Right in Our Backyard, Please!
That's the reverse Nimbyism that the long-suffering residents of Lakeview are employing to try to prevent another huge power plant from descending in their midst.
Having just been removed from the four-plus-decade long shadow of the coal-fired Lakeview Generating Station, ratepayers have no intention of sitting on the sidelines while Ontario Power Generation and Mississauga's Enersource Corporation put together a deal for a new 850-odd megawatt power plant on the same site where Lakeview lay.
Using the philosophy that the best defence is a good offence, the Lakeview Ratepayers' Association has put together a plan — called the Lakeview Legacy Project — which is audacious and appealing.
Jim Tovey, the pony-tailed carpenter/dynamo who helped relaunch the defunct ratepayers' group, says the idea for Lakeview Legacy first came to him one day in August 1994 while he was walking his dog along the decrepit and largely unoccupied industrial area north of the power plant.
The days of Lakeview were numbered even then. The enormous potential for redevelopment was obvious and Tovey wanted the community to be ready when crunch time came, so that it could rebuff the inevitable attempts that would be made to put another power plant in the "logical" place for it: the community which was blackened with its stain (on its cars, on its clothes and everywhere else) for lo these many years.
Tovey realized that the newly-gentrified Lakeview (he's in the business of rehabilitating older homes) must be full of lawyers and planners and other professionals who could be recruited to the cause.
Enter John Danahy and a few more of his ilk. Danahy moved to the neighbourhood in 1984, attracted by the lovely landscape and the ditches ("one of the most sustainable forms" of urban runoff control.)
Danahy also just happens to be the director of the Centre for Landscape Research in the faculty of architecture at the University of Toronto, where he is a professor.
He and his graduate students took on Lakeview as a case study on brownfields redevelopment. Danahy was stunned at the potential of the community, starting with the magnificent opportunity afforded by the nearly 200-ft. setbacks of all those old factories on the south side of Lakeshore Rd. E.
"One of the things that always bothered me about most communities is the fact that, along the main streets, there was never enough room to plant trees that would survive and thrive."
In the new Lakeview, there is room for three rows of large, mature trees to create what is really "a mainstreet park," which just happens to be a distinguishing characteristic of many a great city's promenade.
There's room for a light rapid transit line and cycling pathways you can ride without fear of death.
"Lakeview is the only major residential community in the city without a commercial core," says Danahy.
The neighbourhood also has unlimited potential to become the showcase live/work community, with improvement of public transit being a major determinant. An LRT line is to feed Hurontario St. and a new route will also serve Long Branch.
Extending those services along Lakeshore Rd. would allow people to live without their cars and walk to public transit, the key element in creating truly liveable communities.
The multi-faceted legacy plan embraces the intensification and provincially-mandated Places To Grow density upgrades that are coming to Lakeview and the rest of the City and melds them into a neighbourhood that makes sense – with restored access to the Lake. ("Putting the lake back in Lakeview," as Tovey says.)
Instead of a wall of condos along the north side of Lakeshore, Danahy and his students, using innovative Google map and digital software they have developed, have distributed that density on the Lakeview lands. It's like putting a couple of Port Credits on the lands, mostly medium density housing with the odd high-rise reaching 20 storeys.
The existing north-south transmission line rights-of-way could become greenways, with cycling and pedestrian paths. There could be unrestricted waterfront access across nearly the entire frontage.
The old cooling ponds for Lakeview could be rehabilitated, to create a lovely skating oval in the winter, recalling the days when everyone skated on the credit River and out onto the Lake.
The beauty of the format is its flexibility. The modelling allows a glimpse into a bold future. The students have dropped various developments onto the landscape to show the tremendous potential that a 500-acre blank planning pallet can present.
The distillery district, the stadium where the Chicago Bears play, the Pittsburgh Pirates ballpark, the UTM campus, the Winnipeg "forks" park development, the whole of Exhibition Place and Ontario Place, the Sheridan Park Research Centre (there has been a suggestion to create a similar think-tank campus of leading environmental research firms), a major aquarium — they have all been fitted onto the landscape as examples of its vast potential.
There's even a financial model that has been developed to accompany the plans, calculating the $30-$35 million tax return the City could expect on the development.
"This could be the poster child for the province's smart growth strategy," says Danahy. He points out that this the last site of its size on the GTA waterfront with this kind of outstanding potential to incorporate all the principles of sustainable, compact, liveable development.
"There aren't really many ideas that we can't fit on the site," adds Tovey. "The only thing that doesn't make any sense is a gas plant."
The Lakeview Legacy proposal will be presented to City council Feb. 27.