A recipe for managing heritage properties

For a perfect example of why municipal politics matter — even when a lot of the issues debated at Toronto city hall can seem small — consider an item on the agenda for Wednesday’s meeting of city council.

It’s about a soy sauce factory. Seriously. Stick with me on this.

There’s an old two-storey redbrick soy sauce factory on the southeast corner of Queen Street East and Leslie Street in Leslieville. It was built in the 1920s with additions in later decades. Somewhere along the line, it became the longtime home to Lee Food Products Limited, makers of China Lily soy sauce.

The sauce spigots went dry when the company decamped to Scarborough in 2020. But Toronto’s heritage planning division wants to keep the memories alive, recommending that Mayor John Tory and council designate the property as a heritage site.

It’s a move that would require any developer who wants to build on the corner to work with the city to maintain elements deemed to have heritage value.

But long before the heritage report was published, Core Development Group had already signalled plans to build an eight-storey, 132unit rental apartment building at the site, submitting an application in March. Their initial designs would demolish the factory. City planning staff say there’s even some potential to negotiate affordable housing into the proposal.

While the heritage designation, if adopted by council, wouldn’t automatically scuttle all of Core’s plans — or the potential for affordable housing — it could certainly change them, adding significant costs related to maintaining and restoring parts of the old factory.

For some housing advocates, this soy sauce factory has become a flashpoint for built-up frustration with the city’s heritage department.

Last week, Mark Richardson, the technical lead at housing advocacy group HousingNowTO, joined a meeting of the Toronto Preservation Board — the committee that reviews heritage reports before they go to city council — to let some of that frustration fly. Fired up, he told board members to “give your heads a shake and go look at some rental listings to see if you could afford to live in the neighbourhood you live in today if you were 25 years old.”

“What are our city’s priorities?” he asked. “Where are our limited number of city planners being directed to spend their valuable time? Why do we have dozens of heritage dry cleaners on our main streets? Why are we even talking about designating a two-storey factory building?”

His “dozens of heritage dry cleaners” comment needs some explanation.

Starting in 2015, city hall started approving what they call “batch listings” of heritage properties. Long lists of addresses get submitted and approved for heritage consideration, usually with minimal justification. While these addresses aren’t yet formally designated as heritage properties, listing them means they are now subject to city hall review before redevelopment can take place.

To date, this approach has been used to list a whopping1,918 properties, according to my count. Most of the batch listings have come in areas near future transit stations, like Yonge and Eglinton, the east side of downtown, and across Danforth Avenue.

Some of these properties could indeed be called historic. Others, though, seem to stretch the definition. There are relatively unremarkable storefronts with tenants like cellphone stores, cannabis dispensaries and, yes, dry cleaners.

In Richardson’s view, many of these heritage listings — and the move to designate the soy sauce factory — are just more barriers to building more housing in a city that badly needs more housing.

And so when Tory and council consider the matter of the soy sauce factory at council this week, they won’t just be considering the fate of a single old building. Their decision could be seen as a statement of priorities. What matters more: removing as many barriers as possible to get more housing built in this city, or protections for the physical legacy of a soy sauce factory?

As someone who really appreciates old buildings and would also like to see way more housing built, I hate that it’s come to this. Heritage and housing don’t have to be at odds. This is a forced dichotomy brought about by bad policies.

A heritage approach that wasn’t a barrier to new housing could offer things like reduced development charges to developers who take on projects involving heritage preservation. It could reward and incentivize projects that integrate heritage-protected elements into new buildings, instead of sticking them with extra costs and red tape.

A good basic first step, proposed by Richardson and supported by some members of the preservation board: any report recommending heritage listing or designation should provide an estimated accounting of costs related to maintaining the property. If Toronto wants to be a city that values heritage, it should at least be a city that understands the cost of keeping it.