Appeal filed against proposed Exchange District development
The Sanford Building and Maw's Garage in Winnipeg's Exchange District are both pictured in April 2025. (Michelle Gerwing/CTV News Winnipeg)
A city committee will hear an appeal to a proposed addition to two Exchange District heritage buildings next week.
According to the property and development committee's agenda, the president of a nearby condo complex has appealed the decision to create a nine-storey rooftop addition above the Sanford Building and Maw's Garage near Bannatyne Avenue and King Street.
In a letter, Alan Tate said the proposed development is out of scale and out of character for the area, and would impact the proposed development of the Exchange District as a National Historic Site.
The letter also claims the development could physically impact neighbouring structures, particularly his own building on Princess Street.
A permit was granted for the project in April by the same committee.
The matter will be heard when the committee meets June 11.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CBC
34 minutes ago
- CBC
Stony Plain Road, 124th Street intersection set to re-open after 6 weeks
Social Sharing The intersection of Stony Plain Road and 124th Street in Edmonton is expected to re-open to traffic and pedestrians next week, as crews wrap up construction on that section of the Valley Line West LRT, the City of Edmonton and Marigold Infrastructure Projects announced Friday. The intersection shut down completely on April 21 to allow crews to accelerate work on the LRT line. "We were going to be in this zone in a heavy way for about a year-and-a-half, and we've condensed that into seven weeks," Jonathan Cox, construction manager with Marigold Infrastructure Projects, the company building the line, said during a media availability Friday. Cox added that the intersection should open a few days earlier than originally scheduled. "It is huge," he said. "It's just because of the change of the rules about how we can access and which lanes we keep open." Brian Latte, the city's director of the Valley Line West, said the progress reflects well on the contractor. "We're really optimistic that they're just going to continue this effective work through the balance of this year until the end of the project," Latte said at the media availability. The Valley Line West LRT is now about 40 per cent complete, Cox said. It is expected to open in 2028. Businesses frustrated For six weeks, businesses on the corner of Stony Plain and 124th Street could only be accessed by the sidewalk. Some businesses nearby the closed-off area also felt the impact, including the Vetrina Cafe, which opened just south of Stony Plain Road last fall. "It was good. It was many customers," owner Fikra Moese told CBC News Friday. "Now it's very low … because of construction." Gallery and shop owners have noticed the impact, including the owner of the Lando Gallery, Brent Luebke, who says the signage is insufficient for pedestrians and motorists. "When people do come to the area, they just don't know where to go," Luebke told CBC News Friday. From his gallery, he said he has seen a lot of vehicles doing U-turns when they meet the fenced-off area to the north, and pedestrians are equally as lost. Luebke said he wants the city to put up signs farther down the street to give people more advanced notice. More construction Other intersections along the Valley Line West route are still under construction, including the 156th Street interchange and 159th Street/Meadowlark at 89th Avenue, which are set to remain closed until mid-July, the city said. The subsequent phase of work will start next week, moving up the road to 139th Street and Stony Plain Road in a previously unplanned closure for nine weeks. Starting June 10, the intersection at 142nd Street and Stony Plain Road will also be partially closed for nine weeks, the city said. The decision to simultaneously close both intersections will reduce long-term disruption to the neighbourhood, businesses and commuters, the city said in a news release Friday. 'The new normal' Latte, of the City of Edmonton, said municipal officials are discussing a similar approach on other projects that would see roads and intersections completely closed to speed up work. "If there's something that we can do at a location that's similar, that has the same results, absolutely it's something we would consider," Latte said. Cox acknowledged that there may have been some skeptics because of previous city projects that were delayed. The Valley Line Southeast LRT, for example, was nearly three years behind schedule when it opened in November 2023. The Walterdale Bridge replacement was two years behind when it opened in September 2017. But Cox described the accelerated approach as "the new normal." "We can deliver in these time frames," he said.
CBC
an hour ago
- CBC
U-pick flower farms blossoming in Chatham-Kent
U-pick flowers are a growing trend in southwestern Ontario as farmers open up their operations to tourists looking for novel experiences and stunning photo opportunities. Farms in Chatham-Kent offer visitors the opportunity to stroll among rows of peonies, sunflowers and tulips, taking photographs and cutting flowers to purchase. "We just thought, 'We don't see the joy that the peonies bring when we sell it wholesale,'" said Valérie Chort, one of the owners of Fleur de Roy near Mitchell's Bay, Ont. Fleur de Roy grows 17 varieties of peonies over 10 acres, making for about 150,000 stems. But until now, it had been shipping them off to market in Toronto. Now, after four years of commercial operations, the owners have partnered with local vendors and florists to display art and offer workshops in an effort to create an annual peony bloom festival, Chort said. The Puddleford Tree Farm in Kent Bridge, meanwhile, will be awash in sunflowers in about five weeks' time, according to co-owner Matthew Whitney. The farm grows about 20,000 of the flowers each year on about two acres of land and raises money for the Alzheimer's Society by charging visitors per car and per cut flower. "We decided to do this because people love to go to see sunflowers," Whitney said. "They're a great thing to take photos of. And we wanted to give people an opportunity to do that and not interfere with the commercial growers who don't want people walking through their fields. … People can come out and have a nice day and take some nice photos and just enjoy the sunshine." The sunflowers at Puddleford are only around two inches high right now, said co-owner Gail Whitney. But tulip season is already at Hat Trick Farms in Blenheim, Ont., and they also offered people a chance to pick their own tulips. The three-year-old operation got into tulip-growing because the three siblings who own it only have a small land-base to work with — so they had to focus on niche crops, said co-owner Lynne Warriner. They started growing winterberries late in the season, then followed up with tulips as a spring crop. "The response from the visitors has been quite rewarding," Warriner said. "They come and visit the field, for taking pictures, the majority of them — but they can also pick their own while they're here." The owners have taken to planting some fields in a multitude of colours, and Warriner said she loves watching the colours change as different varieties bloom at different times. "Usually the orange and pink tulips are the first ones to bloom," she said. "But two to three weeks later, depending on how long our season is, it's more purple and white in colour. So for us … it's different to see how the field changes through the season."
CTV News
an hour ago
- CTV News
Toronto housing among least affordable on this global index. Here's what experts say needs to change
A new global index suggests Toronto is among the world's worst cities when it comes to housing affordability — as experts blame decades of policy missteps, development delays, and overwhelming population demand for the problem. The 2025 Global Cities Index from Oxford Economics finds that as a result of Toronto's expensive real estate market, residents 'spend more of their income on housing than residents of nearly every other city in the world.' While the federal government recently promised to eliminate the GST on first-time home purchases under $1 million, critics argue that restrictive housing policies, costly development charges and sluggish approvals have created a market that's out of reach for most buyers. The average price of a home in the Toronto area did decline four per cent year-over-year in May but still stood at more than $1.1 million, according to the latest data from the Toronto Region Real Estate Board. 'Over the past 20 years Toronto's population has grown by 35 per cent but affordable housing hasn't kept up. The result? Life is getting too expensive for families,' Mayor Olivia Chow said during a press conference on Friday. 'Young people are giving up on the dream of home ownership.' The City of Toronto has a program where it will defer development fees for some projects so long as at least 20 per cent of its units are affordable. However, demand for the program has far exceeded the city's ability to fund it and as a result Chow says that there are projects totalling 300,000 new units from about 70 different developers that are 'shovel ready' and just 'sitting there in the pipeline' waiting for funding from other levels of government. In Toronto alone, development fees can add more than $100,000 to the cost of a new home and in some areas in the GTA development fees can easily double that, says Frank Clayton, Senior Research Fellow at Toronto Metropolitan University. Prime Minister Mark Carney has previously promised to help municipalities reduce those fees by 50 per cent through additional payments that could be distributed by the provinces though he has not provided a timeline for those investments. 'If a municipality takes $200,000 up front, developers got to increase their prices such that $200,000 is reflected ultimately in the price of the house,' Clayton said. 'Builders won't build, unless they can cover their costs.' Toronto housing A real estate sign is displayed on the front lawn of a house in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on Thursday, May 11, 2017. Clayton identifies three key culprits behind Toronto's crisis: high fees, restrictive planning rules, and relentless demand — the latter driven in part by immigration. Last year alone, nearly 300,000 newcomers arrived in the region, fuelling further housing pressure. 'You need sites. You need sites that are zoned, and you need sites that are serviced,' Clayton said. 'The planning system is very unresponsive to changes in demand.' 'We have to act now' New home sales in the GTA hit a seventh consecutive month of record all-time lows in April, owing in part to a significant reduction in housing starts. Dave Wilkes, president and CEO of the Building Industry and Land Development Association (BILD), says time is running out to fix the system. 'We are seeing real market consequences. 80,000 people leave the GTA,' Wilkes said. 'The longer we wait, the longer that it's going to take to balance supply and demand.' Wilkes is calling for urgent action on housing taxes — especially the harmonized sales tax (HST) formula, which hasn't been revised since 1991. 'Making that change on HST today is the most immediate thing we could do,' Wilkes said. 'It would bring costs down by a dramatic 13 per cent for the first million dollars of a purchase.' He also warned that the federal government's plan to remove GST only for homes under $1 million misses the mark in high-cost cities like Toronto, where the average sale price sits well above that. 'Under a million is just not a product type that is available in the GTA,' he emphasized. Row of houses in Toronto Children ride bikes by a row of houses in Toronto on Tuesday July 12, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Cole Burston What is the market is lacking? Jason Mercer, Chief Information Officer for the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board, says affordability has technically improved — but warns that too little new construction could reverse that trend. 'Two years ago, a lot of households simply wouldn't have qualified,' Mercer said. 'Today, I would argue that a lot of those households could qualify, because prices have edged lower and interest rates have come down.' Still, Mercer says demand will eventually rebound, and if the city can't match it with supply, prices will climb again. 'We haven't done a good job keeping up with housing supply to meet that population growth,' he said. 'From a public policy perspective, we want to look at ways that we see sort of a sustained pipeline of new housing coming online.' A turning point with urgency Clayton says the roots of the crisis stretch back to the early-2000s when Ontario shifted its land-use focus towards environmental protection, including the establishment of the Greenbelt. He argues the policy limited where housing could be built, and gave too much power to growth management plans that discouraged the types of homes most people want — townhouses and detached units. 'We have to have a competitive supply of land,' Clayton said. 'Because if there's competition, then prices don't go up very much.' Despite efforts from all levels of government to address the issue — including a recent Ontario bill aimed at speeding up construction — most experts agree that housing affordability won't be meaningfully restored unless there's a broad and urgent shift in policy, from zoning and fees to taxes and timelines. 'The time for discussion has concluded. We really need the time for action,' Wilkes said.
