(Download the PDF version of this press release here)

Community groups and nonprofit housing providers are pleased to announce the creation of a historic land trust that will invest $17 million in housing and community facilities.

Build a Better Bloor Dufferin (BBBD), a community group advocating for community benefits from the large development at Bloor and Dufferin, secured these benefits from Capital Developments. The arrangements will commit funds through local nonprofit housing providers Habitat for Humanity and St Clare’s Multifaith Housing Society.

The lengthy negotiations emerged from the community group’s continued efforts to ensure that the billion dollar development contributed significant amenities to the neighbourhood and moved past the current status quo in Toronto where massive developments still provide only modest investments in the community. A land trust will be launched with a $9 million contribution and $8 million interest-free loan from Capital Developments and Metropia, the companies redeveloping the Bloor- Dufferin site. Half of the land trust funds will be dedicated to affordable housing development in Ward 9, with priority to projects that directly benefit the Bloor-Dufferin community. Two million dollars of the funding is reserved for acquiring community space for nonprofit services and arts organizations in the neighbourhood.

The investment in the land trust comes in addition to the $10 million contribution toward an eight-storey building across from the site that the City of Toronto negotiated separately.

“This was intense multimillion dollar haggling,” said BBBD co-chair Maggie Hutcheson, “which we don’t do every day. But we were confident that a development this big could contribute more and we had to stick to our guns to make that happen. The status quo in Toronto is for developers to earn hundreds of millions out of density the City grants, with far too little of that value going to public benefit.”

“Other cities get far more, so we felt we had to dig in and get more for the community too,” said co-chair Emily Paradis. “Let’s hope that this becomes a pattern, and that the next negotiation and the next housing plan see more of the benefits created by the housing boom going to ease the pressures the housing boom is also creating.” BBBD is a community-based group of residents, local business owners, artists, service organizations, and members of the local school communities dedicated to the sustainable development of the Bloor-Dufferin neighbourhood as it changes with the proposed new development at the southwest corner of Bloor and Dufferin.

Contact: Maggie Hutcheson, maggie.e.hutcheson@gmail.com, 416-985-2424
Emily Paradis, e.paradis@utoronto.ca, 416-802-4025