LORINC: The vital need to renew Tower Renewal
Almost exactly a year ago, a team of American affordable housing experts from the Urban Land Institute came to Toronto to offer up ideas for breaking the logjam on retrofitting our huge portfolio of aging slab apartment buildings that collectively provide reasonably priced accommodation for hundreds of thousands of people.
They spent a few weeks studying this far-flung assembly of buildings, some privately owned and others run by Toronto Community Housing. Then, at a well-attended and upbeat session at the Munk Centre, the group offered solutions, which have subsequently been packaged up in a report. Senior municipal and council officials were in attendance, and there was plenty of talk about not just nosing this fix up the city’s priorities ladder but launching a pilot project with ten buildings. “You need to think about the next 60 years,” former New York City chief planner Purnima Kapur told the audience.
Community group to province: Why demolish historic Toronto foundry site when it could look like this?
A coalition of professionals and community members is releasing its vision for a historic Toronto property the Ontario government is seeking to demolish. The century-old Dominion Wheel and Foundries is to be sold and redeveloped as a mixed-use housing development.
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Friends of the Foundry/Handout
The Ontario government doesn’t need to tear down a group of heritage industrial buildings in Toronto’s West Don Lands in order to decontaminate the site and allow housing to be built, a group of architects and community activists say.
The derelict red-brick buildings of the former Dominion Wheel and Foundries Co., the oldest of which dates back to 1917, have been at the centre of a political battle for weeks, after a local neighbourhood association won a court order blocking the province’s demolition, idling heavy equipment that had already started clearing the site.
A coalition of community activists has released ideas for preserving several heritage properties in the West Don Lands ahead of a meeting with the province to try and negotiate their fate.
Ford government selling Dominion Foundries land, but isn t revealing buyer cbc.ca - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from cbc.ca Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.