Home is where the mall is.Torontonians will soon be seeing more condominiums and apartment buildings springing up on big shopping centre properties across the city.Developers plan to expand and incorporate housing at the Bayview Village plaza, where two new residential towers are planned, and Dufferin Mall, set in the next few years to host four towers of condos and possibly rental units.At the Galleria Mall near Dufferin and Dupont Sts. and the Agincourt Mall in Scarborough, plans call for the demolition of these centres to make way for mixed-use developments that include condos.Yorkdale Mall has put forward what it calls a 20-year vision that includes a hotel and as many as 12 residential towers ringing the parking lot — though those behind the project say configurations may change and there are currently no construction timetables or architectural drawings.The yet-to-be-approved master plan for the Scarborough Town Centre has a long-term “work in progress” vision calling for as many as 36 highrise towers on site, with the mall staying intact.Housing coexisting on shopping mall sites is a trend spreading in North America, Europe and other parts of the world. In Toronto, where there’s a dearth of land to develop and online commerce sites such as Amazon have altered consumer habits, builders say the co-mingling of housing with the shopping mall experience makes perfect sense.“The reality of the scarcity of land opportunities within the GTA — that kind of forces developers to think out of the box and find ways to take something and create something ... where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” says Rafael Lazer, CEO of Elad Canada Inc., the company behind the mega Galleria project.Experts say malls provide mixed-use opportunities that induce developers and cities as a whole.“We often plan for one thing — this area is for housing, that area is for shopping and this place is for offices and everythi ...
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