At its meeting Monday, the Toronto Preservation Board (TPB) voted to adopt a set of staff recommendations that seemed, to some observers as well as development industry insiders, like a classic example of bureaucratic overreach.
In a series of reports tabled at the board, Heritage Planning division officials recommended that almost a thousand older commercial/main street building be listed on the City’s Heritage Register as having cultural heritage value, even if each one is not, individually, historically or architecturally distinctive.
Most of these background buildings are along Queen West, Spadina Road, and the Danforth (between Coxwell and Victoria Park), in the King East/Adelaide corridor, and up Roncesvalles to Dundas West and north of Bloor.
The designation, according to the staff report, “[extends] interim protection from demolition, should a development or demolition application be submitted. Heritage Impact Assessments (HIA) are required for development applications that affect listed and designated properties.”
The act of listing, the document continues with studied neutrality, “provides an opportunity for City Council to determine whether the property warrants conservation through designation under the Ontario Heritage Act.” All but one of the board’s 12 members are citizen appointees, and the group includes several prominent architects.
These moves, which are unlikely to present intensification efforts with insurmountable headwinds, hint at the many circles the City needs to square over the next year-and-a-half, as planners slog through the immense task of updating the Official Plan so it conforms to new provincial land use rules.