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thank you jan and .thank you very much. and thank you all for coming.thank you to the city of ottawa for inviting me.it’s great to see old friends and to come home. i went to school here and spent 12 yearsin ottawa. i know it’s a great city. i also know how ottawans have a great affinity fortoronto so. one of our national past times is we love to hate the banks, we love to hatetoronto but it’s ok i understand that. so i am going to start this. in fact, when youthink of what we have done. i have 30 minutes to explain what was done in the last 13 years.so it’s going to be rather quick. but i will focus on some of the hows . i think thatis really important when you are talking about

urban renewal it is really important to thinkabout how you do the things. the toronto form may not work here. in fact, probably everycity has to have its own form and its own unique requirements and so forth. but someof the hows that we did are important to learn from because it is a great opportunity foryou to look at the waterfront for example and you get one shot at it for a century orso. so you better do it right. i am going to talk a bit about the context of the projectand how we did things. what we have done, the economic impacts and finish off with thefuture of what’s happening. this is one of the largest projects in north america.certainly maybe even the world. it’s a huge project. it’s 2000 acres right next to acentral business district of what is effectively

the economic capital of canada. not the politicalcapital obviously but the economic capital. it’s land of 2000 acres for about 40 thousandresidential units. about 100 thousand people. ten million square feet of commercial spaceplus parks, recreation, entertainment retail and so forth. it’s a very large project.it is estimated to be about 35 billion dollars in today’s dollars. which 6 to 8 billionis the public sector investment. of couse its private sector for apartments and buildings,hotels and the like. it’s probably, we have been at it for 13 years and there’s probablyanother twenty or thirty years depending on the market place to see it through. so it’sa long long term project. that’s going to take a lot of perseverance to get done. eventorontonians don’t appreciate the scale

of this. we do some bubble maps just to showpeople what the scale is. the first bubble represents the area of battery park in newyork city. 97 acres. then you have got canary wharf, 297 acres and waterfront toronto 2000acres. so this is a major major project that’s going to take a long time to do. decades butwe are on the right path. so a lot of challenges and jan talked briefly about some of those.we have huge public cynicism. there’s been studies on toronto’s waterfront for 200years. the first one were done by lieutenant governor simcoe in the mid 1790s. and nota lot of action so. obviously when we started 13 years ago it was all ah yeah more studies,more consultants and nothing is going to happen so. a lot of public cynicism to overcome andthat affected our strategy of development.

stop and start. we had a few false startsin the mid 80s in the harbor front and that really turned people off. i think that thelarge part. very complex projects. everything south of front street is fill. the harborhas been moved out of the last hundred years. so it’s all fill. so there is no bearingcapacity. put a light pole in and you have to go 35 feet to rock. the water table isa four feet and contaminants you name it, we got it. name any one and i am sure i canfind it down there somewhere. because no one tracked what they got down there. coal, tar,we got arsenic. you name it, it’s there. so it was very challenging from that perspectiveas well. and global competition. we know that most cities are doing the same thing thatwe are doing which is really trying to attract

talent and capital. and if you are not movingahead in this area, you are getting behind. meaning the war for talent is there. as peoplemy age move out of the workforce , young people are very mobile, capital is mobile so youreally want to be ensuring that your city is attracting its fair share of talent. andof course, limited resources. we have a large contribution from three levels of government.it’s a 35 billion dollar project so our initial contribution doesn’t go all thatfar. and here is what i think is the most important part. it’s about waterfront revitalizationnot about real estate development. we don’t need to peddle real estate on the waterfront.we are doing it really to change the nation. it’s about being driven by public policy.stopping urban sprawl, promoting sustainability,

design excellence, transit. all those thingsthat create a great quality of life. because that’s what’s going to keep people, that’sgoing to attract people to your city, to our city, to the country. and that’s what isgoing to make us competitive globally for the long term. that’s what protects ourquality of life. it’s to have these places, quality of places and quality of life that isgoing to allow us to retain that talent. because other places are doing this aswell. singapore,melbourne, sydney. you name it. there’s people doing the same things and we have todo our part to make sure that we can keep that young talent here. the intellectual capitalthat we need to survive and thrive in the next century.

the business model is really quite simple.we have a large contribution from three governments. it was the legacy of a failed olympic bidfor the toronto 2008 summer olympics. which didn’t occur as you know. but we got 1.5billion dollars of seed capital plus control of land. and it’s about 85 percent ownership in the public of all that land. and the model is to take the seed capital invest it in infrastructure. sewer, water roads and so forth. sell the public land. take the profit. re-invest in infrastructure. sell the land and so on and so forth. so that doesn't get us to six to eight billions dollars. of revenue to provide all the infrastructure but it does change the model it allows us to grow 1.5 billion up to about 2.3 billion dollars of infrastructure to allow development to occur.

a part from that, that land that goes out to the development community goes through a competitive tender. again public asset. it goes out through a public process. but again it's not just price. it's not a tender, it is more a request for proposals. because those are all defined or determined by not only price but also quality, vision, sustainability and those kinds of things. that a developer brings to the table. and that's really an important aspect of it. one of our roles, we are the master planners for the waterfront we are not the regulating authority. that resides with the city. but we are the master planners so we do the master planning with the community. we take those plans to city council. and to the planning department for approval and for zoning changes.

we are basing it on an official plan that's been done many years ago. probably ten years ago. so we are not starting from scratch. we have the core concepts of what those areas should be. but we are doing the next layer of planning. which is precinct planning. which then allows us to get underway with development. and we do it through a very large consultation process. i am going to dwell a bit on this because i think this is important. given that what i have heard from sheila and others. in a period of 2006 to 2013 we had over 300 meetings. we had so many projects underway. and what we have done basically is we have an enviromental

assessment process but we've mixed those meetings with other kinds of meetings so we have public meetings then we have stakeholder meetings. stakeholder meetings are meetings with people who we've invited in to represent an organization it could be a bia, it could be a residents' association, a condominium board a retail association, a trucking association, depending on what the issues are and those twelve to twenty people will actually work with our planners. and have working sessions to help devise those

plans. so go through and as they work on those plans with our staff and our outside planners. that word goes back through their organization as to what is going on. so we have a public meeting a stakeholder meeting, public meetings, stakeholder, public and then council. and so it does two things, gives us great input and it also helps build consensus. throughout the whole process. so we get to city council we don't have deputations about people objecting to the plan we have people computing and saying get out of the way and let these guys get on with the job.

because it is their plan aswell. the phrase i like to say is. we love to do our projects with the community not to the community. and that requires a lot of patience, a lot of work but certainly it ends up with better ideas, better results. because the community knows the neighborhoods better than anybody else. they know what works, what doesn't work. it doesn't change the plans, it's not the old adage about a race horse designed by a community being a camel. it's basically helping us create great ideas, create great input to the plans to make sure

that we are getting better product i call it crowd-sourcing for ideas. and it works well. quality of place is obviously a key element for us we've attracted some of the best designers in the world. over 60 design awards in the last 13 years. it's more than that now, it's creeping up. but we don't basically restrict out design. we challenge world for ideas. some of the things we've done

are to create international design competitions for big projects. this one here was for the central waterfront. it attracted 38 submissions from 17 countries from around the world. now they have to partner up with a lot of local designers for licensing purposes but it's fine. but we do actually want to tap in to the brainpower of the world.you are building a waterfront you want the best, you get to do it once. to do it right, you get the best ideas.

no matter where they are from. we also put into place, a design review panel third one in canada. first was vancouver, second was your own national capital commission then we put ours in and that idea has rippled out in many more do that. that's really helped to crank up the design aswell and make sure that people are giving it really good designs. it is a bit of a struggle with developers. and their architects.i call it a very humbling experience but it's actually ended up with a better product and

most designers who have been through it realize their designs have been enhanced by having peer reviews of outside experts. we are also trying to raise the bar for sustainability. that's key, a core value of the corporation. we started off in 2005 by creating what we call a sustainability framework. and that guideline was to really affect how we plan build, operate all the facilities in the waterfront. we started off requiring leed gold

leed stands for leadingship in energy and environmental design. it becomes the north american model. there's models around the world. there's bream in england. there's gold stars in australia. there's various ones but we thought let's adopt one that basically the market begins to understand. and we established leed gold as the requirement for 2005 and it basically ratcheted it up since then not just going to platinum but actually being much more specific.

one of the challenges we have is how do you plan for today and deal with the developers who have to sell the product tomorrow but also look to the future? so as we changed our requirements now to sort of move up and doing things like making sure that we have minimum slab heights minimum slab heights to make sure that things don't become obsolete. the other thing we've done is make sure that any parking garages have flat floors. parking garages will be obsolete in twenty years. so let's make sure that those structures aren't obsolete, that they can be used for other things.

so increase the slab height and make sure that they floors are flat. put the ramps at the end and also other things like ensure that developers don't build their buildings using a partition wall as a shear wall. in an office building it's a common slab construction because you know the floor plate is going to change. in toronto and that marketplace. they use the partition walls and sheer walls. the problem with that of-course is that a 500 square foot unit today is 500 square feet forever. so we are saying no use sound reducing materials but don't use those as structural elements. make sure that 500 square foot units may sell tomorrow morning but in 20 or 30 years time does that become a slum?

perhaps. so we are saying make sure that you can actually take some of those walls down. and a person who buys today can buy their neighbor or their other neighbor in the future. there's still challenges like electrical chases and mechanical chases but usually those are more towards the core. and you can open up the units and create flexibility. in the residential housing stocks. but it doesn't get torn down. we also know that it the waterfront we have about 2 million cubic metres of bad soil to take out

and a million cubic metres to bring back in. and if we just adopt the standard approach of just let the developers dig and dump is what they call it and just take it up north somewhere and put it in a hole license or not, what does that mean? we have the ontario centre of excellence does a study for it and what is the impact of that if we just sit back and let people do what they normally do? well it means about 50 million kilometers extra of truck traffic. and the public cost to that when you consider

congestion and road wear and tear, accidents, fatalities, public health because we are a single payer system it's about 65 million dollars. so well we have a broader responsibility. let's do something different so we tried washing the soil to reduce the export of bad product. and actually have someone else now who can cook the cake and basically reduce it to nothing. however, i don't have the wherewithal or we have the wherewithal to basically subsidize that so what did is we ran a pilot program to make sure it was doable. then we brought a private sector operator to run the business.

and what we did to make sure that he could run the business is we said we'll garantee that our developers have to take our soil to you as long as it costs no more than dig and dump. no cost to the developer, no cost to the public and the right public policy agenda gets acheived. and you know we have become very good at what i call work-arounds. it's not illegal. what i mean by that is finding creative ways. to use private sector models to achieve public policy without spending public bucks.

we know for example that by looking at stockholm. that transits is a very important part of our sustainability agenda. in stockholm when they put in the transit within 18 months of the first occupants the model split went from the 30s to 70 percent using public transit. in our model in toronto transit is unfortunately isn't well funded and you get transit there after three of four years and the population builds up the problem then is of course patterns have been created, you can't get people out of their cars. so our challenge is to get it there early enough such that people when they go down there to buy an apartment or get a job

down there that transit is available. big challenge given the cost of it but we are still struggling with it. we are also building future ready infrastructure. we have a flooding issue that we have to manage in toronto there are three rivers that come in we had hurricane hazel in the 50s that killed about 160 people on the humber river. we're on the don river watershed so we have to design the area such that it can withstand a hurricane hazel in the don river watershed. there's about 300 square miles of watershed a lot of it hard packed, hard surfaced rather.

so we had to build floor protection berms to effectively shield downtown from that flood risk.what we have done is create parks. we this is a 17 acre park now that no one knows is really a flood protection barrier is now a broad city park well received also some creative infrastructure. we've combined public art, infrastructure and parks and recreation to create this really looking after storm water so when the storm water gets collected in the area, it gets treated with u.v. it gets run through the public art, some big arches in comes down into a bio filter

and when we don't have rain water we use lake water it's about 99 percent pure when it goes out into the harbour. we also unlike most developments we are leading with the public realm. and couple good reasons for that when you think about it. it overcomes the public cynicism we say no it is happening this time for sure here's the park or the parks. secondly we also set a great high design centre for our developers to follow if the developers are building next door and they see a great park they are going to give us a great design as well.

and of course in the business model is to sell the public land why not add value to it first? so it helps in all three ways and it's been successful. ... in all three categories. we also have a challenge in toronto with street trees. they last an average of five to 7 years. no irrigation, hard packed compaction and what happens is they get cut off and not replaced. ... and that's a shame so what we've adopted is a technology called

silva cells, it's like upside down patio tables it's grillage of framework of grills that can support paved surfaces. it allows 30 cubic metres of uncompacted soil for every tree. and so each tree should last 50, 60 and 70 years not 5, 6 or 7. and of the 34 thousand trees we have to plant about 16 thousand will have this treatment because there are in paved areas. that will give us those generational trees which are so important to the public realm.

also looking at waterfront around the world, i saw probably a dozen myself personally and our designer looked at probably 30 one of the things we've learned is to make sure that when you have a public edge, a park edge or a water's edge. don't allow residential at grade. second floor up no problem. but keep the ground floor retail, community, educational, whatever. keep it public and what happens is ground floor residential tends to unofficially privatize public space. and it just sucks the life out of a waterfront.

and so we've been very hard nosed about that saying no you've gotta have retail, there's a limit to how many cafes you can have in a kilometre waterfront but you can have the condos, community area. you can have a school, you can have other retailers. as long as it's retail because when it becomes private after the condo developers is gone the pots creep out and the residents don't like it and the public doesn't like it and it basically sterilizes that area so quickly.

if you are not careful. also you want to make sure provide waterfront views. in toronto the buildings escalate back from the water to provide more views for people and so you will avoid that high rise right at the water's edge. which is important. and we are doing some new things as well. we call them pilot programs. these are call woonerfs living streets they are not mainstreets but they are sidestreets.

... and what they are are a pedestrianized surface with a very low rolling curb and nobody has the right of way. so people drive, people walk, people bicycle, people skateboard, whatever. no signage, no one has the right of way. so everybody looks out for everybody else. and it's a dutch concept which we're trialing. it's interesting. one of the things that is difficult in any big city is there are certain design standards that the city staff have that apply but we found that if you call it a pilot, it's ok because it allows for failure.

if you want to do it first and it becomes a precedent that's a concern but if it's a pilot, people know it may or may not work. so i've found great use for the term pilot. great value in that. i mean if you are managing infrastructure for a city of 2.5 million people or in this case a million people. it's tough. you have snakeoil salesmen coming all the time pitching different ideas. this tends to work quite well. we also built canada's third underpass park or second. the largest one in canada so far. and we took that space under the overpass which is a dead space. where the trolls live, if you remember your fairy tales.

and we turned it into a very well lit community park. as a connector between two neighbourhoods. as opposed to leaving it being a desolate, dark, potentially dangerous area and that's worked very very well. underpass park. also, we have done something different in our public art program. most cities, i am not sure if ottawa has this or not. but in most cities, like new york or london, toronto. developers have to commit a certain percentage of their hard cost towards public art.

this is apart from section 37, this is a separate dedication. and what can happen is you get, the tapisserie in the back of the lobby or the little statue in the corner they spend the money but it's really not that significant. so what we decided to do is, we said we can manage that , we can broker that so let's basically get large important commissions put in prominent public locations. and be the broker and then collect from the developers that one percent. as they put their building permits in. so with government help, we became the middleman to make sure we have a high value

public art program again that costs the public nothing. and the developers don't mind because basically they are just cutting a cheque. and it's a task off their plate. it's given us very significant art in a more meaningful way with helps value aswell. it helps add value to the neighbourhood. when you have that public art in prominent locations. we also have to create land for affordable housing. we have a mandate that 25 percent of the housing should be affordable. 5 percent ownership, 20 percent affordable rental.

we haven't got the model to provide the capital for that but we provide the land for that. we are now fortunate enough to have circumstances occur that allow us to manage and maintain the 20 percent. this is a toronto community housing project. the very first one at river and king street and very well done. something else we are doing. is we have canada's first open access, ultra broadband network. open access means anybody can go on at home i get bell.i get bell telephony, bell tv, bell internet.

but with open access network, it's an open pipe. most of these systems around the world are municipally owned. in canada and in north america, the darriers compete on the hardware aswell as the content so it's not common. we put the first one in here. first was chattanooga in north america. first in canada is the waterfront. and we started off with 100 megabits per second' synchronous, same speed up or down. no data caps, for 60$ a month. and what we did is we basically had the carrier put in half the capital and we carved out a fee from the developers per door for the other part. we gave the carriers a capital subsidy and we gave the carrier a ten year contract for each condo. so part of the condo common cost, they have to pay 60$ a month per unit to pay for the internet.

for a ten year contract. and because we said we are effectively giving you a monopoly you cannot mine that you have to keep within the top seven of the world when it comes to price performance. so we started at $60 a month for 100 megabits per second and we ratcheted it up to a gigabit per second for $60 a month. no data caps. you won't get that anywhere else in north america. and that's been very successful with a small carrier. greenfield metro connect who was doing commercial work in toronto at the time. something else that we've done though is we've

built in an internal cross subsidy so i carve out 120 percent from the developer for the market units and i give the carrier 100 percent for every unit including the affordable rental. we make sure that no one gets left behind. you know that the divide is getting more challenging for our society. the digital divide is getting worse. so we are trying to make sure that everybody in the neighbourhood no matter where they live has access to that high speed broadband so they don't get behind as so far as the economy. and that's working quite well. in fact, the carriers are now even discounting the operating costs to those units as well.

and again because we have that in the neighbourhood we have a proposal that's gone out and won for the innovation centre. for tenants that want to use the broadband and actually collaborate. 20 years ago it was unheard of. everyone kept their distance, today a lot of high tech companies want to collaborate even with their suppliers and their competitors on different issues. so this particular project is again going to build on the fact that the pipe is there and the community is wired so we have hoping to attract tenants that want to collaborate but also want to trial things at super high speeds

if it works here, then they can export that product to ontario, to canada and to the globe. and we are using this basically as a starting point to build an innovation corridor. again to attract jobs back downtown in that sector. we are putting in the framework and all the infrastructure to let that happen. that kind of talks about how we've done things. so i will do a quick run-through of what we've done. so 24 new or improved parks. east bayfront a major precinct at the water's edge before this is sugar beach, these are the berms that the storm water comes down the middle

as is screened in the bio filter. but part of the public art. sugar beach, before and after. the infamous umbrellas. and what we've done is the corus quay, 1200 employees high tech employees. in a vertically integrated broadcast company. george brown. waterfronts. you know this in ottawa, waterfronts in the wintertime are pretty brutal. and one of the things that we've learned from quebec city was we want to make them animated all year round, bring students down. they got to be there in january and february. i know is sounds a bit machiavellian but it works!

and so you have the retailers and the people are down there and it's happening so again it provides that liveliness and moshe safdie designed mondo. bayside, east bay front so. the west don lands, underpass park before and after corktown common this is the berm i talked about the flood protection land form. now a 17 acre community park. and in that we have a community housing, river city our first commercial project of residential. and the pam am village, we were very successfull in toronto

in securing the pam am games in 2015. and we had a village ready to go in a sens. we had designs, plans, approved, ready to go. so the village basically allowed us to build exactly what we told the community that we were going to build. but we used it to house the coaches and the athletes during the games then it went to the eventual end users. so it wasn't a case of building barracks and trying to figure out what to do with them afterwards. it was, we build exactly what we told the community and we had planned for. so the central waterfront, before . york key, ontario square you can guess who funded that.

canada square, again major public realm. and the big thing was to convert queens quay as jan spoke about to a four lane mismanaged, ugly street voted one of the ten ugliest streets in the world. by spacing blog, to one of the most.. our new signature street in toronto. so before and after. and again our wave decks. this is going to be our signature street, when you go to barcelona you walk the ramblas. when you go to paris you go to the champs-ã‰lisã©es when you come to toronto as a tourist you are going to walk queens quay.

that is going to be our signature street. it's stunning. and there's a fly-through. i am not finished yet. can you run the fly-through? i think it is only 30 or 40 seconds. this is basically what we did before built it to show people what we liked and it is actually built just that way the trees aren't as big yet but this is exactly what got built. and we have to do some of the footbridges yet.

it was a four lane street, mismanaged and we actually reduced it to two lanes and took all the lanes to the right of the tramlines and convert it to this martin goodman trail and public realm into left convert the two lanes to a two-way street. now you wouldn't think that would be acceptable to the community and it was a hard sell from four lanes to two lanes but we showed them through modelling that it actually by improving the street we actually maintained its capacity and given this beautiful environment from a government point of view

a billion and a half dollars is a lot of money and what did they get for it? so we did a study in 2013 to quickly show what they got for it. that time we invested about 1.3 billion dollars and going back to the government 622 million dollars of taxes, that's sales tax, income tax, interact taxation, hst and so forth. most of it went to the federal government some to the province and very little to the city unfortunately. but our public sector investment allowed the first six projects. a commitment of 2.6 billion dollars. and again that's the start of the development. many more from that.

so this isn't all, this is just a starting point. and that's another 838 million dollars of tax revenue back. between those two, you are up to the 1.3 billion dollars of revenue. ... going back to governments. and of course, around us because what we have done the focus we had a lot of other development happening in the private sector so another 9.5 billion dollars is or was underway so we can't take credit for that but in some cases we we're the catalyst for entirely and in some cases we just helped their marketing.

but that's what's happening around the waterfront when it became a focus of interest. so come a long way and the next project for us is the port lands. another 800 acres of flood risk area. we've been working on an environmental assessment for ten years. this flood risk shows houses being flooded out if hurricane hazel occurs. and the solution was to rather than have one outlet for the water to build three outlets. a new river, the existing channel to the north and a new outlet to the south. and that basically releves the flood risk. this shows you what the waterfront would look like in probably 15 years time.. and it’s a guess because we have the market to deal with, but it shows you what’s been done so far.

it pans over to the east to show new development and the new port lands area. i think...i think that’s it. it’s not a video, but i think i’ve timed out. i’m getting the hook here. two minutes? okay, we can show the last video. this is a fly down the river and it’s important, i think, in getting the public to show people these things because it’s hard to visualize if you’re not trained. so there’s the existing channel and further on in here is the new riverbed. this is a large project. this is about a billion and a half dollars by itself, but you can’t expand the city, downtown until you do this because of the flood risk. these fly-throughs are wonderful. they give people a real sense of what can be done. okay, i think that’s it, so thank you very much. thank you very much. and now we’re just going to open it for questions, so if anyone has any questions, we have...

i think my mic is off, and francine has been working hard getting all the...do you need more cards? maybe we could get francine more cards. there’s been a lot of traffic on the webcast. so for the first question is, looking back, what would you say is the biggest accomplishment of the project? one thing that i’m most proud of is the public engagement. we really went from an era 15 years ago when the public really weren’t that engaged, and i think what we’ve done is really set a new standard in toronto for public engagement. that’s what i think i’m really proud of. it’s not our project, it’s the project of the community and that really has made a big difference it’s one of those things that’s not physical but it’s certainly has had a big impact, and i think it’s one of the things i’m most proud of. question: if you would have to do it all over again, what would you do differently? i think that when we had started in 2001 (unofficially), the government had created us and in a hurry to get us out, they didn’t give us the powers of a corporation.

we couldn’t borrow money, we couldn’t create subsidiaries, which all real estate companies need to do, so we really had very little power. and it took us until last year to get the power to borrow and even just to borrow for operating cash, not to borrow a billion dollars to go and invest. as the grants run out you end up relying on sales, and sales revenues raise spiky, but your expenses aren’t spiky. you got to pay people every day. we should’ve held off and got more corporate powers. the other thing that i think would be different would be to actually get land ownership as opposed to land stewardship. right now, we own very little land that we bought. most of the land’s owned by the province or the city, so there’s a fairly lengthy process. once we pick a developer, we then have to go and deal... with the crown to make sure that that land transfer occurs and that can become quite lengthy and arduous. and whether it’s city council or the crown, it’s another process that people can second-guess.

owning the land and having the powers of a corporation would be essential. my counterpart in hamburg, germany has all that. he borrowed three and a half billion euros, and he’s probably ten years ahead of us because he’s had that oomph to it. . and he’s supported by the city of hamburg and the state of hamburg. time-wise they’re way ahead of us because of that. we’ve had to sort of muddle along cap and hand. great, thank you. next question, it’s not me, remember it’s somebody else asking. i don’t quite understand the distinction you make between revitalization and redevelopment. isn’t building new residences and offices and retail a big part of toronto’s new waterfront? it is, and that’s a very important point. i’m glad that that person raised it because i really want to reinforce that. real estate is real estate, and it’s redevelopment, but it’s how you do it. it’s ensuring the public realm is built there.

making sure that building broadband is in the process and the planning process. all those things help shape... a quality of life and quality of place, which is quite different from just peddling land and selling it to developers for residential. making sure that the ground floor is not residential, those kinds of things. making sure that people build for the future. again, that’s always a challenge, you got to deal with tomorrow morning because the developer has to sell the stuff, but you also want to think about what happens in 20, 30 and 40 years time. that’s not what they’re going to think about, that’s what we have to think about. so the revitalization is much more about being driven by public policy to ensure that in fact you’re building a quality of life here, that everybody wants to live here, they want to stay here. you don’t get that just by peddling real estate. if you travel the waterfronts around the world... ...you see those that have sold real estate and those that have done the other, which is being mindful of the broader public policies. question: condos versus waterfront views for all. how did you manage that?

a big challenge. when we first started at every public meeting i went to people said “we don’t want a wall of condos” ... because there had been previously a developer that had done some very high-rise ugly stuff that had people concerned. what we’ve done really is, with the planners, tiered stuff back away from the water, so four to six storeys at water’s edge, around 10 storeys at the main street, queens quay, and back against the expressway probably 30 storeys or higher. . so tiering it back and making sure that as you look down those streets, you can see the water as well. it’s a blend of the hierarchy of buildings going back and making sure there’s enough access going down to the water. question: give a few more examples of what the ground floor can be used for instead of private uses schools. george brown has a ground floor lobby, food court and so forth. bookstores. again, there’s the challenge. it all sounds great if you have cafã©s there, but there’s only some many cafã©s you can support.

if you’ve got a kilometre of waterfront, you’re not going to have a kilometre of cafã©s. restaurants, cafã©s, bookstores, retail, gyms. the community space of the condos, their gyms and so forth. it’s not so much what’s there, it’s what’s not there that’s important. you don’t want people with their lawn chairs out there moving their pots into the public realm because that’s what sterilizes the area. it’s really anything but residential as opposed to it has to be this. it’s really anything but private residential. question: what types of engagement activities reached the largest audience? we went through community papers, we tried to expand the reach and it’s been tough because you get a certain percentage of the population who are very engaged in civic issues . it’s tough to reach the immigrant population, and it’s tough to reach young people. so we advertized in some of the immigrant local newspapers and we pushed our social media... extensively, so facebook, twitter, all that sort of stuff. we’ve done a lot of that to try to reach out and make sure that we can bring young people. and doing the same thing that’s being done here tonight, which is broadcasting and having people participate in the public meeting through a social media table.

and that gets more young people engaged. it is a challenge though. it’s the older folks, like me, that are interested in this sort of thing, that come out to the public meetings, so it’s a challenge to get everybody else. question: was the zoning in place already or did you allow exceptions? we did the precinct plan with the community and with the planning department side by side and then that goes into city hall for a zoning by-law so the zoning is created as a result of the precinct planning. before there was industrial use. we have the omb. sometimes it can be a bit of a crap shoot at the omb. when it’s our land we’re putting out to marketplace, they aren’t even allowed to go and talk to the city about a permission. we will let them go and ask for minor variations if the design calls for it, but they can’t go with a 10 storey building and say “i want 30 storeys”. now the challenge is, of the 15 per cent of private land that’s there, as private owners they can go to the omb. so the city passes a by-law that says certain things, and we’ve been arguing for three years with some developers about what they want to do that’s outside the zoning by-law.

at the end of the day, we’re pragmatic. city hall doesn’t have billions of dollars to spend on legal costs, so there can in some cases be the courthouse step settlement. zoning calls for 10, you want 20, we’ll settle on 15. that does happen, that’s the realism. there’s not much you can do about it. i think that the legal costs for one of our arguments is up over two million dollars to fight certain things that they want to do. so it’s a challenge. we don’t allow the exceptions where we can control it, but where it’s private sector we have to negotiate because of the threat of the omb. question: how important is the public realm to the success of the revitalization? absolutely essential. when you go to great cities, it’s the public realm that makes you feel that it’s a great city. when you walk around paris, the buildings don’t impress you, it’s the public realm that you enjoy, the pedestrian aspect. all great cities i think are really defined by their public realm, not by their buildings i mean, look at dubai. it’s a great collection of real estate projects, but i would not call it a great city.

there’s very little public realm. i think that it’s really critical to create that quality of place. it’s the quality of the public realm that people enjoy on the streets. absolutely essential. question: are there any plans to incorporate urban farming? we’ve talked about it, we’ve thought about it, but no, not a lot. there are garden plot areas in the city, but i think that when you look at the smart growth strategy of the province, and the greenbelt strategy around toronto, we have to intensify. the waterfronts are the top of the list. we’re trying to find ways to intensify in a smart fashion. we can’t keep building bungalows to niagara falls, that’s not going to work. so it’s how do we intensify in the waterfront and get a great quality of life but also get higher densities and higher intensity because that’s also sustainable. question from the audience: what about green roofs? possibly. we are calling for 40 or 50 per cent of the roof top area to be green. so there is some room for intensive green roofs

which is 18 inches, which allows for it in some cases. but we’re not mandating it other than the green roof strategy. question: what will be the legacy of the redevelopment of toronto’s waterfront? the vision is that it will create a city that others aspire to live and work and stay there. i think that’s the legacy, to make sure that we’re competitive. i travel around the world, i was in melbourne, adelaide in australia a month ago and you see what melbourne and singapore and others are doing. everyone’s doing this, so we cannot not do it. standing still, we’re falling behind. if we want our cities to thrive and we want to preserve the quality of life that we have, we’ve got to build great quality of place. question: what are the plans for the gardiner? we did a study and the misconception is that the gardiner’s an expressway. actually, the piece that we were looking at is called a link between two expressways.

the gardiner comes in from the west, the don valley comes in from the north and most of the traffic comes into the city and back out. only about 20 per cent of the traffic uses that link. that’s why we decided that we should look at that link to see what we could do. our recommendation was to take it down, but that’s a bigger question than the waterfront question. it went to city council and they decided that they wanted to do a hybrid, which was move it and rebuild it and make it more attractive, free up some waterfront land. we didn’t think that was necessary, but i don’t live in the world of politics, i wasn’t elected. and so the politicians decided that they wanted the hybrid. thank you very much. that ends this part of our q&a. thank you very much mr. campbell for a great answering of the questions and a fantastic presentation.