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A rendering for the 2280 Dundas St. W. site plan.Handout

One of the great mysteries about Toronto is why so little has been built along the Bloor-Danforth subway line.

The line opened in 1966, with extensions in 1968 and 1980. Toronto has seen immense growth in the decades since. Buildings have shot up along the Yonge line, which opened in 1954 and has also been extended. Hubs such as Yonge and Eglinton and Yonge and Sheppard have thickets of tall buildings.

Not Bloor-Danforth. Except in a few spots – where it meets the Yonge line at Bloor and Yonge, for example, or in the apartment tower community around High Park station – it has almost none of the high-rise or high-density development that mass transit lines should attract.

The Danforth features block after block of low-rise shops. Residential neighbourhoods to the north and south are made up mostly of single-family homes. Come out of the subway at Chester Station and you find yourself facing a parking lot. Modest semi-detached houses stand all around. The occupants can sit on their front porches and watch the thin stream of commuters walk to the poky little station. This is a far cry from what city planners have in mind when they talk about combating urban sprawl with “smart-growth” around transit hubs.

Recently, though, there have been encouraging signs of change along the Bloor-Danforth line. The Mirvish Village development that is going up on the site of the old Honest Ed’s store will bring more density to the intersection of Bathurst and Bloor near the Bathurst subway station. Further west, big new projects are planned for Bloor and Dufferin and Bloor and Dundas. It means that for the first time in many years, the Bloor-Danforth line will be getting the kind of development clusters that the Yonge line has had.

And what does Toronto do? Well, naturally, it tries to scale them back. The Mirvish project is finally underway – and it is going to be great, though even it has been trimmed down from an earlier version – but the other two are facing stiff opposition from local residents and politicians. Too many tall buildings, they say. Too much potential traffic. If the opponents accept the idea that there is to be any new development at all, they want less density and fewer people.

This whittling-down process is typical of Toronto. Developer proposes something big and tall; residents want something small and short. They often saw off at something mediocre.

It’s especially discouraging to see it happening at these two sites. Both would take advantage of grossly underused urban space. Both have major transit connections. They are obvious targets for some urban density.

The project planned for Bloor and Dufferin is on the southwest corner. Two aged schools stand there now. The school board declared them surplus and sold the land to developers. Their preliminary plans show a mixed-use project with buildings ranging from six to 47 storeys. It would include office space, about 2,200 residential units, a community hub in one of the school buildings, a new public park and a new “high street” for shopping and strolling.

It would be a big improvement on what is there now. Bloor and Dufferin is a pretty crummy intersection. Right on that southwest corner stands an asphalted sports area with a tall, wire fence around it. That’s a glaring waste of a prime intersection. Two major transit lines meet at Bloor and Dufferin: the subway and the busy Dufferin bus. If this is not the place for urban density, where is?

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A second rendering of the 2280 Dundas St. W. plan. Several transit services meet at Bloor and Dundas: the GO Train, the Union Pearson Express, the subway and the Dundas streetcarHandout

The same could be asked about Bloor and Dundas a few blocks west. It’s hard to imagine a more natural place for dense development than this. Several transit services meet there: the GO Train, the Union Pearson Express, the subway and the Dundas streetcar.

Yet the intersection is vastly underdeveloped. The only density comes in the form of two old residential towers on the northeast corner. Across the street, just back of Bloor, stands a supermarket with a vast parking lot – another glaring waste of urban space.

The project proposed for the site would make full use of that space. The developers unveiled a reworked version of their concept this week. It shows a series of towers on a broad campus with a strip of parkland at one end. The project would mix office, apartment and retail space. A school that squats on the corner would be rebuilt on the south side of the site. The supermarket and liquor store would stay, moved to new digs. Illustrations of the concept show a glassed-in atrium, a pedestrian walkway and a new transit station.

But, really, it is just a concept. Nothing as bold or as dense is likely to be built there. A great whittling-down is inevitable, and that’s a shame. Opportunities such as this are rare. One of the reasons development has not come on Bloor-Danforth is that, with residential neighbourhoods clustered around it, it is hard to find decent-sized plots to develop.

When they come available, Toronto should seize the moment.

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