Yonge Street's going vertical, and Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam figures it's got something to do with a generational shift among the people who own it.
"I think that for Yonge Street, for a long time it's been multi-generational ownership, parent to child, parent to child," says the
Ward 27 councillor and former real estate agent with Coldwell Banker. "I think that in many instances, the children are no longer [interested in] operating these businesses."
Yonge Street south of Davenport, along with most of Bloor, the Danforth and Queen Street, have not kept pace with the intensification of the core, keeping to their quaint, two-, three- and four-storey selves. But Wong-Tam's started to notice a tidal shift on Yonge.
"I've had many pre-application meetings with third-generation property owners who are bringing in developers with whom they've structured deals," she says, adding that these days, "applications in Ward 27 seem to start at 40, 45 storeys."
Some of these families are prominent property holders, like Hong Kong-based holding company
Chen and Sons, and others own one or two storefronts and are looking to maximize the profit on their generations-long investments, while allowing Yonge Street to grow up.
As Wong-Tam has said before, she's ambivalent on the issue of Yonge Street's imminent verticality. As a former real estate pro, she likes good development, but at the same time, she talks about walking down Yonge on a recent afternoon during this unseasonably sunny spring.
It was, she says, "really illuminating for me, to see all those people lining up for patios with sun. It's not shadows in parks or shadows in backyards, it's shadows right on the street, on patios, that matter." And soon, there'll be many more of them.
Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Kristyn Wong-Tam
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