@noel.semple7 Good news example of a defunct condo project being repurposed as (partially) affordable rental. The kind of public/private cooperation we need!
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Transcript:
They say that when one door closes, another one opens, but sometimes it takes government and private sector working together to push that door open.
So the GTA is going through a condo crash right now. Lots of planned condo projects are being cancelled cause the demand is just not there. And obviously that’s bad for a housing supply and also bad for all the folks who could be working building those towers.
But the good news is that some of these condo projects are being converted to purpose-built rental projects, some of which are actually quite affordable.
The Toronto Star reported this week on 511 Kingston Road in Scarborough, which was planned for a luxury condo project that got cancelled due to lack of demand.
And it was a three storey hole in the ground for quite a while. But recently this developer Marcus Tzaferis has found a way to relaunch the project as a rental apartment building in which [30%] of the build units at least will be affordable. City Hall is chipping in with $7.8 million in capital funding as well as a property tax exemption and the local councillor helped coordinate it.
And there’s a non-profit which does affordable supportive housing across the street, which is potentially going to be part of making this happen and get these units going.
But it also required some private sector risk-taking and ingenuity. So the developer has pivoted and this individual Marcus Tzaferis identified in the article as thinking outside of the box, and that’s the kind of entrepreneurship we need: where someone in the private sector identifies a real social need and takes on some risk and meets the need.
Andif they turn a good profit after doing something like that, good for them. But in this case, it was the sort of thing which required cooperation between government and private sector to make something good happen.