Patricia Mueller remembers when the earth opened up and swallowed the floor.
The sinkhole at the roughly 80-unit supportive housing building in Toronto’s West Queen West area started out small, around three-by-three feet, shortly before the pandemic, Mueller said. But it was growing, despite residents still living inside. As it gnawed outwards, the floor started to give way.
The plumbing began to break down next. Water was getting through the walls, particularly after a hard rainstorm. The building felt to Mueller like it was shifting, after more than 100 years in place.
Then, in 2021, Mueller — CEO of social agency Homes First — heard about a deadly condo collapse in Surfside, Fla., and it kicked her fears into high gear.
“I’m like ‘oh, we’ve got to do something here. This is scaring me.’” Her mind immediately went to Strachan House, the more than century-old, city-owned site at the corner of Wellington Street West and Strachan Avenue.
When a sewage backup and a fire added to the structural decay months later, it was the final straw, the city says. It was time to move tenants out. Since then, the building has sat empty, despite the housing crisis raging outside its pink brick walls.
“The city’s been trying to figure out, ‘OK, how can we get this thing back into housing?’” said Vic Gupta, the chief executive officer of city hall real estate agency CreateTO.
A plan is now starting to take shape. CreateTO is hoping that, by the end of this decade, the building will be a home once again, envisioning up to three towers on the property offering 500 affordable and market-priced homes.
“This is an important city project that we do want to move on,” said Gupta, who says in the smoothest scenario, they could break ground in 2027 and open roughly three years later. “We don’t want to have vacant sites sitting around.”
A tenant exodus
City hall has owned the West Queen West property for more than a century. From its construction between 1888 and 1901 until the mid-1960s, officials leased it to the John B. Smith and Sons lumber company. After the company closed their planing mill inside, the building sat empty until the ‘90s, when it was turned into living space for roughly 80 people. It offered support services inside for those struggling with their mental health or other challenges, providing an off-ramp from homelessness. Across Toronto today, tens of thousands of people are waiting for this kind of housing.
But Strachan House followed a similar trajectory to other vacant housing sites across Toronto: problems in the aging building swelled until they became untenable, with enormous costs to bring it back into decent condition.
“Fire alarms were going off, sprinklers were being activated, there was mould … there was an accumulation of unsafe conditions,” Gupta said, noting the site had gone a long time without needed investments. City hall, in an email, confirmed that a floor had collapsed in 2019 and had to be shored up.
When tenants were displaced, they were first moved to a Scarborough hotel. Most have since been resettled into two new supportive housing developments, one downtown and the other in Scarborough, Mueller said, although a handful of former tenants fell off their radar, disappearing to unknown locations.
She understands these kinds of redevelopment efforts take time. Still, she pointed to Toronto’s soaring homelessness as a reason for as much urgency as possible. “I wish the processes could move a lot faster.”
Becoming homes again
On a sunny, late April morning, the empty building was quiet. Most windows were boarded over, plastered with posters for a Bentway block party and a musical tribute show. One uncovered window, on the second floor, was wide open.
As a Star reporter looked closer at the rusted chains and metal fencing around the site, a passerby called out from the sidewalk: “You going to buy it?”
The man, who identified himself only as Nigel, has lived down the road for 25 years, and said the neighbourhood has changed radically around Strachan House in that time.
“If they decide to turn it into another condo-type dwelling, like everywhere else around here, I think they should still figure out how to use the façade,” he said. “I would really love to see it in better shape, but I’d also like to see it put to good use.”
That’s exactly what Gupta has in mind. “There were 80 supportive housing units initially on the site. We’d like to bring those back, or bring as many back as we can,” he said. To increase the density for the 500 market and affordable units he believes the site could accommodate, city hall needs a zoning and Official Plan change.
Toronto city council first asked staff to look into any required bylaw amendments to redevelop the property in 2020. While Gupta wasn’t directly involved at the time, he suggested the pandemic disrupted many city projects.
City hall says a number of proposals have been batted around for the historic building since 2020. Earlier versions were lower in density and used parts of the existing building, a city spokesperson wrote in a statement, but that idea was “proven untenable.” The latest plan began taking shape in 2023, they said, with more density and a more “feasible” path for funding it.
A portion of the site was also listed on the Heritage Register this past December, as Gupta says CreateTO has been consulting with other city divisions about their priorities, and conducting planning and feasibility studies.
He hopes they can finish an application to rezone the site by later this year. If that’s approved by early 2026, and the city secures any needed development partners, he hopes they can break ground in 2027 — followed by around three years of construction, putting the most optimistic opening date around 2030.
The financial picture has changed since the site emptied — as Toronto has shifted from a red-hot development sphere to one where many projects are struggling to launch. But Gupta is eager to find a fix after years of vacancy.
“Hopefully we can make it all work,” Gupta said. “We recognize that there is a housing shortage — and it’s something that’s deeply needed.”
