New in homes: Building a community over the tracks 

In a city where unoccupied land is scarce and housing demand remains intense, Toronto Rail Yards is proposing a solution: create a new community above downtown Toronto’s largest and busiest stretch of rail infrastructure.  

Should it proceed, the 14-acre mixed-use project from the Laborers’ International Union of North America’s pension fund and Fengate Capital Asset [Pls CHK] Management would bring nearly 4,000 new homes to a site anchored by the future Spadina-Front GO Station. Formerly known as the Rail Deck Development, the community also includes more than two acres of parks, office and retail space, and two child-care centres. Much of this would sit atop a six-acre deck built over the active rail corridor south of Front Street West between Bathurst Street and Spadina Avenue.  

Here, Michael Sørensen, global market director for Copenhagen-based Henning Larsen, the project’s lead architecture firm, joins Jordana Ross, Fengate’s vice-president of development, to discuss their design approach in bringing housing to the tracks. 

Q What are the main challenges in turning the space above an active rail corridor into a community?  

Sørensen: The fundamental challenge is designing above infrastructure that doesn’t stop. The design has to overcome the rail corridor’s dynamic movement and sense of discontinuity to create spaces where people feel genuinely settled, not perched above. That means paying close attention to wind, sunlight, materials and the scale of public spaces. It means designing a place that earns the ground it’s given.  

Ross: On a practical level, the design also had to account for the absence of a conventional underground condition and the need to maintain clearance for the active rail yard below. That meant both the buildings and public realm had to be carefully designed to move people and activity from Front Street up to the spaces above the rail corridor, including the promenade, open space, retail and some of the residential lobbies.  

Q How did the presence of the rail corridor shape the master plan?  

Sørensen: It defines the boundaries of the site, the structural logic of the deck and the orientation of the public realm. The corridor also shaped our thinking about connectivity. This stretch of rail infrastructure acts as a physical divide, and the master plan responds by creating multiple portals through the site and opportunities for surrounding communities to connect to each other, as well as the future GO station and open spaces.  

Q What elements of the surrounding downtown neighbourhoods influenced the design?  

Ross: What’s compelling is the mix of important heritage, including Fort York and Draper Street, alongside strong contemporary neighbours. The project has an opportunity to respond to both. For example, one of the open-space portals has been positioned to connect with The Well’s architectural canopy on Front Street, a public-facing space that already draws people in. Our goal is to complement that experience with a thoughtful and distinctive design on the south side of the street.  

Q How do you expect the public spaces will be used?  

Sørensen: (They’re) designed around the full rhythm of daily life. That means space for the school run and the morning coffee, for the lunchtime walk and the weekend market, for the children’s playground and the evening gathering. The space needs to work at seven in the morning and at seven in the evening, in January and in July.  

In practical terms, that translates into a south-facing public realm with shaded seating areas, cycling and pedestrian paths, flexible programming space for markets and events, active ground-floor retail and play areas designed for all ages. The Living Room, the central park space on the deck, is designed to function as a neighbourhood backyard: genuinely usable every day rather than impressive on a masterplan and empty in practice.  

Ross: Toronto has so many great examples of public space that we were drawing inspiration from. Harbourfront’s promenade, and the Bentway, two examples just a stone’s throw from the site, are types of urban open space that are flexible, accessible and appeal to a wide range of users. We see Toronto Rail Yards becoming as used and loved as these spaces are. 

Q How does the design encourage walking, cycling and transit use while reducing reliance on cars?  

Sørensen: New pedestrian and cycling routes will connect Front Street to the south-facing promenade and the future GO station. Active frontages, clear sightlines and multiple routes through the site are designed to make walking and cycling the natural choice.  

Ross: A notable move in the updated concept was removing parking altogether and fully leaning into the site’s connectivity to a future GO station and location close to the new Ontario Line. From a walkability perspective, it is hard to imagine a stronger urban location.  

Q Looking ahead, what would make Toronto Rail Yards successful not just as an engineering achievement but as a lived-in neighbourhood 10 years after completion?  

Sørensen: The engineering achievement will be self-evident and is really just the beginning of the story, not the end. The measure of a neighbourhood is not the quality of its opening day but the quality of its ordinary Tuesday. 

What would make Toronto Rail Yards truly successful 10 years from now is if it feels inevitable, if people who live there and people who pass through it cannot imagine the city without it. That happens when the public spaces are genuinely used every day, when the connections to surrounding neighbourhoods feel natural rather than engineered and when the ground-floor reflects the character of the community that has grown up around it.