Realtor Andrew Harrild is sitting outside the Tip Top Lofts on Lake Shore Blvd. W., looking up at the balconies on the Fort York condos across the street. It’s a blue sky day but there’s not a soul in sight on those tiny, ubiquitous terraces.“I see a lot of stuff on the balconies but not a lot of people,” says Harrild, a partner in Condos.ca.More than half his clients put balconies on their condo wish lists. But Toronto’s short summers and the diminutive size of those concrete slabs means that sought-after outdoor space is frequently under-used and often relegated to storage, a repository for cafe tables and bikes.In a city of shrinking apartment sizes, it’s hard not to wonder why balconies are incorporated in so many new buildings when home buyers might get more use from the same space indoors. “Could you live here,” tweeted Toronto writer and urbanist Matt Elliott referring to a floor plan for a unit in a waterfront development called Sugar Wharf. It touts a 402 sq. ft. condo, including a 325 sq. ft. interior. The remainder, a 77 sq. ft. balcony, is relatively generous, providing just a little less space than two king mattresses laid end to end.Even if they recognize the balcony is going to be too small, too overlooked, too hot or too shadowed, people like the idea of that door leading outside, said Harrild.“In the back of (a condo buyer’s) head, if they’re going to be stuck in a glass box up in the sky they’ve got to have, maybe even subconsciously, some kind of connection to the outside world,” he said.The balcony “was everything,” when Anne Marie Aikins bought a River City condo off a builder’s plan more than four years prior to moving in last month.Throughout construction, the spokeswoman for Metrolinx would visit the site to admire her future view of the Don train yard, the Hearn generating station and Corktown Common.But when she went for a pre-occupancy inspe ...
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