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It’s an unusual proposal for an unusual building. The design renderings for 2444 Eglinton Ave. East, between Kennedy Road and Midland Avenue, are a blueprint for a massive co-operative housing effort posed to transform a parking lot and autobody shop into a co-op consisting of 612 affordable to market-priced rental units, plus hundreds more market condos.

“I think it’s really important that we don’t just build homogeneous buildings,” says principal architect Gregory Henriquez. In big cities, he hears a regular critique: they moved too fast, leaving too little time for unique, peculiar things to emerge,Ìýand as a result, buildings tended to look pretty much the same.

Their kaleidoscopic design was an intentional break from that approach, said Henriquez — and he doesn’t fret about it evoking strong emotions.

“If we worried about everyone’s opinion, everything would be beige. I think it’s our job, our role as the architects for this project, to do something meaningful and dynamic that people want to live in,” he said.

Beyond its eye-catching design, this Scarborough development — a city-backed plan in partnership with Civic Developments, Windmill Developments and the Co-operative Housing Federation of º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍø— has been hailed as a kind of breakthrough. City officials say it’ll be one of Ontario’s largest co-ops, and certainly one of the first new co-op developments of its size in some time.Ìý

While co-ops could access more government aid back in the 1970s and ‘80s, housing players nowadays have had to scrimp together funding from various programs and governments,Ìýslowing the sector’s growth to a crawl.Ìý

But interest in co-ops has been rising. City hall’s latest housing strategies identify a need for more subsidized, non-profit and co-operative housing. Recognizing co-op housing can help with housing affordability, the federal government has also promised $1.5 billion in new funding for co-op developments. Officials received 51 applications to claim those funds in 2024 — including from the Scarborough co-op team, though they’re still waiting to hear back as the process was put on ice by the federal election.Ìý

“Although everybody feels this is a really significant project, you can’t go to the bank with that, so we have to wait,” said Tom Clement, executive director of the Co-operative Housing Federation of Toronto.

Some of the design choices for the site were made with economics in mind, Henriquez told the Star.Ìý

The concrete circles that encase the windows, for example, use a repeating pattern because it means they’ll only have to pay for one pre-cast mould, he said. They’ve planned above-grade parking on the second and third levels because the ground is considered contaminated and “would cost a fortune to dig up,” he said, adding it elevated residential units above the busy street.

Henriquez considers this Scarborough property one of the most challenging sites he’s worked on, pointing to the web of rail lines and fast-moving vehicle traffic on Eglinton, plus the informal routes people use to cut across the property and access local retail. That informed their design, too, he said — with a new road bisecting the three buildings, meant to be used by residents, visitors and patrons of new retail spaces at the base.

Their team wants the retail to bolster Scarborough’s vibrant food realm. As new buildings often face criticism for yielding drugstores and banks instead of small businesses,ÌýHenriquez believes their shallower units can help local entrepreneurs.

“It’s just the right size for those sorts of boutique-oriented, mom-and-pop offerings,” he said.

He wants the project to be beautiful, and believes it will be, with landscape work by Montreal-based firm CCxA — founded by the late Claude Cormier, the designer behind Toronto’s Berczy Park and its whimsical dog fountain.ÌýThe idea is to have the new street open onto the existing green space trails behind the property, Henriquez said, so it transitions from an “inhospitable” road to a pastoral area.

Henriquez’s inspiration for the development overall is, by his own admission, somewhat surreal — modelled after a cob of Ontario-grown flint corn with its multicoloured kernels.

Once complete, city hall’s real estate agency, CreateTO, has said the property will offer units from studios to three-bedrooms, with affordable rentals to cost between 40 and 100 per cent of federally determined average market rent — the average for all rental homes, not just new listings.Ìý

Using this year’s figures, a studio unit could cost up to $1,456, a one-bedroom up to $1,715, a two-bedroom up to $1,985 and a three-bedroom up to $2,268.

The going market rate for listings, meanwhile, is higher. In March, found the average listing cost for a º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøone-bedroom unit was $2,342. 

For Henriquez, who hadn’t worked on a co-op since 2005, the project feels weighty. The model allows people of different socio-economic backgrounds to live together within one community, he said, which felt special.

“They’re something that hasn’t been done a lot of yet lately — but it’s coming back.”