A rendering of the Shops on Steeles redevelopment.
By Brian Slemming
Cliff Korman is a man in a hurry. He wants to change the way we live, or perhaps where we live may be more accurate. That’s no small ambition.
“The North American planners’ dream was to build homes in one area, commercial in a second and retail in a third area,” he says. Then people could drive between the different areas. Drive to work, drive to the shops, drive for recreation. Everything depended on the automobile.
“Single use zoning was the aim. It doesn’t work today,” says Korman, a promoter of mixed-use development and a decreasing dependence on the motor vehicle.
Toronto-based Korman is a senior partner at Kirkor Architects & Planners. He describes himself as both a planner and an architect. Where most people see a shopping mall and an associated parking lot, Korman sees opportunities to increase density, and with that, greater commercial possibilities.
The key to these opportunities lies in the grey expanse of asphalt covered parking or greyfield development as Korman describes it. “We need sustainable development and smart growth. We have to put people where the services are. If you build a 30-storey-highrise with 360 units you need one acre of land. In the suburbs you can put 300 houses on 100 acres. That means 300 driveways, 300 roofs, 300 furnaces and infrastructure – hydrants, roads, sidewalks, street lighting and cars.” Must the march to the suburbs continue? Is it desirable? What are the alternatives?
Cliff Korman
“Our work generally begins with a problem. A site owner comes to us and we tackle the problem together,” Korman says. At the Hullmark Centre in Toronto’s North York, the problem was “a one-storey rundown retail plaza about 60-years-old. Low-end retail outlets, low-end food store. But it is a prime site because there are two subways crossing it. We came through with a major re-zoning to allow for a mixed-use category. We changed an 80,000- square-foot retail complex to a one million square foot mixed-use complex.”
Now under construction, the site will have a high-end food store, 200,000 square feet of office space and a 43-storey residential tower with 800 units. All on top of two subways. “We reduced the parking and did it in a green and sustainable way,” Korman says.
A similar rejuvenation is underway at Steeles and Don Mills at the Shops on Steeles, a typical suburban mall that lost its main anchor. Again, the mail is over 50-years-old. Kirkor says he can add over 1,200 residential units, rebuild the retail space and add public parks and walking spaces. He admits the density increases are considerable but “we increase density in a non-impact manner to local communities. We involve the existing communities in our planning from the outset.”
Korman admits there is opposition to many of his plans. “People don’t want change; they fear their property values will drop. Not true. A mixed-use project will increase values.”
He says it is not only property values that increase – so do the benefits for municipalities. An industrial parcel of land he is currently re-zoning has 11 acres with a transport centre on it that handles up to 400 trucks each day. There are 68 people employed on the site, which pays about $200,000 a year in taxes.
“We can put a one-million square foot mixed-use community with retail, office and residential units and the tax income will jump to $5 million a year,” he says. With that level of increased income it may be supposed that municipal politicians are racing to his side. Not so, he says. “They (the politicians) are firmly wedded to the single-use zoning concept. That’s understandable because they have to get elected and their voters don’t want change. People want to keep things as they are, they like the familiar places and systems with which they have grown up, so elected officials listen to their voters and work to keep the status quo. There are very few visionaries among politicians, because visionaries don’t get elected.”
Will the suburbs change? Korman believes so. “I hope we are seeing the end of the ‘big-box centres’. They represent very poor planning,” he says. “Car dealers and big box stores have now become the entry way to many Canadian communities. They look bad. I hope their end is near.”
Increasing density clearly raises the question of overbuilding, and there are often concerns that too many condominiums are being built in the GTA.
“Overbuilding is a myth. All my clients build to market,” says Korman. “In the GTA 70 per cent of our buildings are sold before a shovel goes in the ground. Every year Greater Toronto sees a minimum of 100,000 new immigrants, coming from Asia, the Middle East, Europe and South America. They are coming with education and with money. Their first requirement is somewhere to live. They are used to apartment living and they don’t want to drive. Condominiums have become the new affordable housing for the newer arrivals.”
The Hullmark Centre at Yonge and Sheppard in Toronto.
A short drive through any community in this country will turn up countless acres of greyfield. Every mall has a mandated number of parking spaces, which sit empty for much of the time. Korman acknowledged that the end of the car is a long way off, but that doesn’t convince him that those acres of asphalt are necessary. “There’s nothing to say that parking has to be at grade. We plan parking below or above grade.” In the drive for higher density, that greyfield parking area is golden.
Still, nothing in the world of planning and zoning is that simple. “It takes two years minimum to change a zoning bylaw. You need a host of experts and it is expensive. But it can be done.”
Mixed-use planning will become generally accepted, he says. Already the car and its parking space are playing a smaller part in planning. Already parking spaces per unit are falling. “In downtown Toronto, new highrises are being planned allowing parking allocation of one-third parking lot per unit. That will continue.” Change, it appears, is as inevitable as greatly increased density levels.
Korman says that visionaries “don’t get elected” but perhaps they do get things done.
