The City of Toronto’s Preservation Board recently passed legislation that lists almost a 1,000 properties located on major streets in the centrral regions of the city as historical. As the Globe and Mail’s Alex Bozikovic points out, “this broad-brush move…is the most dramatic change to heritage in the city in a generation. It reflects a belief among preservationists that the old commercial main streets need to be saved at all costs. But the future and the past may collide here on the Danforth. The city’s planning department sees those same buildings as sites for redevelopment. Toronto will add about a million people in the next generation. It needs much more housing and the city’s plan would put much of that housing on sites like this.”
The listing of properties as historically significant will at another level of government that owners have to navigate through in order to get a building permit especially when renovations require changes to the façade or include additions. An historical designation can have an affect on property value as it makes development more difficult, but not impossible, to to demolish an existing structure to build more density. Here is a link to Toronto’s Historical Registry
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