Building a Brightwater Future

Matt Durnan

A waterfront revitalization project underway in Mississauga will transform a former Port Credit brownfield site into a mixed-use complete community while adding a significant number of affordable rental housing units to the neighbourhood that will remain affordable in perpetuity.

Mississauga's Brightwater waterfront community is currently under construction at 70 Mississauga Road South and 181 Lakeshore Road West on a 28-hectare site that once accommodated an oil refinery operated by Texaco Canada. After acquiring the decommissioned refinery from Texaco in 1989, Imperial Oil put the site back on the market. Work on the Brightwater community began in 2016 after it was determined that the brownfield property could be successfully remediated for residential and other uses.

Since then, the site has undergone significant remediation and construction is well underway for the master-planned community. Once completed, Brightwater will have brought around 2,500 new housing units—including 150 affordable rental units—retail uses, parks and office space to a site that is just a short walk from the shores of Lake Ontario (See: "From Brownfield to Brightwater, Novae Res Urbis GTHA", December 18, 2019).

Construction of the master-planned community will be undertaken in multiple phases. And integral to the mandate of the project team was assurance that the affordable housing component of the project would be included in Brightwater's first phase, comprising a key part of a complete community within the scope of the larger complete community of the entire development.

Peel Region is working alongside FRAM + Slokker to design and build the affordable housing component of the Brightwater community, a component that will be owned by the Region of Peel and will provide a wide variety of housing options that will remain affordable in perpetuity.

Brightwater's affordable housing units will be accommodated within a seven-storey mixed-use building that will include a one-level underground parking garage that will be shared with two other condominium towers that are planned for the site.

"The important part of this is the fact that the affordable housing is being done in the first phase. The only thing we don't have in our first phase is the waterfront, that's coming later," FRAM Building Group president Frank Giannone told NRU.

"At the corner of Mississauga Road and Lakeshore you will have a complete community on its own. And for us, as a developer, it gives us that calling card that you're going to have everything here, right off the bat."

FRAM and the Region of Peel have set out some benchmarks they are seeking to achieve through the development of the affordable housing, including implementing green building standards to achieve energy and greenhouse gas savings.

In addition to mitigating environmental impacts associated with the project, the team has also set out to provide as wide a variety of affordable rental housing options as possible. The entire residential component of the affordable housing site will be universally designed for maximum accessibility, and 21 per cent of the affordable units will be completely barrier-free.

"With Frank [Giannone] and his design team, when you go into that development, it's not going to stand out as though it's social housing, or low-income housing. It will blend in, and that's thanks to the work of the design team and their work on the internal side of the building and how it functions," Peel Region manager of housing development Brett Barnes told NRU.

"We're focusing on the larger-sized units, the need is just there for that. And we're also focusing on the barrier-free side of things. These buildings are meant to be in existence for 50-plus years, so we want to make sure over time that people who need those types of units will have the ability to cycle through them. We're not just building these for today, but also for well into the future."

The affordable housing building will offer 40 per cent of its 150 rental apartment units [60 units] at 60 per cent of the median market rent rate, with the balance of the units set at 100 per cent of the median market rent rate.

Family-sized units will also make up a substantial portion of the affordable units, with nearly 50 per cent of the unit mix total consisting of two and three-bedroom apartment units.

"We're trying to address those unique housing needs by having a variety in terms of the unit breakdown, with the three-bedroom units—those larger family-sized units that tend to be harder to come by and are more cost-prohibitive in the general market," Region of Peel project manager, housing development Marwan Kassay told NRU.

"Thirty per cent of the units will be two-bedroom and 18 per cent will be three-bedroom. We're conscious of the range of benefits that we need to offer to support that population pool."

While the affordable housing component of the development is being led by Region of Peel and FRAM + Slokker, the City of Mississauga had its own role to play on the planning side when it came to approving the site plan and ensuring that the proposed development aligned with the City's planning principles and growth targets.

Port Credit has been a popular landing place for developers in recent years, with a number of large-scale developments in the works that will bring significant housing to the area. This includes the contentious Lakeview project for which the Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Steve Clark recently issued a Ministerial Zoning Order (MZO) to roughly double the number of housing units previously proposed for the site (See: "Council Blindsided by Lakeview MZO", Novae Res Urbis, May 17, 2023).

So far, the Brightwater plan has been proceeding more smoothly than the Lakeview plan, and it is a project that Mississauga ward 1 councillor Stephen Dasko is excited to see taking shape.

"The Brightwater site was interesting because that was all part of the Inspiration Port Credit plan, which looked at the marina lands, and the other part of the property was the old Texaco lands, which ended up being Imperial Oil's lands," Dasko told NRU.

"That piece was one that we never thought anybody would ever do much with, and that it would be pretty limited. That whole site was cleaned up-which was truly one of the dirtiest in the entire city in terms of contaminants-and it was all cleaned up at no cost to the taxpayer."

Dasko was pleased to see that the Brightwater site will include an affordable housing component, as well as accommodating roughly seven hectares of parkland, as well as a variety of housing options, retail uses and office space.

"You have a whole bunch of residential and of course, the affordability component. There's a good mix-from townhouses to condos and some signature buildings as well-which makes it a landmark," Dasko said.

"There's an employment component, a retail component, an elementary school, and all those parts snap together to make what I think is how communities should be designed going forward."

The partnership between Region of Peel and the team at FRAM + Slokker has been a welcome change from the norm when it comes to building affordable housing, and the fact that the affordable component is being prioritized as part of the first phase of the project is an added bonus.

"Private developers aren't banging on the Region's door saying 'Hey, how can we work with you, what can we do?' But that's how the discussions went with Frank and his team. I think they see the value in doing this, and we don't get very many opportunities to create new affordable housing in a new community," Barnes said.

"If anything, it's always trying to squeeze it in some time down the road, but this is an ideal situation for helping to create a mixed-use community right from the outset."

Construction of the seven-storey affordable housing building is already well underway and both Peel Region and FRAM are projecting that this phase of the project will be completed and ready for occupancy by late 2024.

Posted with permission of the publisher of NRU Publishing Inc. Original article first appeared in Novae Res Urbis GTHA, Vol. 26, No. 25, Wednesday, June 21, 2023.