Vacant lot on Lansdowne Avenue earmarked for affordable housing development: Tory

Mayor Tory announces that a vacant lot on Lansdowne Avenue is being set aside for future affordable housing development.

A vacant lot that was once the site of a TTC garage could soon be home to a new affordable housing development.

The four-acre lot on Lansdowne Avenue north of Bloor Street has sat unoccupied since 1997 but on Tuesday it was announced that the city would make the land available to private and non-profit developers interested in building affordable housing as part of its Open Door Program.

The program provides surplus public land for the development of affordable housing and streamlines the approval process. So far the city has committed 15 sites with a combined land value of $106 million to the program.

“This is a piece of land that has been sitting here without any identified purpose for years,” Mayor John Tory said at the announcement. “It has sat here unused while we had an affordable housing crisis in this city and today we are ending years of inaction by announcing that affordable housing will be built right here.”

The sites that have been committed to the Open Door Program so far could be transformed into 1,750 rental homes and 641 affordable ownership homes, according to city data.

Tory said that the next step will be finding partners that are able to get shovels in the ground.

“We based this program on what the private sector and the non-profit sector told us it was going to take to get them coming forward saying they would build affordable housing and we want them to do it and we want them to do it faster,” he said. “We are showing more than just our good faith by putting up $100 million in land and saying ‘Come and tell us how you can build affordable housing.’”