If the City of Toronto sees no community benefit from your space, they take it back — learn about Section 37

BY SELINA McCALLUM

The Toronto Media Arts Centre located at 32 Lisgar St. in Toronto has been battling with the City of Toronto to own their home for years now.

The center and board are made up of four organizations which includes Dames Playing Games, Gamma Space, Charles Street Video and the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre.

These four organizations cover digital media from film to virtual reality. They also provide opportunities for artists of all backgrounds across the city to learn about gaming software, rent expensive film equipment, showcase their art or film to large communities, and host workshops and events.

However, the city of Toronto claims that they have no impact or “benefit” for the community.

Henry Faber, President of the Board of the Toronto Media Arts Centre (TMAC), and President of Gamma Space is frustrated with the hurdles that the City of Toronto has put in front of them for over five years.

“We sued the City of Toronto to protect our rights. During that whole process the city started to come up with measurements to determine if we are maintaining a community benefit, but the problem with that is that they allowed the benefit to be compromised from the very beginning for not allowing Urbancorp to finish the space,” said Faber.

Urbancorp is a developer company which has created and built some of the most modern homes and condominium communities in the Greater Toronto Area.

When Urbancorp delayed work on TMAC in 2014 to prioritize finishing the condo portion of the building, certain things like bannisters and handrails on staircases, covers for HVAC vents, baseboards, door handles and sealed floors were never completed.

When the City interfered in 2015 by instructing Urbancorp not to close with TMAC, it effectively gave the developer a pass to not finish the space, yet still receive their $69.2 million density bonus under the agreement that was made.

In April 2016, Urbancorp went bankrupt.

“On top of this whole negotiation process, Urbancorp went bankrupt,” said Faber. “So not only were they bankrupt, but because the city didn’t enforce them to finish the space, and then prevent us from going into it, who’s responsible for all this?”

TMAC is a “Section 37” space which means that they have to follow certain requirements to operate.

The term “Section 37” refers to the section of Ontario’s Planning Act which allows the City to ask for benefits to construct or improve facilities when a development requires a Zoning By-Law amendment.

Section 37 enables the City to negotiate contributions towards local community benefits for development applications that exceed a site’s zoned height and density.

“On one hand, the city can’t say that they are worried about how we’re going to make the space work, while not supporting the space, let alone us,” said Faber.

TMAC continues to show that they can be independent and are constantly building community benefit.

Since April 2018, TMAC hosted more than 450 workshops, receptions, screenings, artist talks, concerts, community and social events plus 45 exhibitions and festivals.

When the city asked them to raise $2.5 million dollars to provide the city with comfort that they are able to establish partnerships and secure private funding to operate the facility, they met that goal in March 2019.

Faber says that the amount of support from the community has been powerful.

“It’s been pretty moving. We posted a single tweet and Facebook post that highlighted Sally Han’s affidavit that said TMAC operations provides a limited benefit to the community and we asked people to say how they feel. Within the first three days we had over 350 letters, and I don’t mean just one or two lines, we received pages from people,” said Faber.  “Now we’re almost at 500, and they’re still coming.”

The President of TMAC says that the whole point of TMAC is to be for the community.

“We built this with the community. There’s no other interest other than to support and provide space for the media arts community,” said Faber.

To learn more about Toronto Media Arts Centre and the negotiations, visit https://www.tomediaarts.org/tmaction/