January 23, 2007
Anger Over Housing for the Dis-Abelled
Last week, we covered the Ontario Municipal Board's approval of a plan to build several condo buildings in the area of the Queen West Triangle. The plan has been controversial from the beginning, and has been strongly opposed by a residents group called Active 18.
One point that has some particularly saddened is the teardown of the structure at 48 Abell, a one time industrial building converted to lofts which are used as live-work spaces by artists and others. Now, there are a variety of issues around this development that bear discussion – whether the city’s planning process works, how to manage intensification vs. nimbyism, and the proper role and authority of the OMB, to name a few. That said, the Abell building is almost certainly not the right poster child for this particular cause.
Even a cursory look at the Abell reveals that it has serious problems. Ceilings and walls are cracked, floors have a funhouse slant to them, and any visible heritage the building ever had has long since seeped away. It looks like the place could collapse before the wreckers even get there, and according to a structural assessment undertaken last year, that’s not far from the truth.
The reason that the Abell building did not receive heritage status was because of the following assessment of the building,
The language of the actual study is even less diplomatic, noting that “Both options that attempt to retain the existing structure or the existing façade are not viable due to the risk of damage to the existing building elements.” In other words, if you try to build around the Abell building, it will probably fall down.
Both of the above documents are available on the Active 18 website, so it’s not as though the anti-condo forces aren’t aware of them.
It looks like the Abell building is being used as a visual symbol to rally the troops, an excuse to throw poor old Jane Jacobs’ corpse on the “save the artists” bandwagon and march triumphantly to City Hall. The whole thing has a mock-epic, comic book quality -- SculptorMan and PainterGirl have to rescue the Legion of Super Artists from the evil Condo Cranes, or Toronto will be powerless against the spectre of Big Money! Is the Abell building really the key issue, or is this just ego-theatre?
There’s also a tacit suggestion that the demolition of the building will deal Toronto’s creative community a crushing blow – come on, surely there are a few artists who don’t live in the Queen West Triangle? If not, maybe there should be.
The irony is that of the sub-projects that make up the proposed development, it’s this one that’s actually planning to guarantee units for families and low income renters, as well as affordable studio and living space for displaced artists. For whatever reason, this fact rarely finds its way into the “Save the Abell” rhetoric; perhaps a new building would lack the requisite squalor that ensures artistic integrity.
There’s definitely a need to look at reform for the OMB, and the way it interacts with the city planners. We need to find a more effective way of balancing the needs of neighbourhoods against the inevitable growth of the city, and to avoid having solutions imposed by an external group without input from those most affected. However, the Abell building is more of a red herring than a focal point to bring these issues into the spotlight.
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While I know it's horrible to support any sort of development on West Queen West, I actually sort of like the sound of this project.
It has affordable RGI units and apartments big enough for families. That's what the neighbourhood needs more of. You wanna hate the Bohemian Embassy? Go ahead. Their billboard alone is enough to deserve a good kick in the head. But the Abell project doesn't sound like more overpriced microcondos for people who will live downtown in their 20s and early 30s and then move to Richmond Hill when they have kids. It's something that could actually add to the neighbourhood.
Or mayber it is just another condo and they're blowing smoke up our asses, but at least on the surface it looks to have some merit.
Could not agree more. You want sustainable development? Great. 48 Abell is not sutainable in its current incarnation. The exterior load-bearing brick walls are brittle and becoming un-anchored from the post-and-beam timber load-bearing structure within. Basement beams are rotting due to moisture seepage and a fire there could bring the whole structure down. The exterior brick is highly weathered and prone to absorbing moisture, ensuring more freeze/thaw brittleness.
If they really want to save this thing, the smart move is to help the developer make it cost-effective to remediate the existing structure (or at least the facade). Simply driving the developer away from the project merely ensures that it stays decrepit (and sooner or later will be condemned as unsafe). Everyone moves out and you lose the space anyway.
It's going to take a lot of money to save 48 Abell -- who's going to pony up for it?
Quite the refreshing perspective, although one must applaud Active 18's efforts to remain a positive force in the debate, and for not resorting to the usual NIMBY rhetoric.
One thing to keep in mind is that Abell street developed into an artists community not through any sort of City policy, but through the usual forces in commercial real-estate (less diplomatically, it was a dump where few others wanted to live or do business). Now that the real-estate market has turned, the artists are being left out in the cold. But few (in the city as a whole) seem to care.
The City must first be convinced that housing for artists is important. Whether this happens at Abell Steet, down the block, or somewhere else is irrelevant. No amount of well-intentioned heritage designations will provide housing for artists unless this becomes a priority within the City. Otherwise this cycle will only repeat itself further down Queen Street over and over.
Paul
Last I heard, the RGI units were dependent on the project receiving government funding, not a gift on the part of the developer at all (and if you've seen the architects' drawings... well, let's just say the proposed building ain't pretty). And while it's true that Abell is not structurally sound (ask anyone who lives there), and that it is not the *only* place artists live in Toronto, for that many people to get evicted from live/work spaces is still going to have an impact on the artistic community; the sheer number of people who are going to be looking for the kind of space that allows for studios all at the same time will drive rents for those kinds of spaces up, in the short term at least.
(p.s. the stclares.ca link is broken...)
>It's going to take a lot of money to save 48 Abell -- who's going to pony up for it?
Well, the city may be ponying up the money for the affordable housing that will replace 48 Abell. That's the only way the developer can afford to build it. If the city doesn't approve funding the 200 units they're asking for (and people have been saying it's unlikely that they will since they are only planing to fund, I think, 600 units across the city in total), these affordable units will not be built.
Another thing people seem to forget is that 48 Abell already provides affordable housing. If they city does choose to fund the 200 units proposed to replace it, they'd essentially be tearing down affordable housing to build affordable housing -- there'd be no net gain of affordable units throughout the city.
The units in at Abell are live-work as well. As Paul mentioned, the thing that's so wonderful about this old building is the community of artists that live there. They don't live in isolation. They feed off of each other's ideas and creativity. Artists tend to thrive in communities like these. 48 Abell is the kind of place that ArtScape spends years to plan and find funds for. If the city agrees that this is a good location to have affordable units, perhaps they should allocate funds to help fix the place up.
One more thing to think about: Margie Zeidler once said 'the most environemtally friendly building is the building that already exists.' Tearing down a building that can be fixed wastes tonnes of energy and creates tonnes of waste. I learned recently that a third of the junk in our landfill is remnents of old buildings (might be a good thing to look up.) 48 Abell may be old and crumbling. It may need A LOT of work, but that doesn't mean it can't be saved.
I've been to active 18 meetings. I've listened to the people who live in 48 Abell talk about what will be lost. This building IS a key issue. People feel very strongly about it.
Dale: I think your *artistic community* argument is crap. I live and work in 48 Abell and I'm lucky if my neighbours say hello to me in the hall.
Everyone likes to pretend that there's this interactive, cool, arts-collective vibe in the building, but it just doesn't exist. Everybody kinda does their own thing, complains about their neighbours and the noise, like any other apartment-building structure.
Dale - 'the most environmentally friendly building is the building that already exists.' is a catchy slogan, but like most generalizations, it's not necessarily true. My take is that to refurbish 48 Abell would require essentially gutting the place, and starting almost from scratch, which would put a lot of construction junk into landfills and recycling. Moreover, it's unlikely that a structure the age and design of 48 Abell could ever be revamped in a way that would make it anywhere near as energy efficient and environmentally friendly as a building constructed using modern technologies. Over a lifespan of 30-40, years, a new building would have a much smaller environmental footprint.
That's probably irrelevant anyway, because the structural assessment report indicates strongly that the building is essentially unsalvageable, no matter how much money you put into it. If so, the whole debate is a huge waste of time. One way or another, 48 Abell cannot continue to be what it is, and it's better to consider how to transition out of there than to chain yourself to the radiator and wait for them to come board up the windows.
And a community is about people, not bricks and mortar. I'm aware of other Abell residents who share Steve's less romantic view of the place, believe me. They just aren't as vocal as the cheerleaders.
Dale, I think one could safely make the argument that a building that is in poor structural condition and has not been adequately maintained with its current maintenance budget, is not exactly "affordable" in its current condition. It's affordable because the landlords, over the years, have not increased the maintenance budget to keep pace with its structural decay.
Frankly, I like the idea of keeping 48 Abell -- provided the structure is remediated. Unremediated, though, it is no better than any other 120-year-old building whose structural integrity (and therefore safety) teeters on a knife edge. And as the report says, remediating the structure is cost-prohibitive whether they try to keep the entire building or just the facade. Those are no small considerations when one is attempting to develop a property.
I am President of the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario.
The debate over 48 Abell is a very important one. To quote Andrew Powter, "the greenest building is the one that already exists". Here are a few things to think about. From English Heritage a small Victorian row house contains enough embodied energy to drive a car around the world three times" Every time a building is demolished all that embodied energy is lost.
Donovan Rypkema from the U.S. estimates that tearing down even a small brick building like any of the small commmercial buildings on Queen W. undoes all the benefit of recycling about 3.1 million pop cans.
It costs roughly the same to renovate an existing building as build a new one, but the costs go into labour roughly twice as much as to build new, and far fewer physical resources are needed. The labour and materials come, as the original materials did, from local sources, so support the local economy.
Even though the brickwork needs work, it can be stabilized. Labour intensive, yes, but not more than building new. And once repaired the building is good for another hundred years or more...not many new buildings can make that claim.
Re-using existing buildings is one of the most important green strategies society can adopt.
That embodied energy is going to be lost anyway, once the building loses enough structural integrity. And all those years of embodied energy savings are not exactly helping to underwrite the present remediation process.
The brick is probably the least technically challenging item in that report. There is the small matter of parking, for instance, which requires an underground parking garage whose dimensions exceed the building's ground-level square-footage footprint. In other words the garage area needs to be wider than the building. Shoring up a structurally deficient building while simultaneously excavating and constructing much larger subterranean levels beneath it is no mean feat.
Remember, the report indicates that the structure is vulnerable enough that even the presence of excavation and construction-related vibration in adjacent properties is likely to cause serious damage.
Then there is the matter of bringing the structure, framing, plumbing and utilities into compliance with current code. Or gutting the entire interior structure while keeping the brittle exterior intact.
I would be interested in knowing what your evaluation of the remediation costs are, versus those forecast by the developer. If it is always a revenue-neutral proposition, as you say, then presumably renovation and remediation would be the default choice for most construction projects replacing same-density, same-zoning-type buildings. What are your cost figures?
Dale--
The latest figures I have seen put the number of units at 48 Abell at 80, renting for prices starting at 1100/month. The proposed replacement features 199 units, with rents starting at 724/month. By any standard, that seems like a net gain in affordable housing, either of 109 units or 199 units, depending on whether or not you consider the current prices at 48 Abell affordable.
In addition, the illegality of the units involves safety of life issues: the consultant's report on the building says the live/work units do not come up to fire codes, and the owner probably could not bring them up to fire code without a major expenditure in money and materials.
I also consider the arguments about embodied energy problematic. Tearing down 48 Abell to put up an additional 90 units of affordable housing may involve an energy expenditure, but how much would we really gain by putting those additional units up in Brampton or Oshawa? We have to infill to intensify the city, no matter what, and in the process some buildings will inevitably get lost. I don't much like that, but I can't change it.
Bringing this issue down to the way people feel about 48 Abell simply highlights a problem with the planning process in this city. The people on housing wait lists haven't the energy to come to public meetings and express their emotions; they spend their time looking for the next couch (or the next steam grate).