Toronto's Lower Don: The Challanges of Urban Redevelopment

By Keith Edmund White

Editor-in-Chief

The Lower Don, once a industrial hob of Toronto's industrial era, has fallen on hard times, and has now lived through over 50 years of redevelopment attempts.   The appeal of the Lower Don is obvious:  if prudently developed, the Lower Don offers an ideal urban living space for a growing metropolis.  But after decades of fits and starts, will large-scale residential construction now underway, will large-scale residential development finally kick-start the redevelopment of the Lower Don? 

Images taken from Canadian Geographic, Evergreen City Works, and WATERFRONToronto

Quick Facts About the Lower Don

The Lower Don Lands is a 125-hectare (308-acre) area that runs from East Bayfront (the Parliament Street Slip) east to the Don Roadway and from West Don Lands (the rail corridor) south to the Shipping Channel.  (Source:  WATERFRONToronto)

As of 2000, over the Lower Don—or Ward 25 that covers the  Don Rive—boasted 84,000 inhabits.  (Source:  City of Toronto Website)

Why did the Lower Don fade?  The Lower Don area initially developed as an industrial center.  And with the dawn of the Industrial era, the Lower Don faced a slow death—leaving this unique waterfront area left with environmental scars.  From the Canadian Geographic Magazine’s June 2011 article "Death and Rebirth of the Don River":

At the time of the Funeral for the Don, the river’s 36,000- hectare watershed was easy to divide into three regions. The foulest area was near the river’s southern terminus. Rebuilt in Victorian days as an industrial artery for a restless Dominion, the lower Don was a font of goods, everything from flour, lumber, paper, wool and brick to Coleman lanterns, Sunlight soap, Woods tents and sleeping bags, Gooderham’s Bonded Stock whisky and probably even the metal pails Love used to carry the deceased to the funeral. (The Don’s industrial role was no accident. Upper Canada’s first Lieutenant-Governor, John Graves Simcoe, decided to build the new capital of York — now Toronto — east of the river to take advantage of its timber and the sheltered waterfront created by a large peninsula and marsh. As a result, the Don was close to shipping and eventually became a railway corridor, while the larger Humber River, to the west, was surrounded first by farms and later housing.)

…

What the mourners couldn’t have known is that the industrial Don was on the verge of a dramatic transformation (see timeline above). When James Onyschuk worked at a riverside warehouse in the 1960s, he’d occasionally check to see what colour the river was: pink, maybe, or bright blue, courtesy of the dyes from an upstream paper mill. Today, former factories have become trendy lofts and upscale car dealerships. North of the funeral site, the plant that provided the material for much of Toronto’s stolid Victorian architecture has been rebranded as the Evergreen Brick Works. It’s an environmental community centre and tourist draw, complete with a farmers’ market and workshops on water conservation, bicycle repairs and home canning.

…

“In the Don, there’s 150 years of history to reverse,” says Ontario Ministry of the Environment research scientist Paul Helm. Change on that scale “doesn’t happen on a dime.”

Enough dimes, however, will soften history’s more egregious insults, and a series of successful regreening efforts offer hope for a broader transformation of the river. When Nancy Penny moved to her Scarborough neighbourhood in the 1970s, the local section of Taylor Massey Creek was confined to what she calls a “concrete ditch” running through parkland that was “basically a dog toilet: a grass field with a few trees.”

New Spur of Residential Development Triggers New Greenway Project to Consolidate the Lower Don's Recent Gains

The Globe and Mail reported Friday on the commercial kick-start that may trigger a lasting, and full-scale redevelopment on The Lower Don:

Evergreen has just launched the Lower Don Greenway Project, a collaboration with the city and the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA) to pick up where the now-disbanded Task Force to Bring Back the Don left off.

The aim of Evergreen’s project – and a city-sponsored planning study that will be announced this week – is to make the valley accessible green space for the 80,000 people expected to move into nearby infill housing.

The lower valley has come a long way since 1989 when it was a no-go area and the task force was launched. As the staff co-ordinator for eight years Mr. Stonehouse saw fences come down and bridges go up, wetlands and trails created.
But the valley is in danger of falling off the radar, according to Mr. Stonehouse. “We need public engagement to create a bandwagon effect,” he says, adding, “There needs to be a wish list.”

Who’s building the new residences that would be the beneficiary of building such “accessible green space”? WATERFRONToronto, whose 2012/2013 Corporate Plan (pages 2-3) includes plans to renovate East Bayfront, West Don Lands, Central Waterlands, and other Toronto areas. And guess what? WATERFRONToronto itself a public development corporation created by the Canada national government, the province of Ontario, and the city of Toronto. But, critically, this group has leveraged private funds to fuel the Lower Don’s redevelopment, with investments from organizations including Urban Capital.

Challenges Facing Lower Don's Redevelopment

What seems to be the problem with re-starting the Lower Don? This SpacingToronto 'reality check' helps answer that vexing question:

-disagreements on how to develop the space—e.g super-mall anchored development vs. urban feel),
-the costs of greening the Lower Don (not to mention addressing the ravine’s inherent flooding risk),
-and disagreements over whether the cost of full-scale redevelopment would be paid back—in less than 10 years—by tax revenue.

The apparent result: a stop-and-start, staggered approach to the Lower Don's redevelopment, which often seemed a breathe away from flat-lining.  

But with the launch of a new 80,000 residential construction project, it now seems the Lower Don redevelopment effort now has the commercial muscle needed to kick-start and, hopefully, complete the revitalization of an waterfront area once considered a casualty of Toronto's industrial past.