If you want to understand the collision (and collusion) between political and economic forces as they apply to development and urban form there is no better place to look than Yonge Street in Toronto.
The City of Toronto recently made a significant change to how approval for tower construction is handled. Previously, the entire city had height restrictions and anyone wanting to exceed that limit (60 - 70% of recent condo construction) had to apply for an exception. The City used this as leverage to get things like parks built by developers. Developers got fed up with the extra costs and time these negotiation and payouts required and started appealing to the Ontario Municipal Board (a provincial body not a municipal one and very business friendly). The OMB almost always struck down height limits. The City responded with a new statute for tall buildings that contained design guidelines (rules) and heights by area. It was a concession to business interests meant to keep the province out of the decision making process. Most of Yonge St downtown is now 60 storeys by right - meaning the location entitles the developers to 60 storeys without any negotiation. Some of it is 80 storey and some 100. A new 100 storey project seems fantastic now but when the statute was passed Toronto had more towers under construction than any city in the world and more condos being developed than Manhattan.
The design guidelines in the Tall Buildings code include a mandatory podium (I forget exactly how tall this is to be, probably between 4 and 6 storeys) to preserve the streetscape. Buildings, particularly towers that stand off from the street (and from the line established by the surrounding buildings) look like gap teeth. Over the last 400 years an understanding, sometimes statutory and sometimes habitual, has been established that only buildings of significance can stand off the street. So City Hall gets its own courtyard. The Provincial Parliament gets a great lawn in surrounding it. But Starbucks stands in line with all the other buildings. If you think of a tall building, it's probably standing alone with open space around it. Unless you live in Manhattan, where laws concerning maximum coverage and set-backs have been in place for a long time. There are exceptions in Toronto, most notably Mies ven der Rohe's TD Towers.
Most residential buildings downtown (or anywhere where land is valuable) have a plot that encourages units on all four sides - this is only untrue if your plot is very thin. But you need astronomical land values for a thin plot to be worth developing a tower on. Think Hong Kong or Tokyo. So, you have a plot that is some version of a rectangle or quadrilateral. More units equals more money; units facing four directions equals more money than units facing two directions. But two of those four directions are going to be looking directly at other buildings unless you rotate the building and step it back slightly from the edges of your plot. So that's what happens. Now, instead of a continuous wall enclosing both sides of the street, filled with shop windows and things to look at you have a corners facing the street. The answer is make the developer (and the architect) include a podium on the bottom. Developers don't complain because you can't use the lowest stories for condos anyway - no one is going to buy a street level condo. The space in the podium is used for elevator cores, service areas, mail boxes, offices, and (when the space is big enough or valuable enough) retail. The problem is extremely high land prices (meaning extremely high rents) limit the types of tenants you can get. Mostly it is either chains that will lose money on an individual branch to maintain market share, luxury goods, or stores that make huge profits per sq ft.
Yonge St real estate is valuable but not cool (at least not in most areas). Partly that value is due to historic significance but mostly it's due to the location of Toronto's subway system - there's a major line directly below Yonge. I'll get to that in a second. Because Yonge isn't cool luxury stores don't want space on it - they are all on the so called Mink Mile (Bloor between, say, Avenue Rd and Yonge). That means the podiums (podia?) of any new towers on Yonge are going to be filled with bank branches, drug store chains, tiny coffee shops, and liquor stores. Block after block. It doesn't make for a nice stroll.
Now the subway. The Yonge line is ridiculously beyond capacity. If you live downtown and want to ride the line to work, you better leave your home a 6 am. Because by 7 am the line will fill the platform, out the turnstiles, up the stairs, and out onto the street. So adding 100 storey condo towers directly on top of it isn't such a great idea. But the developer doesn't care how long you have to wait to get on the subway. She only cares if you will pay more for the idea you have instant access to transit. And people do. The fact that subways increase land value is why Toronto is building one in Scarborough - which doesn't need one at all - instead of downtown - which desperately needs one. The people who voted for the current Mayor (and his brother) live along the route of the new line. It's cash for votes.
OK. So because of the subway, because the street has a by right height of not less than 60 storeys, because it is one of the most famous streets in Toronto, it's possible to sell a lot of condos on Yonge. But the City (not the part that is building subways we don't need, the part headed by Toronto's wonderful head planner Jennifer Keesmaat) is trying to get almost all of Yonge turned into a Historic Conservation District. If / when they succeed (Torontonians love heritage protection and will slap it on anything) developers will be forced to build without affecting the historic streetscape. Personally, I think most of the streetscape should be replaced - someone once called it 500 buildings leaning up against the Eaton Center. But that won't be a possibility when the whole thing gets heritage protection.
The people who run the heritage protection part of City Hall are little despots. Their office is only open until noon, they can exclude you from a building permit by fiat and there is no appeal. There are levels of heritage protection ranging from just a little (you can fix it and change the interiors all you want) to total (touch it and die). I don't know what level will apply in this case. It will probably be settled by negotiation. There are some ugly fucking buildings on Yonge and it would be impossible to justify total protection for them.
And so here, in a nutshell, are all the forces at play. The City can control the maximum height off any building as well as set-backs, cornice heights, percent coverage, and massing (through guidelines that are really rules). The City also decides where to build subways and how good transit service will be. And the City can award Heritage designations and the concomitant protection. But those are three different agencies within City Hall. Developers can pick and choose where to build towers and, if the by right height isn't high enough, they can appeal to the OMB for an exception. The planners are up against the pro-business politicians and the developers. Unfortunately, no one is talking to the TTC.
If I had any say, and I don't, I would make the by right height 40 storeys, exclude the OMB appeals by any law I could think of and make developers pay the TTC for any extra storeys. That way there might be a hope in hell the Downtown Relief Line would be built in my lifetime.
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