A bylaw meant to transform Thorncliffe Park is failing

On the ground level of Thorncliffe Park's decades-old apartment buildings could sit shops serving kabobs and pink Kashmiri chai, storefronts that sell clothing or simply space for the community to spend time together.

That's what resident Sabina Ali says she envisioned for the neighbourhood after the city passed a bylaw a decade ago that would allow the re-zoning of some building sites, including those in Thorncliffe, to allow for non-residential uses like businesses. It's called the RAC Zone bylaw, which stands for Residential Apartment Commercial.

But that vision hasn't come to fruition in Thorncliffe Park.

Not a single store, health clinic, gym or cafe has opened as a result of RAC zoning, according to Ali, a long-time community leader in Thorncliffe. A city spokesperson did not respond to a CBC Toronto query about how many businesses in Thorncliffe Park opened as a result of RAC zoning. 

Ali and urban planning experts who spoke to CBC Toronto say residents need more support from the city to actually make use of the 10-year-old bylaw. 

"Not really anything has happened since the bylaws passed," said Ali, founder of the Thorncliffe Park Women's Committee, an organization that focuses on improving community space and creating opportunities in the neighbourhood. 

Ali and other residents had pushed for the RAC Zone bylaw to be ushered in hoping it would give women entrepreneurs in the neighbourhood a chance to have spaces of their own. For years, the group has hosted stalls with women from the community selling goods like food and clothes at fairs at a nearby park. Store-fronts could be a way for these businesses to be more accessible to the community, she said. 

"That would make more sense, if they had the cafe on the ground floor of the building or the convenience store," she said. 

The Thorncliffe Park neighbourhood is known as a landing hub for new immigrants and refugees. Many people in the community run informal businesses from their homes, said Ali.

"What if the start-ups get some space?" she said.

The RAC Zone bylaw, that was adopted by the then-titled Ontario Municipal Board in 2016 (now called the Ontario Land Tribunal), is focused on apartments that are older, more than 100 units in size and allows small-scale commercial and community uses in building sites, according to the bylaw.

Graeme Stewart, principal at ERA Architects, helped work on the bylaw. ERA has been involved in a few projects across the city that have been successful due to RAC zoning, including Gordonridge Place in Scarborough where shops have been put in, he said.

Stewart says high-rise apartments built in the 1960s and 1970s were meant to be affordable for people like immigrants and that's still the case. But a lot of people living there no longer rely on cars like they did decades ago, and space to congregate, along with commercial space, is missing, he explained.

"Especially a place like Thorncliffe, but all over the city, those lawns or parking lots are really the centre of social life," he said. "I feel we're not at the vision yet."