This audio and slide presentation was recorded at the May 8, 2024 public meeting held by the Strathcona Shadow Dwellers, about Vrancor’s massive new two-tower proposal for the parking lot on Queen Street North, between Market and Napier Streets. The developer is already seeking an expedited decision from the Ontario Land Tribunal to get significant amendments to the Urban Hamilton Official Plan and zoning by-law, even though the developer’s new proposal was not introduced until December 2023. Narrated by Wayne McPhail, this 60-minute slide show introduces the players, details about the newest proposal, the history of the development and describes the broken appeal process. The OLT hearing process begins May 17, 2024.
The City of Hamilton and many other municipalities use March 21 as the date to calculate any shadowing that a new building might present to the surrounding neighbourhood.
This date for calculating shadowing may have worked well in the past, when a shadow may have been considered a mere nuisance or impact the vegetation growth. For the period from March 21 to Sept. 21, the shadow would be smaller and from Sept. 22 to March 20 the shadow would be longer.
The trend toward renewable energy sources especially energy harvesting from solar array systems, will become more prevalent in the future, and shadowing from new builds may impact the total time per year the adjoining neighbourhood may receive sunlight.
Solar windows are now a reality, where rather than installing solar panels on the roof a homeowner can install solar windows instead. This would greatly reduce installation costs and promote a more efficient solar renewable solution.
This renewable energy trend is also in conjunction with municipalities allowing higher residential structures to help solve the housing shortage. Therefore, how does one balance the tall buildings versus received sunlight dilemma?
An example of this dilemma is a new development proposal at 1494 Upper Wellington St., at the southwest corner of the intersection of Stone Church Road East and Upper Wellington Street.
This proposal involves a combination of five-, 12- and 20-storey structures. Using the March 21 date, the developer has presented that the various tall structures have no real impact on shadows cast onto existing residential housing and a retirement community situated along Stone Church Road East and other side streets.
However, a calculation of shadowing throughout the year and especially during the beginning of November to the end of February, or about a third of the year, shows that many of the current buildings situated along Stone Church Road will be highly impacted by the shadows from the proposed development.
This will affect the ability of the owners of these buildings to achieve reasonable renewable energy solutions in the future.
Once tall structures are approved, especially in predominately residential neighbourhoods, their impact due to shadowing on potential renewable solar energy sources will last for well over 80 to 100 years or more.
The City of Hamilton should take a new look at the impact of shadowing, not for one specific date, but rather how the shadows affect the total available amount of sunlight received by the adjoining neighbourhood over a 12-month period.
First, the big news. On May 6, Vrancor put forward a new plan for 354 King Street West. Here it is:
The main differences are:
Two new one-storey multiple dwellings behind the homes on Ray at Market. The attached homes seem to have front doors that open onto a driveway and parking spots. Hard to imagine it will be a great place to live or raise a family.
The 25-storey tower drops to 13-storeys on the Market St. side. Formerly the 13-storey height was on King. This is supposed to ease the transition to the townhouses on Market, but as you can see from my graphic below, even the 13-storey tower doesn’t fit under a 45-degree line from the townhouses, which it should.
There is a curvy set of stairs that lead up to the King St. entrance to the residence (see below)
They’ve agreed that 5% of the units should be three bedroom. This is a good start towards some family housing.
Some indication that they’ll change the surface materials to match the neighbourhood look and feel. Past behaviour suggests this may not happen.
Oddly, the townhouses have grown from eight multiple units to 14 units.
We are pleased to see some of these changes. However, we wish that over the last couple of years Vrancor had made changes that reflected our obvious concerns (now echoed by expert witnesses, as you’ll see) rather than spending that time trying to gaslight us about how the proposed development fit well into the neighbourhood. It should not have taken an upcoming OLT hearing to make Vrancor pay attention to shortcomings anyone could see.
The main tower is still 25 storeys. You will recall that Vrancor currently only has permission to build six storeys, a height they led the community to believe a few years back, that would have been profitable for them. We still have major concerns about density, shadows, traffic and parking.
Now, you probably have some questions about how this came about so late in the game.
So do we! Here’s some background.
You may recall that Vrancor is taking the proposed 25-storey tower part of the 354 King Street West development to the Ontario Land Tribunal (OLT). It argued that the city had taken too long to decide about the development. So, it leapfrogged over the municipal process of going to the Planning Committee and then Council for approval.
You may also recall that The Strathcona Shadow Dwellers applied for and were granted Participant status at the hearing that’s coming up during the week of June 20. Of course the two Parties at the hearing are Vrancor and the city’s planning department, both via lawyers.
As Participants we were permitted to make a written submission that would be used in the OLT hearing. We did that, addressing the proposal Vrancor had put forward at that time, and is still on the GSP Group website, here:
Our submission also addressed the specific questions of urban design and urban planning that will be the focus of the OLT litigation in June.
We also received copies of the submissions of expert witnesses for the city and Vrancor.
The documents were both heartening and astounding.
Both expert witnesses for the city, to use the legal term, “trashed” the Vrancor proposal. Here are a few quotes:
“The proposed building does not incorporate satisfactory stepbacks to provide the appropriate transition to these lands to the west ... This does not minimize the impact of overlook of the tower portion of the building on the existing neighbourhood. Additionally, as outlined in the Urban Design Guidelines of the Strathcona Secondary Plan, the built form envisioned for the subject property is a midrise built form transitioning down to the adjacent low rise form.”
“In my opinion, the proposed development does not meet the policies of the Strathcona Secondary Plan.”
And, in regard to the development rising above a 45-degree line drawn from the back of adjacent properties:
“It is my opinion that the Subject Proposal, which includes entire floors outside of the angular plane, does not represent a reasonable encroachment into, but rather a complete disregard for, the angular plane provisions of the Corridor Planning Principles and Design Guidelines.”
In short, the city’s expert witnesses point out exactly the shortcomings (and more) that we, as residents have been pointing out to the developer and city for years. Shortcomings that Vrancor has been gaslighting us about.
Very satisfying reading 🙂
But, surprisingly, one of the expert witnesses for Vrancor, William Neal, an architect with MccallumSather, also had concerns about the proposed design. He wrote in his expert submission:
“In response to the Issues List received from the City of Hamilton, I recommended that several revisions to the proposed design that was submitted to the City be made. These revisions have been largely focused on reducing the building massing depth on the northern side to provide additional gradation to the adjacent low rise residential areas, defining the podium massing to create an appropriately scaled and robust urban edge condition along King Street West, increasing the building setback from King Street West to improve public open space, landscaping opportunities and site permeability, particularly at the south east portion of the building, and revising the building materiality to sensitively respond to the surrounding historic urban and neighbourhood fabric.”
In other words, Neal, Vrancor’s witness, wasn’t going to support the Vrancor proposal for a lot of the reasons we don’t. As a result, according to Neal’s statement to the OLT:
“On April 6, 2022 and April 14, 2022, Planning and Urban Design Experts met virtually to identify and agree to facts related to the development proposed on the Site. The outcome of these meetings led… to a revised design.”
So, prior to the OLT hearing, both Parties got together and Vrancor has revised its plan to better address the concerns the city’s experts raised. The revised design is the one featured above. We were not informed of the April meetings and only saw the new proposed plan last Friday afternoon (May 6 2022). Had we not pressed for the Party submissions (which they are not required to provide us) we would not have learned of the new proposal in Strathcona until the first day of the hearing in June.
So, that’s where we are now, with a somewhat new proposal from Vrancor. We have not yet decided whether to petition the OLT to revise our submission or not, since it was based on the old proposal. We’ll keep you posted.
Strathcona Shadow Dwellers 