Buildings Inventory of Harbord Village and City Planning Study

It is a truism to say that the City of Toronto will be under enormous pressure to make room for a large increase in population during the next few decades.

Where will they all go? Intensification is going to affect all the downtown core for the foreseeable future. We will see more applications at the Committee of Adjustment asking for variances that will almost always involve ‘higher, bigger and more' and applications for bylaw revisions will be the same but only on a grander scale.

When such an application is made, the reaction of the directly affected neighbours and indeed HVRA is the same: what is the impact here? Is this where intensification belongs... or elsewhere?

The Board of HVRA began to consider intensification with the following questions:

Should we consider intensification in back lanes? on the periphery of the catchment area? on the main streets? in the interior ? in short ---- where?

When there seemed no ready answer, the Board then considered the question: is it possible to study Harbord Village in a systematic way so as to discover if there were a pattern or patterns that would help us to decide where intensification could occur in our neighbourhood with minimum impact on the stability and value of our community and conversely, where it would do the most damage.

Further, we decided to engage City Planning to see if they were interested in declaring HVRA an area of interest and come with ideas about how to apportion the impact of future projects

With all this as background, we can report that as of January 2009:

1. There is an ongoing study by City Planning of our area with a view to a possible Part 2 plan.

2. During 2005and 2006, HVRA  engaged several volunteers to walk the neighbourhood armed with pencils and a questionaire designed by Curt Oliver taking down the information as raw data.  This part was completed by the end of 2006 
   We then engaged the services of Diane Silver, a Planner in her own right and she undertook to take the raw data, check it against some of her own investigations, enter it on Excel spreadsheets and summarize the data

3. Diane finished her work in the late spring of 2007 and the results are referenced at the bottom of this page  Essentially this is an inventory of every house in HVRA with descriptions of the lot and use of the rear yards. It is organized and classiffied  block by block according to several criteria: height, single family, flats, rooming house, row/semi/detached, width of lot, heritage value, modifications to facade, use of back yards and several others.

This data will be presented to the Planning Department for their use in their deliberations and  will be useful in developing a Part II Plan. It will certainly will help us create informed decisions in determining patterns, say, for intensification inside HVRA and it is now posted here for whatever use you may wish to find for it  

Gus Sinclair

January 2010