Kingston Road tower goes back for a fourth look

The density plan cleared committee in June with little discussion. It comes back to council on the fourteenth carrying two new questions, and both of them are about arithmetic.

What changed since June

The parking count in the original submission assumed a ratio the city has not applied to a building of this height since 2019. The shadow study was modelled on a nine-storey massing; the application is now eleven.

Neither point was raised at committee. Both were raised by residents afterwards, in writing, and both were confirmed by staff as accurate.

The ratio matters because it decides how much of the site goes to cars. At the 2019 figure the building needs roughly forty more spaces than the drawings show, and there is nowhere on the parcel to put them without losing the ground-floor units that made the proposal attractive in the first place.

Nobody here is against the building. We are against approving a number that we already know is wrong.

A ward councillor, at committee

Staff have recommended approval twice. Neither report addressed the ratio directly, and the applicant has not been asked to remodel the shadows.

Council sits on the fourteenth. The question in front of it is narrow: send it back, or approve it as counted.

The applicant has been co-operative throughout and has not objected to remodelling. What the applicant has objected to is the timeline: a deferral pushes the decision past the fall, and past the fall means past the construction window.

That is a real cost and it is worth naming. It is also the cost of having asked the question in June rather than in August, which is when residents asked it, because the report that would have prompted it in June did not contain the ratio at all.

Council sits at seven. The item is fourth on the agenda.

This is the fourth time the file has come back, and the four are not equivalent. The first return was for a traffic study. The second was for the affordable-unit count, which was resolved. The third was procedural — a notice period missed by two days.

This one is different because nobody disputes the facts. Staff confirmed the ratio. The applicant has not contested it. What is being weighed is whether an acknowledged error is worth a season.

The building itself has broad support on council. It replaces a parking lot, it puts a hundred and forty units on a transit corridor, and the ground-floor commercial is the kind the ward has been asking for since the last plan. None of that is in question either.

Which is what makes the vote awkward. There is no side of the room that wants the project dead, and there is no side of the room that can explain why the number in the report is the number in the report.