A highrise project near Bayview Village is proposing to incorporate Toronto’s first Catholic school in a condo building

“It’s a much better way of intensification, especially here,” said Gabriel Leung, Concord Adex’s vice-president of development.

“The school board spends much less money on the land because they don’t need the entire piece. We can build on top, intensify and have more people use that ghost station. It’s a win-win for everyone,” he continued, noting the area houses many young families as well.

The towers would be located right next to Bessarion Station, one of the TTC’s least-used subway stations, at 1001 Sheppard Ave. E. It’s an area in North York called Concord Park Place, which Concord Adex has been developing since it acquired the land in 2006.

Concord Park Place already has several highrise towers with more under construction on its 45-acre site, including the city’s recently opened Ethennonnhawahstihnen’ Community Recreation Centre and Library. The plan for the area aims to eventually have about 7,500 units with roughly 30,000 residents, and it’s about halfway there, according to Leung.

Leung said the developer had learned lessons from other projects such as CityPlace downtown, and aimed to synchronize the opening of the residential towers with city facilities in the new community. The construction of a community centre and schools near CityPlace came “really late in the game,” he said, noting by the time they opened residents had already moved in and kids were commuting to other schools. “It was a bit of a pain for everyone.”

The proposal for the two towers would account for 860 units in total with 480 square metres of retail space. The school would cover a total of 4,618 square metres across the ground and second levels of the development’s five-level podium, along with a schoolyard outside.

“It’s one hundred per cent a trend,” says longtime Councillor Shelley Carroll (Ward 17, Don Valley North) about mixed-use developments incorporating schools.

“We’re an outlier (in Canada) in terms of our population, our density and our needs. We should be an outlier in creating policy to meet our needs,” she added, noting that increasing the housing supply would also help with the city’s affordability in the long run.

This neighbourhood in particular, she continued, is one where “all the policies point to build as much as you can” and to build “a lot of transit-oriented homes” because the Line 4 subway stations are close together, plus it’s a portion of the TTC that can afford to take on more capacity. 

“We hope this is one of many school projects which are constructed as they create opportunities for integrating education, residence, employment, commercial and recreation in a walkable community,” said Shazia Vlahos, TCDSB’s chief communications officer.

The schoolyard would also serve as an open space for the broader community to use after school hours, Vlahos added, describing the proposal as an “innovative and revolutionary” way to contribute to a community’s educational needs, all the while “deviating from the traditional stand-alone school facility.”

She said it would also help promote “family-friendly walkable communities.”

The Toronto District School Board has been working with this model for a while: North Toronto Collegiate reopened in 2010 with condo towers hugging its sides and in 2022 a project was announced that included a “vertical school” built into the third floor of a waterfront condo, the latter of which Carroll says is looking to incorporate joint public and Catholic programming.

“For the Catholic board to get involved, it means we have now the two large school boards so we can really maximize on places where there’s opportunity to meet capacity as the city grows,” Carroll said.