Toronto is about to be a two-boom city (condos and office towers)
Soon all those cranes hovering over downtown won’t just be for the multitude of new condos—demand for downtown office space is up and rumours abound that there’s more construction ahead, says the Financial Post. Last week, Brookfield Properties announced it will add a colossal 43-storey second tower to the Bay-Adelaide Centre, sparking talk that the company will begin a new round of aggressive building—which could, in turn, spur a full-fledged office building boom in the core. “You can feel the wave building by the day…I think in the next 60 days we are going to have announcements that will probably surprise a lot of people,” one industry research director told the paper. The amount of proposed construction is already close to Toronto’s last massive office expansion in 2006; adding up all the new builds so far, the city should see 4.1 million square feet of new office space, just slightly lower than the 4.4 million square feet built in the last wave. [Financial Post]
Excellent news. We’ve handed over far too many prime downtown addresses to non-descript, forgettable condos. I’m all for people living in the core, but we are also Canada’s business capital, remember? However, 43 storeys hardly qualifies as “colossal”. There have got to be more than 20 buildings under construction or soon to be under construction that are taller than that, the first Bay-Adelaide Centre tower is already dwarfed by most of the older financial district towers, but hey, it’s better than nothing.