After completing her undergrad and working for Park Services in Massachusetts, Bronwyn came to Toronto for her Planning master’s degree and fell in love with the city. Afterwards, she worked for the National Park Service northeast regional office, but returned to Toronto to join the pre-amalgamation City of Toronto planning department. During her 7 years with the City, Bronwyn became interested in larger scale development. After a brief stint with Cineplex Odeon, her captivation with the downtown core was cemented. She then joined Wittington Properties as a Director of Planning where she worked on projects that focused on creating value through master planning and development approvals, including infrastructure. After 18 years, Bronwyn moved into consulting and then into her most current role as VP and Chief Development Officer at the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC). Bronwyn is a longtime member of ULI.

Can you tell me a bit about the scope of your role with TCHC?
I’ve been in this role for a couple of months now and my title is VP and Chief Development Officer. I’m heading up a group of about 20 staff members who are professionals and project managers. TCHC is a large company; we own and operate 58,000 units of housing, and have a big development program now. One of the things that my predecessors recognized was that we needed to not only be able to maintain our properties but to also establish a Revitalization program. Our first large-scale project is Regent Park, where we’ve partnered with the private sector. The whole concept is about working with low-density post-war properties that are isolated from the city grid in almost every way, and need a lot of capital to set them up for the next 40 or 50 years. We want to re-integrate these neighbourhoods back into the city, intensify them where appropriate, and to have the new development pay for the cost of new affordable housing rather than Toronto’s taxpayers. I’m lucky in that I have amazing staff; I’m very impressed with them. The Revitalization projects in our portfolio will make a better contribution to this city in many ways. Overall, we’re going to see mixed-use communities, with well-planned retail, and that includes all of the necessary infrastructure.

What are some of the biggest project challenges TCHC faces?
Development is difficult and it takes a long time. You need to know the direction of a project, but you have to be flexible in order to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. It’s important to be aware of this given that there are so many complexities at the scale we’re working. There’s also a challenge in every project to develop a consensus. This simple idea of a consensus calls for a lot of leadership for these complicated developments to be successful. The hardest days of development are the earliest ones. You’re always starting from a position of building trust and confidence in the direction of the project and getting people excited about a future.

Of course there’s also the sheer size of the organization and all of its stakeholders which is a challenge in its own right. Did you know we house 6% of Toronto’s population? We’re a huge landlord. Our first priority is our tenants; they’re great tenants, naturally though, when we first introduce the concept of revitalization, there is uncertainty, skepticism and in some cases resistance. This means we place great emphasis on building trust and providing sufficient information so that people understand and don’t fear the changes ahead. Another major hurdle is that we are living in an era of scarce funds, and we need to find ways to create sufficient value in our portfolio in order to reach all of our objectives. We’re not just talking about beautiful streetscapes, but at the most basic level we need to ensure we are doing really good city building.

What are your thoughts on the planning industry over time? Has it changed or stayed largely the same?
I think there has been a great deal of change in the industry. One of the major trends is that it has become very technical, and the regulatory environment continues to become more layered and compartmentalized. The craft of city building or making great projects has become more and more subject to technocratic regulations. There are a thousand things to look after which distracts from the big picture of what the project really is: its presence on the ground, and what it feels like to live in. When I first worked for the City in the beginning of my career, we brought people together. Now it’s very division-oriented, every staffer has their own technical areas of expertise, and there is no one individual or group at the helm to use their creative judgment to solve the overarching problems.

Unfortunately, there is one thing that is absolutely the same – there’s little or no regard for the time-value of money. It’s all about the process; it doesn’t matter how long it takes or what it costs. A further difficulty is that the planning regulations in Toronto and Ontario are permissive. You essentially start from the idea that nothing is allowed. Developers have to go through the processes for rezoning through the committee of adjustment, and grapple with the expanding number of permits with supporting studies, securities and third-party oversights that are required to build virtually any project.

The rezoning process has also been distorted by Section 37 (which permits CityCouncil to authorize increases in permitted height and/or density in return for community benefits). It feels a bit like you’re being ‘held up’ as an applicant – and you are, in time, and in fact. We need to remember that development investments by TCHC or any other developer add to realty assessment and to land value nearby; create prosperity and opportunities; and improve the quality of life for Torontonians. I think the zoning bylaw could be used much more invitationally – to signal where the City wants investment, where it would like to see renewal take place or new businesses get underway –rather than as a barrier. Pre-zoning is a powerful tool that could be exploited by the City.

Environmental awareness and conservation efforts have moved to the forefront of the industry over the past few years. What do you think about this shift and how does it affect your industry?
Environmental awareness is huge for the TCHC. In fact this organization has been a pioneer in adopting alternative energy practices in our buildings and communities. I think the biggest risk is making sure we’re not just experimenting and that it bears out to be an economically-feasible practice. Building systems have become much more sophisticated in that one now needs specialized training for maintenance staff to look after these systems. There’s the simple example of tri-sorters, where we’ve had to train tenants and staff. There is a learning curve associated with sustainable practices.

What does the future of planning in the City of Toronto and the TCHC look like?
I think that everyone acknowledges that the public transportation system has lagged behind growth. The longer it languishes, the higher the cost to the city in terms of the loss of opportunity and economic productivity. Let me give you an example: When I worked on the railway lands at City Hall, there was a debate whether the Gardner should have been taken down then, and it’s still being debated now. Because of the indecision (and cost), the opportunity was lost on the west side of the downtown. Infrastructure is more and more bound up with intensification and we’re losing opportunities to intervene in the urban fabric. What is possible now, will soon become ‘un-doable.’ I’m an advocate of the ‘everybody shake hands, agree on a plan and let’s start doing it’ approach. We need to get some commitment to a more extensive plan, and then just start doing it.

For the TCHC, one of our challenges is from an asset management point of view. We have a lot of great land to work with. Ten years ago, some of our more suburban city-owned lands were considered very ‘down-market’. In a few short years, we’re going to have a subway running alongside to outside of the city’s boundary for the first time in our history. Some of our properties right in the middle of that expanded subway line will be directly linked to the explosive growth taking place in the 905. With subway line expansion slated for completion in the not-too-distant future, what was once yesterday’s byway is going to become tomorrow’s hot location. In hindsight, you look back and see that all the things that create land value were being put in place a long time ago. Part of our mission is to start thinking about our lands in strategic terms. We have to evaluate where the city can get the most out of the land assets we have, and then decide on the smartest way to put it back into our affordable housing portfolio.

ULI has a thriving Young Leaders community eager for advice and direction from successful professionals like you. Drawing from your experiences, what do you think are the keys to a successful career in real estate?
Firstly, I believe that when it comes to young people in real estate, development, planning and all the related professions, we are talking about amazing people here, there’s so much talent. When I draw from my own development experiences, I think one of the most important messages is that development is not an activity for soloists. It’s for people who can work with teams, inspire people, and for people who look for opportunities and find alliances. It’s about place-making and finding the right mix of things for that particular submarket in that time, that will make for a thoughtful and well-positioned project. No matter what you’re building, it has to be better than what was there before it. What I see again and again is that every project I have worked on has helped lift everything around it. Good development does that and that’s the point of it all. These thoughts apply to both the public and private sides of things, if you can create enough confidence amongst those involved, you will be successful, and this is what it’s really all about.

What do you think the role of ULI is in the planning industry and commercial real estate on the whole? What do you get out of your membership?
ULI is a very interesting organization. For me what it represents is a broad cross-section of the industry. There’s a very high level of awareness of good design, a strong interest in excellent urban development and creative solutions. It’s a great place to learn what is being done in Toronto and around the world. ULI provides wonderful networking opportunities to hear experts speak about their experiences. I like hearing people talk about the projects they’ve been working on and about trends in the industry. They talk about issues they’ve encountered and how they’ve dealt with them and these resolutions can often apply to your own work life. The dialogue that ULI facilitates really contributes to a cross-fertilization of new ideas and solutions.

Adrienne Smith
ULI Communications Committee
Oxford Properties Group