London's Obsession with Tall Buildings

I've lived in Toronto for 10 years. I have no problem with Tall buildings per se. In dense areas, height is necessary to pay for the land it sits on. London however, does not have such a problem.

One of the biggest chicken-and-egg questions in Economics is whether Tall buildings cause high land values or if high land values cause tall buildings. As with all things economic, the human nature of developer greed is left out of the equation all together. So too is the ineptitude of local politicians and their aspirations of greatness.

London has seen its share of tall buildings in the downtown core. Unfortunately, London City Council seems to have failed to learn the lessons of the negative effects of too much development on any given site. Take for instance what should have been learned from the building of One London Place, a 42-storey commercial building that sucked all pressure for redevelopment out of the downtown core by adding a vast amount of Gross Floor Area.

One London Place was built in the late 1980's, just prior to the marvelous recession that hit in 1987 and lasted until about 1991. As a result, there are more surface parking lots and empty malls, run-down apartments and vacant buildings than one could possibly attempt to shake a stick at! Nothing sucks life off a street like a surface parking lot.

Turn the page to today, 15 to 20 years later, in the midst of a deep recession and we see the beginnings of another upswing. In tough times, developers buy land knowing that prices will only begin to rise back to pre-recession levels and climb steadily after that. One new condominium tower has been built at the corner of Ridout and King Street and continues to have units for sale. That building is 27-storeys and sits by itself, a sort of sore thumb saying 'look at me', refusing to be a team player in the pattern of urban development in downtown London.

Today's London Free Press has on its front page (never a sign of rational development review) a picture of a new condominium to be built on Dundas Street East, in an area known as the East Village, on the site of the old Embassy Hotel. Like so many potential heritage buildings in London, The Embassy was razed by fire a few months ago. It now sits as, you guessed it, a vacant lot. Vacant lots offer developers a fantastic revenue opportunity in themselves, requiring nothing more than a shovel to begin construction.

On the Embassy site is proposed an entirely suitable and desirable development, an 8-storey, loft-style building built up to the street line, most likely with retail opportunities on the ground floor, apartments above (since there's still a great deal of commercial space available closer to the core.) This site should be the model for redevelopment in London. By building a shorter building new housing will be offered without overwhelming the surrounding neighbourhood. This building will have 150-units.

Unfortunately, the other part of the story is not so rosey. On the south side of Dundas Street in a block bounded by King Street to the south, Lyle Street to the west and Hewitt Street to the East is proposed a podium and tower style building that could have just as well been built in Liberty Village in Toronto by its developer Medallion Development. In fact, I think that's precisely what they've done. In a City starving for downtown renewal, this building will feature two towers, one 21-storeys tall and the other 24-storeys tall. It will contain 600 units.

I have a major beef with this development. Unfortunately, due to the swooning, non-critical nature of the article in the London Free Press, one really doesn't get an understanding of where this development is in the approval process though an indication that foundations will be built as early as this fall gives me a shudder to think it's already been approved. A note says "Also working on two businesses that face Dundas Street" - in the midst of the development's site that will actually front onto King Street to the south. So two huge towers will sit on the south side of the street casting significant shadow on Dundas Street, particularly in the shoulder seasons of Spring and Fall, when sunlight is most desired. The shadow will presumably fall directly on the nice, 8-storey building facing Dundas, one of London's prime downtown streets.

It's difficult to tell too from the pictures included with the article, an artists rendering that appears to show one solid frontage onto a two-way street. Unfortunately, King Street is a one-way thoroughfare that lacks the kind of pedestrian activity shown in the sales-picture. The map and the pictures don't really make any sense and the article fails to take one glancing look at the appropriateness of the urban planning considerations. Instead of asking whether its a fitting way to add density, it seems to fawn like people in a small town would over the new mall with its first escalator!

With 750 new units of housing one has to wonder where or when the next development will occur. Will these new buildings sit amongst a still mostly two-storey neighbourhood for the next 30 years? Surely, with other buildings still having vacant units, this must start to create questions about the pattern of development in the downtown core. Another peaky building to stand alone - with its twin tower, if its built at the same time, though one suspects it will be a phased development and that a second tower may be as fictitious as the second building planned at One London Place.

There seems to be no connection between the fact that so many parts of London remain underdeveloped, vacant and/or neglected. I'm convinced that these kinds of buildings will continue to create a City of peaks and valleys, unrelated to each other with no sense of cohesion. London City Council seems to have refused to ask why these buildings need to be so tall when they are being built on vacant lands, with very low land values in a City that is suffering to identify solid economic development opportunities for the future.

Instead of allowing too much density on singular sites, the City should pursue a more even redevelopment pattern that creates a gradual increase in building heights, forcing property values in the core to rise and putting pressure on other landowners to make changes, redevelop or sell their properties. In addition, this would be good for London homeowners whose homes are generally stagnant in value, rising only as fast as the rate of inflation. Density is good but not on singular sites that create their own problems. It also creates a less than pleasing pattern of urban design, with gaps of unowned, underdeveloped properties.

Clearly some developers understand this. Terrasan, the developer of the site on the North side seems to get it. But given that the Medallion property is approved for such ridiculous heights (what's wrong with 8 and 12 or 12 and 16-storeys?) it's clear that London City Council and its Urban Planners don't get it. And it seems that some developers in London are only too happy to take advantage of this ineptitude and get away with as much filthy lucre as they can.

When will London stop trying to be Toronto? When will they force new developments to be team players and form part of a consistent, denser urban core? These are questions Londoners need to ask instead of swooning. London clearly needs a new City Plan that calls on development to be part of an urban fabric, not stand-alone eye-sores borrowed from a much denser downtown Toronto.