Sidewalk Labs’ long-awaited master plan for the high-tech district it hopes to create on Toronto’s waterfront promises to produce an “economic windfall” for the city, province and Canada and outlines a new strategy to help governments fund a $1.2-billion LRT line the firm says is critical to the project.The document — 1,524 pages in all including three volumes plus an overview — calls for 190 acres of the eastern waterfront to be turned into an Innovative Development and Economic Acceleration (IDEA) District — an area that includes the 12-acre Quayside site near Parliament St. and Queens Quay E. and 20 acres of the City of Toronto-owned, yet-to-be-developed property in the Port Lands called “Villiers West.”Sidewalk Labs, a Manhattan-based sister firm of Google, says it would be the lead real estate developer along with “local partners” for Quayside and Villiers West, where Sidewalk Labs would “prove out” its innovations and, if successful, take them into the broader Port Lands area.In the master plan, entitled Toronto Tomorrow: A New Approach for Inclusive Growth, Sidewalk Labs says it would provide, along with local partners, up to $1.3 billion in funding and financing on the waterfront.The firm says that money would include $900 million in “equity investment” with local partners, and $80 million in investment, again with local partners, in a tall timber factory that would make timber for the wood buildings Sidewalk wants to construct in the tech district, and 10 per cent profit sharing with governments for 10 years for some technologies developed for and used in the IDEA District. It would also include up to $400 million in “optional credit financing” to help accelerate the delivery of a new LRT line on the waterfront and pay for “advanced development of municipal and advanced infrastructure systems”; Sidewalk says of that amount $100 million would ...
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