Lack of ‘truly affordable housing’ and impact of 18-storey building among concerns at meeting on proposal for Queen and Coxwell site
By MATTHEW STEPHENS
Local residents had a chance to revisit updated details for a mixed-use development project at 1631-1641 Queen St. E. and 1090 Eastern Ave that is expected to feature two separate buildings of six and 18 storeys in height.
On the evening of Wednesday, Oct. 22 at Beach United Church, members of the public were invited to a consultation meeting hosted by CreateTO, an agency tasked with managing the city’s real estate assets, and City of Toronto staff. The meeting was held in an open house format to allow for “better community engagement,” according to city staff.
Instead of holding a event where city officials speak to a room full of seated residents, Wednesday’s event presented slides along the perimeter of the church hall, with members of city staff posted at each slide to answer questions and engage in one-on-one conversations with members of the community.
Beach resident and attendee Adam Smith said the meeting’s format could help to reimagine the way the city consultation meetings are held going forward.
“It’s not an actual consultation so much as this is a presentation, which is not a bad thing,” said Smith. “I almost feel like this should be phase one of a consultation meeting, to help familiarize people with the project, and then phase two could be an actual consultation.”
The development proposal, which features a six-storey building fronting Queen Street East and an 18-storey building fronting Eastern Ave. on a parcel of land just east of Coxwell Avenue, is a collaborative effort between CreateTO and the city’s Housing Now initiative, which aims to build more affordable and mixed-income housing for Torontonians.
The proposal is expected to include market and affordable rental housing, childcare, commercial space, and the development of Kishigo Lane, which will serve as a publicly accessible space named in honour of an Anishinaabe family that lived in the area in the late 18th century.
Although there weren’t many significant changes to the updated proposal since it was first announced in 2020, city staff member Jason Chen said many of buildings’ updated design changes were made possible following the acquisition of 1641 Queen St. E., which is currently operating as a Harvey’s restaurant.
“With the acquisition of that property, that really did allow us to relook at the project after picking up the additional land to incorporate into the development,” said Chen on Wednesday. “We realized we could separate the middle section that was 12-storeys and remove that to create two separate buildings, which provides us with a lot more flexibility and simplifies the entire project.”
Beaches-East York Councillor Brad Bradford, who was at Wednesday’s meeting, said the project was delayed so the Harvey’s site could be acquired, a decision he believes was essential to ensure the project’s quality.
“Going out to acquire that Harvey’s site took a lot of time,” said Bradford. “If I was to look back once this thing was built and see that the city had built a building around a fast-food restaurant; that doesn’t make any sense.”
In addition to separating the buildings, as part of the updated proposal, the new design has allowed the childcare space to be moved from two separate storeys in the Eastern Avenue building to one individual space at grade.
However, with the proposed development’s affordable housing prices as low as $1,109 per month for a studio apartment and as high as $2,275 per month for a three-bedroom unit, Smith believes the city is out of touch with what affordability really means for many Torontonians.
“When you look at what’s actually affordable for the average person, the affordable rent is what regular rent should be,” said Smith.
“Market rent, which would be the majority of the units, is simply not affordable to anything but the top 30 per cent of incomes these days. I think the entire model, due to the current economics, is just not going to be sustainable for people to actually live in and be able to afford to live in – other than the affordable units, but that’s a minimum.”
Smith suggested that “the whole building should be affordable,” in light of the city’s over-priced rental market and lack of “truly affordable housing.”
According to a report from Urbanation, Toronto’s condo market is on track to hit its worst year for sales in three-and-a-half decades, as a result of unsold units. In 2024, the Greater Toronto Hamilton Area (GTHA) saw a record high of 22,602 unsold condo units in Q3.
Of the 328 new units proposed in the city’s plan for the Queen Street East and Eastern Avenue site, city staff say approximately 98 will be affordable.
City staff also said the affordable unit costs are reflective of a new hybrid model used to allocate affordable housing, which is expected to launch later this year.
As part of the new model, the city’s application system will also include a “methodology to draw tenants from a random draw and a chronological waitlist from across the city,” a system they believe will “give equitable access to both newcomers and current Torontonians.”
The last public meeting to discuss the project, which was held in 2021, faced backlash from many members of the community, who voiced a shared concern that the proposal went against the Queen Street East Urban Design Guidelines (UDG), which limits building height along Queen Street East in the Beach between Coxwell and Neville Park avenues.
On Wednesday night, city staff included a slide outlining the concerns posed by the community, which included requests for six-storeys along the Queen Street facing portion of the development, the acquisition of the Harvey’s site (1641 Queen St. E.), support for development of Kishigo Lane with Indigenous place keeping, strong support for affordable housing and family sized units, use of the retail space to accommodate a small business, and the protection of city services such as childcare and employment services on site.
In response to the request for six storeys on the Queen Street East building, the community feedback slide mentioned that the building will include “six-storeys with five storeys of residential, and a ground floor consisting of a day care facility and retail plus a 7th partial storey for enclosed amenity space, limited in size to preserve the look of a 6 storey building on Queen Street.”
Despite the new proposal mostly adhering to public feedback, in recent years, residents have also expressed concern about the height of the 18-storey building facing Eastern Avenue.
Local resident and attendee Glenn Chadwick still believes that 18-storeys facing Eastern Avenue could jeopardize the “character” of Queen Street East.
“You have the Urban Design Guidelines, and that’s size. But there’s also issues around the quality of these buildings, especially if you’re on a main street like Queen, which has a certain character and has a pedestrian kind of experience with its small stores and not something that’s the same all the way along,” said Chadwick.
Chadwick said he believes the Queen Street East UDG should also apply to the easternmost portion of Eastern Avenue, as he referred to the latest development project at 1555 Queen St. E. and 1070 Eastern Ave. as “monolithic.”
In response on their feedback slide, city staff alluded to other projects along Eastern Avenue (including the Don Summerville building on the west side of Coxwell Avenue), stating that “the height reflects the emerging and built context of the area while respecting the character on Queen Street East.”
The slide also mentioned that the proposed height on Eastern Avenue was necessary to “support the city’s affordable housing targets,” and “make the site economically viable.”
To address concerns regarding the accompanying density the new proposal will bring, Bradford said he believes the issue could be alleviated by the latest design change to separate the buildings.
“Separating the two buildings between Queen and Eastern Avenue will be an important feature,” said Bradford. “It allows us to move the additional density back towards Eastern while still maintaining the frontage on Queen in keeping with what we’ve seen there before.”
For more information about the project, please head to https://createto.ca/projects/1631-queen-street-east
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