Direct and quantifiable mutual benefit is the only way systems that involve transactions function properly. Doing something purely because it’s the right thing to do is the commercial equivalent of confusing politics with activism. Lyndon Johnson versus Hubert Humphrey
So I should not have been surprised when developer Peter Menkes started talking to me about transit and city planning. But I was.
“I think the city’s doing a good job of it,” Menkes told me over the phone, as we were talking about his thoughts on how this city’s developing and his family’s role in it. “The waterfront area east of Yonge Street has tremendous potential to be planned properly and be a great community. They have transit going on, co-generation, education uses. A well planned out community like that is great for the city. I think the other waterfront to the west was done on an individual basis, and lessons for that are to come up with a master plan and to go over to the Leslie Street Spit and come up with a good plan. I’d really like to see that.”
Did he just diss Harbourfront? He did. I mean, he should; everyone should. Those condos on Queens Quay ruined the central waterfront for everyone, and will continue to do so for generations to come. It’s a crime against urbanity. I just never expected to hear a developer talk that way.
But he didn’t stop there.
“I’d like to see the city with lots of good public transportation,” he said, “and transportation to the airport, full links and loops around the city making it easy for people to get around that way, people will get used to vertical living because they’ll want to live within the city we’ll see intensification all along the main transit lines, going along Yonge, Bloor Street, Eglinton.”
Big developers like Menkes are traditionally the folks who build those massive underground parking structures. I’m not accustomed to hearing them speak highly of transit, or speaking of it at all, in fact.
“With one of our partners out by the airport, we have a major office complex that we manage,” Menkes said. “We sold it to a pension fund a while ago but we still manage it. We have about million square feet of office there now. We bought a shuttle bus to take people to Kipling, and we’re finding senior executives taking the shuttle.”
They bought a shuttle? They didn’t have to buy a shuttle. The airport’s in Mississauga. Everyone has cars in Mississauga, don’t they?
But they did, because Menkes, one of three second-generation brothers who are now responsible for commercial (Peter), condo (Alan) and single-family (Stephen) development around the GTA, know the city better than most, has seen it from perspectives many have not, and he has come to some of the same conclusions as the Spacing folks, and those people on council like Kristyn Wong-Tam, Glen De Baeremaeker, Gord Perks and even good old David Miller of fond memory. Density is better than sprawl, transit is better than cars, and bikes take a lot less room than cars, which leaves more square footage to turn into actual office and condo space (i.e., money).
They also build green, including recycling their construction waste (95 per cent of it on their Telus tower at 25 York), because it saves them money.
And because they build all sorts of buildings, they have a vested interest — and very vested interest — in creating a certain kind of flow that feeds itself as they build ever upwards.
There was a time, you may recall, when there was no office space being built in the city. There was no demand. Markham, Richmond Hill, Mississauga, sure. But not downtown. But once the province passed its greenbelt legislation, putting a halt to the sort of single-family sprawl development upon which Menkes’ father built the family business (and initial fortune), developers were forced to start thinking about condos. And as we can see, they built them in abundance, and people started living downtown. And what happened? The decade of the condo led directly to 2009’s 51-storey, 1.2-million square foot Bay Adelaide Centre West, the first new office building to open downtown in 17 years.
“Without the condos, we didn’t have any demand for new office,” Menkes says. “We have a huge inventory of office buildings within in Toronto. It’s one of the larger ones in North America; the vacancy rate was quite low.” After Bay Adelaide came Menkes’ Telus House in 2010, and now they’re doing the huge 90 Harbour/1 York. Menkes paid $76 million for the lot, and are building 2 million square feet of office, residential and retail.
“With intensification within the city, we see a lot of condos going up in the city, and we know the gross number of new homes is the same as it’s been over the last 10 years, but the split between condos and single-family has changed,” he says. “I think an adjunct to this is growing, is now starting to create demand for new office, people are living in the city, they don’t want to commute out to the suburbs, I think it’s turned quite nicely to make Toronto a great live-work city, which is what I think everybody wanted, and I think the vision is coming together.”
It’s been 55 years since Murray Menkes built his first house, 46 since they built their first commercial building at 60 and 100 Valleybrook in Don Mills and rented it to IBM, and about 35 years since they put up their first condo at 80 and 100 Antibes Drive. They’ve built 20 million square feet of industrial and commercial space, by Menkes’ estimation, and 15,000-20,000 condo units. But to hear Menkes talk these days — with condos feeding office space, vice versa, and a third generation of Menkes, Alan’s son Jared most prominent among them — they may only now be hitting their stride.
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Bert Archer writes for Toronto Standard. Follow him on Twitter: @bertarcher.
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