Toronto condo towers slums in the making?

Christopher Hume, Opinion, The Toronto Star:

As residential towers in Toronto grow ever taller, and living units ever smaller, the prospect of a new sort of slum tower looms ever larger.

There’s nothing new about highrise poverty, here or in almost any other city. Since the end of World War II, the idea of housing the poor in towers has been popular with planners, politicians and developers alike — everyone but the poor themselves.

Torontonians may not like to talk about it, but there are more highrise residential buildings here than any other city in North America except New York. Those constructed in the inner suburbs between the 1950s and the ’70s have largely failed to keep up with the times. They are the remnants of a dysfunctional form of urbanism based on flawed notions about how people inhabit space and interact with their surroundings.

Interestingly, the failure was one of planning. The idea that 80 to 90 percent of a site should be left as open space was clearly misguided. Though they are of little architectural merit, the important thing is that they have family-sized apartments.

Ironically enough, the empty space surrounding them will allow for these towers to be rehabilitated and revitalized.

By contrast, the tall, thin glass condo towers now popping up across the city tend to be much better planned; they sit on handsome low-rise podiums full of shops and restaurants. Some have squares, public art, parks and all kinds of amenities. The quality of the architecture has improved dramatically; a few condo towers are quite beautiful.

But so were the grand 19th-century mansions of Jarvis St.; that didn’t keep them from ending up as rooming houses half a century ago. Those that remain have since been cleaned up and reclaimed, but not before hitting rock bottom.

When it comes to condos, the critical factor is neither architecture nor planning, but price. To keep units affordable, developers have made them smaller and smaller; the result is tiny cell-like spaces that resemble a 21st-century monastery.

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