be living in the West Don Lands and that will help bring in restaurants and shops that will also benefit other emerging neighbourhoods in the area like Corktown to the north and the Distillery District to the west, said Wilkey.
Wilkey, now chair of the West Don Lands Committee, a group of community organizations, initially got involved in redevelopment to stop plans to sell the land to build a harness racing facility.
What they have now, she said, "is a victory for community vision."