Plans for Villiers Island in Toronto’s Portlands area includes about 9,000 homes, plus cultural uses and retail.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Gradually, then suddenly. That line from Ernest Hemingway comes to mind this week, as Toronto City Council considers one of its most important plans in a generation: the vision for Villiers Island, a major new waterfront neighbourhood.
The Villiers plan has spent seven years in obscurity. Now – unless the city demands a rethink – it could be locked down in a flash.
That would be a problem, because the plan is badly flawed and has received almost no public scrutiny. The city, province and the feds could build thousands more affordable homes here; city planners and the agency Waterfront Toronto would prefer not to.
Of course, they won’t put it that way. But it is true. The plan, which goes to the city’s planning and housing committee on Thursday and then to city council next week, is shaped by subjective (and mostly bad) urban design ideas. It goes against the spirit of what Mayor Olivia Chow and council have asked staff to do: maximize housing.
How did we get here? It’s been a 15-year grind of studies and plans that nobody much noticed. The 40-hectare island, on the doorstep of downtown Toronto, is now planned for about 9,000 homes, plus cultural uses and retail. That density number is very low – perhaps half of what any private landowner would ask for today.
Nobody in government can adequately explain where that 9,000 number came from.
The design was shaped by “a mix of factors,” in “an iterative process,” Waterfront Toronto executive Pina Mallozzi said this week. This “mix” is a stew of the technical and the subjective, including “solar access” and a desire for very wide streets. Somehow the island plan has almost as much street space – 8.8 hectares – as the 10.6 hectares devoted to buildings.
That is disastrous urban design, without precedent or excuse.
An earlier 2017 plan was absurdly low-density and made no economic sense. In 2022, Toronto council asked for a revision. City agencies and Waterfront ended up with the new plan, which is much the same in shape but 60-per-cent denser. Success!
Or is it? If you have an empty glass and add 60-per-cent more water, you are still thirsty.
And that’s the right analogy. The city is desperate for more homes, especially the social housing that can be delivered on public land.
It’s possible to do much more, and also deliver a special place. But that means challenging the soft design assumptions of City Planning.
Nobody has had a chance to do so except Waterfront Toronto’s volunteer design review panel. They reviewed the Villiers plan in April, and the conversation was tense. They voted to “conditionally support” the plan, but two members voted no, and there was confusion about what was being supported.
Panel member Nina-Marie Lister, a planner, ecological designer and Toronto Metropolitan University professor, sent criticisms to the panel by e-mail. They were read out, in part, by panel chair Paul Bedford.
“The precinct looks and feels like more of the same,” she wrote. It seems to be “a neighbourhood catering to the car,” and it needs more density, narrower streets, multiple scales of buildings and a “finer grain” of development.
“We need to avoid the trap of old patterns that we know.”
That’s how Mr. Bedford paraphrased her letter, anyway. It remains under wraps until the panel’s June 26 meeting. This week, Ms. Lister declined to comment further, citing an agreement not to speak to the press.
The city should ask her what she means. There is widespread dissent among design professionals about this plan, but no one – as usual in Toronto – will speak in public. After all, city planning officials wield opaque, unbounded powers over their livelihoods.
Only council can fix this now. They should ask for another go-round: six months of design review, including public meetings, with input from academics and foreign designers who are free to speak their minds. The conversation will change rapidly, and so will the neighbourhood.
This place will last a century or more. We can, and must, take a few months to get it right.