Toronto Project LEEDs City And Developer To Green

A planned development just northeast of Toronto will soon become the largest LEED-certified project in Canada, offering 4.5 million square feet of commercial space and 3,900 condos and townhouses. Every building in the project will be certified.

Originally developer Rudy Bratty hadn't planned on building to any environmental standard, but the mayor of the city of Markham approached Bratty with a plan to bring top-dollar tenants and a new face to Markham.

"Bratty's company has held the land for 25 years; development won approval in 1994 and at that time he was going to create a traditional housing project, thousands of single-family and semi-detached homes, cheek by jowl, and maybe some industrial buildings along the planned route for Highway 407, he says."

" 'Nobody thought about the environmental impact in those days,' he explains."

"Then, Markham mayor Don Cousens came to him with an idea. He wanted a master-planned new city centre, a showplace that would focus on intensification while preserving and maintaining the environment."

" 'In environmental terms, on a scale of one to 10, the land was a negative five,' says Rudy Bucolitz, investor Remington Group's vice-president of land development. 'Now we can safely say it is up to an eight or nine.' "