What’s Happening
St. Luke’s United Church sits at Sherbourne and Carlton, directly across from Allan Gardens. In 2022, Toronto approved a redevelopment with a 12-storey building, approximately 100 rental apartments, 31 affordable units and more than 3,000 square metres of community space. The historic church, built in 1887, would largely have been retained, while later additions such as the narthex and gymnasium would be removed. It was already a significant compromise on a sensitive heritage site.
Four years later, the project returned looking completely different. The newer approved proposal is a 48-storey, approximately 166-metre tower with 440 rental units, at least 30 percent of them affordable. That works out to roughly 132 affordable units. The scheme also includes about 1,453 square metres of community space, public-realm improvements on Sherbourne and retention and adaptation of portions of the church. The unit mix changed too. The earlier proposal had roughly 20 percent three-bedroom units, compared with approximately 12 percent in the larger plan.
More housing and more affordable rentals are real benefits. But this is not a conventional private condo project where a developer is simply trying to sell more units. St. Luke’s is part of the United Church’s property-redevelopment effort, involving its property arm, United Property Resource Corporation, and developer Kindred Works. Federal financing and municipal housing incentives are part of the wider picture. The City approved Open Door incentives for 31 affordable units, including relief from certain development and permit fees and long-term property-tax exemptions. According to the figures discussed in the video, those concessions represent roughly $2.83 million in foregone City revenue.
This is why it is a public-interest decision even though the land is privately owned by a church. There are tangible housing and community benefits, public incentives, and an important heritage building directly beside one of Toronto’s best-known downtown parks.
The heritage question is especially difficult. Churches were built as community landmarks. Yet many congregations face declining attendance and expensive maintenance, and redevelopment can be what pays to restore and preserve an aging building. Development can save heritage properties.
What makes St. Luke’s unusual is the contrast between two approved visions for essentially the same site. The Toronto Preservation Board supported the earlier heritage approach in 2022 but recommended against the alterations associated with the taller proposal in 2026. The planning question is not whether the church can change. It is why a much larger intervention became acceptable after the City had already approved a carefully negotiated version.
Why It Matters
Toronto keeps treating the housing crisis as though it is one problem with one solution: more units. In reality, the city has several different housing shortages. We need affordable rental homes, family-sized apartments, supportive housing, accessible housing, and ownership options. Adding 440 apartments helps with rental supply and, in this case, adds affordable units. It does not automatically solve the lack of homes suitable for families, the cost of ownership or the question of whether the building fits its site.
There is a wider pattern worth looking at. Early plans for Ookwemin Minising in the Port Lands were materially less dense than later concepts, which grew from roughly 4,800 units to 9,000 and then around 12,000 as housing targets increased. The planned transit-oriented community around Distillery District Station similarly grew from about 1,520 to roughly 2,400 homes. Yet the approximate number of two-bedroom-and-larger homes remained close to 600 in the versions compared in the video. In other words, substantially more units did not necessarily mean substantially more homes for families.
Those comparisons do not prove every increase in density is wrong. The Port Lands is not a historic church site, and a transit station is different from a park edge. But they do reveal a habit of measuring success almost entirely by unit count, instead of asking who those units are for, what infrastructure will support them and what the neighbourhood gains.
St. Luke’s also raises a difficult question about consistency. The nearby City-owned Green P site at 405 Sherbourne is planned to become a rental building, yet its height is capped at 35 storeys, even though the site itself faces no heritage constraints. Every lot has its own planning context, but residents deserve an explanation when the arguably more sensitive and difficult St. Luke’s site is allowed to accommodate a much taller building.
My Take
I am not opposed to redeveloping St. Luke’s, and I don't think every old church in a growing city should be frozen in time. The original proposal already involved significant change, and I can see why a church would want to use its land to fund housing and preserve a place for its congregation and community.
What I have trouble with is the leap from 12 storeys to 48. If the City had already worked through a sensitive design, why was four times the height suddenly the right answer? More affordable rentals are a compelling public benefit, but that should not end the planning discussion. We should be able to recognize the value of those homes while asking whether the heritage, community-space and neighbourhood trade-offs were reasonable.
And I don't want the response to be that Toronto just needs every unit it can get. We've already seen that an increase in the number of small apartments does not fix every part of the housing market. If we use an emergency to justify every increase in height without examining the outcome, we risk building more housing on paper while leaving the same problems unresolved.
My standard is fairly simple: tell us what kind of homes are being added, who they serve, what the neighbourhood gains and what is being sacrificed. Then explain why the scale is appropriate for that particular site. With St. Luke’s, I understand the case for housing, but I'm not convinced the City has made the case for this much of it. Good planning is more than counting units.
