The absurdity of tearing down perfectly fine buildings,

When I’m asked for apartment hunting advice, which happens often enough in Toronto’s inhumane housing market, I often tell people to walk up streets like St. George.

From Bloor to nearly Dupont, St. George features a series of handsome midrise, midcentury apartment buildings, one after another. It’s a great stretch and most are rentals. If the sign out front says they’re renting, give them a call.

These are all great buildings, built well with units that are more spacious than today’s standard. They’re also run by professional management companies, which means, in theory, tenancy will be stable and for as long as one wants — unlike the more volatile-seeming rental market in condos and houses, where individual owners routinely evict tenants for renovations or other dubious reasons.

There are exceptions, of course, as protests such as the Parkdale rent strike in 2017 over above-the-guideline rent increases by landlord MetCap Living Management Inc. demonstrate, but living in two of these kinds of buildings during my Toronto tenure, one for eight years, I found they are truly good places to live when run properly.

Number 145 St. George St., the first in the street’s modernist row, is a 12-storey rental building built in 1959 with 130 units. It has big balconies and lovely green brick details, but there are plans afoot for it that would render my advice bad.

Tenblock, a development company, has proposed replacing this building with a 29storey tower. Under Toronto’s rental-replacement rules, any building redeveloped with more than six rental units must have those units replaced, so they will be part of the new building, along with 211 condo units.

The absurdity of Toronto’s housing market is on full display here, as it makes financial sense for a developer to tear down a perfectly good building housing hundreds of people to build bigger. And this isn’t the only one.

A few blocks away, at 25 St. Mary St., is a sleek V-shaped 24-storey building with a cool zigzag portico over the entrance built in 1965. Tenblock has also proposed replacing it with two towers, of 54 and 59 floors, sharing the same podium. The 259 rental units here would be replaced and, along with new units, bring the total to over 1,100.

Both of these proposals, on their own, look great. New rental housing is good and, at this early stage, the proposals include units of two or even three bedrooms. The designs are by top firms, too, with the St. George building by architects-Alliance and St. Mary’s by gh3, along with a public courtyard by Claude Cormier + Associés, best known in Toronto for designing the new Berczy Park with its dog fountain.

The climate implications of tearing down perfectly good buildings are profound here, as the embodied energy and materials that went into building these two will be wasted, and more energy expended to destroy them. What responsibility do developers have to not just build as green as possible, but avoid unnecessary teardowns?

More significantly, what responsibility do architects and designers have in refusing projects that contribute to the climate emergency unnecessarily? I say significantly, as these fields in general are prone to using utopian language about brighter green futures and more harmonious living. This year’s winner of the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honour, suggests designers do have an obligation here.

Anne Lacaton and JeanPhilippe Vassal, a Paris-based team, won not just for their thoughtful designs, but because they “re-examine sustainability in their reverence for pre-existing structures, conceiving projects by first taking inventory of what already exists.” They reject plans that call for demolition and instead focus on building upon what’s already there and prioritizing the well-being of current inhabitants.

Still, it’s hard to blame the developers, as Toronto’s wild climate, the one that makes all this economically feasible, is a political and planning creation.

While dozens of two-storey storefronts have been deemed heritage-worthy in recent years, making it harder to build on Toronto’s main streets, these two fine mid-century buildings are afforded no protection, despite being great specimens of the era. Of course, many houses surrounding these two buildings have some heritage protection.

Heritage concerns in Toronto have overwhelmingly been interested in preserving Victorian, Edwardian and other beloved styles of single-family homes.

People in the generally expensive neighbourhoods where they’re located don’t have to worry about their lives being disrupted, but these renters do. Even with rental replacement and right of first return, as Tenblock is offering, moving turns lives upside down. The other side of this is the vast amount of singlefamily-home neighbourhoods, heritage or not, where building even the gentlest density is impossible, even a small walkup apartment. This puts tremendous pressure on the places that can add housing to accommodate Toronto’s growing population, and even trickles outside of the city, contributing to arguments to develop the Greenbelt.

We really can’t blame the developer or designers here, then.

Destroying these two good buildings is a self-inflicted Toronto planning and politics tragedy, one that won’t be solved until all neighbourhoods in Toronto take on the barely-a-burden responsibility of accommodating more housing and people.