June 4th, 2014

Shawn Star

Town Crier

A midtown community group is accusing the city planning department of “acting like any other developer” for how it suggests rezoning areas along Eglinton Avenue to accommodate midrise developments as part of the streetscape plan connected to the Crosstown LRT.

Patrick Smyth, director of planning issues for the Avenue Road-Eglinton Community Association, says the plan to create neighbourhood transition areas, where homes within 30–39 metres of Eglinton could be demolished to have the required depth for a midrise development, will pave the way for developers to buy and demolish homes without giving adjacent homeowners the right to fight it.

Aside from homeowners not having grounds to fight the demolition of homes next door, the issue is the city not following “rules and regulations around official plan amendments and rezoning,” Smyth argued.

June 3, 2014

Rahul Gupta

Inside Toronto

Yonge-Eglinton residents turned up this week to hear city officials discuss the progress of a study weighing options for a relief subway line.

The project has long been in demand as a way to ease congestion on the Yonge-University-Spadina subway line and would take at least eight to 10 years to build. That’s only after design and planning work is completed and the project receives the necessary environmental approvals from the province. There is also the matter of finding the necessary funding - last estimated at three billion dollars for the relief line’s first phase.

“We’re at the start of the process,” said the city’s transportation services director Tim Laspa who gave a presentation on the relief line study during Monday evening’s information session at North Toronto Collegiate which was organized by local city councillor Josh Matlow.

June 2014

Neil Etienne

Post City

The Toronto Transit Commission’s (TTC) bus garage site at 24 Eglinton Ave. W. is bustling a little with life these days, but it’s still only a shadow of what Ward 22 councillor Josh Matlow envisions there for the future.

The property has been a bit of an eyesore in recent times, although it is now clad with Metrolinx panels, thanks to work by the councillor, to give temporary purpose to the land there. Behind those panels is the current staging grounds for the Eglinton Crosstown light rail transit (LRT) line construction. Matlow says it is a decent use for the site, for the time being.

“It’s finally something better than a vacant, dirty lot. It looks like it has a purpose now,” Matlow said about the property being used as a staging ground. “But it’s not what it should be, and I will continue advocating for a great public space there because that’s what great cities do.”

May 26th, 2014

Shawn Star

Town Crier

The corner of Yonge and Eglinton has become a little less of an eyesore, as Eglinton Crosstown LRT construction continues.

New billboards were put up by Metrolinx in mid-April on the southwest corner, covering the abandoned TTC bus barns from public view at street level.

Metrolinx is the provincial transit body overseeing the Crosstown project, a 19-km LRT line with 25 stops running from Weston Road east to Kennedy subway station. Construction began in 2011 and is expected to be complete by 2020.

The Metrolinx boards were something Ward 22 councillor Josh Matlow had been pushing for since he was elected in 2010.

May 26, 2014

Eric Emin Wood

Town Crier

A controversial midtown development that would see two five-storey condominium floors added to existing 14-storey apartment buildings — both with amenity spaces off-limits to existing tenants — will not be authorized by the city unless it’s changed, the city planner and local councillor Josh Matlow have vowed.

In addition to the five-storey additions to 33 Holly St. and 44 Dunfield Ave., the proposal by developer Compten Management Inc. includes two 24-and 32-storey condominium towers and a six-storey rental apartment building at 86 and 88 Soudan Ave. Community groups, including the South Eglinton Residents’ and Ratepayers’ Association, opposed the plan at a public meeting on April 29.

SERRA president Greg Russell said the project would increase the area’s intensification “beyond reasonable limits,” benefitting neither current nor future residents, given the neighbourhood’s high traffic and overcrowded transit.

Roy George drove all the way from Virginia Beach, Va. to see Sharon Hampson, Lois Lilienstein and Bram Morrison perform together for the hundreds of people gathered in June Rowlands Park, during the May 10 playground naming ceremony in their honour.

In 1999 George was a Make-a-Wish kid living in Syracuse, N.Y. who was battling a terminal illness.

“This is the one time where all three play together,” he said, a child-like smile playing on his lips.

He wasn’t the only one beaming with youthful exuberance, as generations of fans came from around the neighbourhood to help usher in the new name of the playground situated in the southwest corner of the Davisville park.

Ward 22 councillor Josh Matlow, put forward the motion in September to name the playground after the troupe, and the process finally came to fruition on a sunny, fun-filled spring day.

May 20th, 2014

Jessica McDiarmid

Toronto Star