When Oksana Wojtiw got the OK to exercise after a recent accident, the purple-haired septuagenarian headed straight for Cloverdale Mall.
She enjoys just wandering around, seeing the same faces, and knowing if she gets lonely she can pull up a seat with a cup of coffee.
Until recently, the mall property was to become the site of new condo towers, but developers pulled the plug last fall due to a lack of sales.
Neighbourhood malls like Cloverdale have been in decline, battered by the rise of online shopping, demographic shifts, and the loss of anchor tenants like Target. Some have become shadows of their former selves.
But during their bleakest hour, when the pandemic closed these community hubs, a new hope for reimagining the mall emerged as the Toronto region condo sector caught fire.
Many owners and developers put in place master plans to turn them into mini-cities, complete with office space, new retail, parks, daycares, and bike lanes. Shiny new towers, and the cash they bring in, were at the centre of these visions.
Now, as the condo sector tanks, some of these communities are back where they started, as developers across the city go bust, cancel projects, or sit on their shovels, waiting for the market to turn around. At least one mall in the Greater Toronto Area with plans for a condo project has fallen into receivership.
At Etobicoke’s Cloverdale, near Dundas Street West and Highway 427, developers say they’re still committed to the sweeping master plan, which includes parks, community space, and new retail.
But for now, the “experience centre” next to the mall promoting the condos is shuttered, a model of the planned towers still visible in the window, with its tiny lights glimmering.
As someone who depends on the mall, Wojtiw found the news of the cancellations “kind of a shame.”
“What went through my mind was, ‘OK now what are you going to do with this space?’”
It’s not 1990 anymore
At Rexdale’s Woodbine Mall, about a 15-minute drive from Cloverdale, there are a few more boarded up stores and the ceiling is peeling. But you can still find someone to chat with, and deals at stores like “Home Xcent” and “Close Out King.”
A few parents with small kids zoom by on rentable furry animal scooters, while a group of seniors discuss their false teeth near the Baskin-Robbins.
The way-finding sign at the entrance has the names of closed stores whited out. There’s a rendering pasted on a skylight advertising plans for new condos and a Bollywood theatre.
It’s not clear what happened to this plan. But the mall is in receivership, according to publicly available documents.
The receiver, EY Canada, declined to comment.
Before the receiver took over, the owner was listed as Woodbine Mall Holdings Inc. The man referenced in the receivership documents as being at the centre of that company, Chris Hinn, did not respond to a request for comment left at a phone number associated with him.
Woodbine’s nearly empty “Fantasy Fair,” complete with life-sized dinosaurs, an empty Ferris wheel, merry-go-round, and recliners for tired parents, is also still open.
When Wojtiw’s three children were little, and she needed a break, she’d head there to “plop down” while the kids played nearby.
She hadn’t been to Woodbine for a while and was shocked when she recently took her granddaughter.
“It was almost like a ghost town,” she said. The mall used to have a large Hudson’s Bay that was a big draw. That’s gone now, along with the marquee sign. But you can still see the outline against the white wall where the letters used to be.
“Is this a sign of the times, is nobody shopping anymore, is everything online?” Wojtiw wondered.
The mall of tomorrow
“Retail is fundamentally changed,” said David Roberts, an associate professor in the department of geography and planning at the University of Toronto. “The suburban mall is not something that seems to have much of a current life unless it’s completely reimagined.”
These sites are typically quite large, with services like plumbing in place, and the land value is high, he added. They’re ripe for new development.
Some have described the master plans as little “15-minute cities” because residents can grab what they need within that time, without having to use a car.
Plans across the GTA that have been previously reported on include 19 new towers and two new public streets at Yorkdale Mall; eight new residential buildings with pedestrian-friendly streets, a community centre and park at the Galleria Mall; and three highrise buildings in the parking lot of North York’s CF Fairview Mall.
“It is about thinking through what makes neighbourhoods enjoyable to live in, beyond just being able to afford a box in the sky,” said Roberts.
“Of course we have a housing crisis, but we can’t just build neighbourhoods that don’t have other things.”
That was the idea at least.
Until an unprecedented condo collapse across the GTA.
The crash
The region’s once red-hot preconstruction condo market has dried up, largely due to higher interest rates, lower prices, and economic uncertainty.
Typically units are sold before buildings are constructed, three to five years out. But now that buyers are hard to find, the residential flank of mall redevelopments has faltered.
In December, according to data from market research firm Urbanation, new homes sales in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area reached an all-time low. Last year there were also record numbers of condo cancellations (28) as developers struggle to continue projects.
Less than 10 per cent of units pre-sold at Cloverdale’s “Clove” condos, a 33-storey tower and nine-storey midrise building, according to a statement from Mattamy Homes at the time, the developer along with QuadReal Property Group.
“It obviously was very unfortunate and for both us and our purchasers that the project couldn’t advance,” Aaron Knight, senior vice-president of development at QuadReal Property Group, told the Star in a recent interview.
But, Knight said, just because the condos are cancelled doesn’t mean the entire project is.
The “intention is not to demolish the mall. That will never happen all at once,” he said. They are still committed to delivering the daycare, he added. They don’t expect work on the mall proper until 2030, and the focus now is “re-examining what happens on the Clove site.”
A way forward?
“Of course, the market today has shifted,” said Rob Spanier, president of Spanier Group, a mixed-use development and advisory firm. “But there’s still demand and a need for housing.”
Bigger developers that have deep pockets can afford to wait it out, Roberts said, until the market rebounds. “I don’t know what happens for the ones that are more desperate.”
Without the “infusion of cash and capital” from preconstruction sales, it’s hard to fund master plans.
City planning consultant Brent Toderian said smart cities are looking for ways to keep these transformations going “in the face of unprecedented uncertainty.”
That includes being creative about “when things are paid,” building more flexibility into the approvals process, and cutting out requirements that aren’t needed anymore, such as parking.
“Everybody’s got to sharpen their pencils, but not in a lazy way,” he said.
Condos at Pickering City Centre are going ahead, bucking the trend. Developer CentreCourt broke ground on two residential towers in October, the first step in the master plan for that mall and surrounding lands that will include a public park and new roads.
Units at the 40- and 45-storey towers have been for sale since 2022, said Mitch Gascoyne, partner and senior vice-president of Development at CentreCourt.
CentreCourt will pay development charges, fees to municipalities for new infrastructure related to growth, at first occupancy instead of when building permits are issued.
“Which gave us the confidence of starting a project without having 100 per cent sales,” Gascoyne said, declining to comment on how many units have been sold. He added the plan has never been to tear down the mall and instead they’ve been adding stores.
Other developers are looking at purpose-built rental, which there is government funding available for through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. (CMHC).
For example, Cloverdale developer Knight said they pivoted to rental on the north phase of their Bayview Village Shopping Centre project.
This is an opportunity, Spanier said, for developers to make sure they have the plan and the phasing right.
Some malls like Yorkdale, which has a multi-year master plan to add both residential and office space, are doing well. Others are struggling but still making some money.
Asked about Yorkdale, a spokesperson for Oxford Properties, which co-owns the site, said they “have no updates.”
Oxford Properties broke ground last year on three exclusively rental towers on parking lots at Scarborough Town Centre, with more than 1,200 units planned, 20 per cent affordable. CMHC funding helped to make it happen, and the project is expected to be completed in summer 2029, the spokesperson confirmed.
Developers need to prioritize where to start, how to “de-mall” the part that’s not performing, without trying to do everything all at once, Spanier said.
“There are retirement residences that are needed. There are rental apartments that are needed. Not everybody has to buy a condo,” he added.
“If you’re just sitting there waiting, it’s going to be a while.”
One of the factors behind the crash, said Sami Kazemi, principal at architecture firm BDP Quadrangle, which has worked on several mall redevelopments in the region, was the dependence on investors. This contributed to tiny units that no one wanted. He hopes to see more diversity going forward, including student and affordable stock.
The direction that some of these developments are taking is still unknown. The Star reached out to several developers of GTA projects and many did not respond.
A spokesperson for redevelopment of Galleria Mall, Galleria on the Park, said they have completed two condo towers and are planning for occupancy in a third this spring.
Cadillac Fairview, the developer behind redevelopment plans at Fairview Mall and Etobicoke’s Sherway Gardens, declined to comment.
One thing the mall developments will always have, Kazemi noted, is that people know and love their malls.
There’s a “communal memory,” he said. A sense of place.
It’s something Wojtiw has, at Woodbine and now Cloverdale.
“Funnily enough then it was social interaction with children, and here it’s social interaction with seniors,” she said with a laugh.
“It’s kind of full circle.”
