By Lana Hall
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The City of Toronto is exploring the future of its
strip mall plazas, many of which are located within inner suburban neighbourhoods and on sites considered prime land for redevelopment.
In a new report titled “Prospects for Plazas” City planning staff consider the role of strip malls in their communities, how to mitigate displacement of small businesses within plazas being redeveloped, and how to enhance the public realm of existing strip mall plazas.
These strip mall plazas are prevalent across Toronto’s inner suburbs, home to more than 3,100 establishments, and as of 2023, accounting for just under 13,000 jobs, according to City data. These low-rise commercial forms have evolved from what were intended to be a temporary solution in the mid-1950s to 1980s—to provide local access to goods and services in a sprawling metropolis—into a permanent fixture of Toronto’s retail scene.
As the report highlights, strip mall plazas play strong economic, social and cultural roles in their communities, especially in neighbourhoods with lower household incomes
and higher proportions of immigrants and racialized people, where these plazas tend
to be located.
Of the study’s 300 survey respondents, 58 per cent reported visiting strip mall plazas once a week, while 70 per cent of those reported visiting two or more businesses on a single trip to a plaza.
Plaza visitors reported that proximity to their home, access to a variety of services, and the ability to support small and local businesses attracted them to local strip malls, while
business owners valued the more affordable rents in these spaces than in other locations.
The report also found that strip malls tend to contain ethnic food retailing and food offerings,
fostering local communal spaces for cultural expression.
Thanks to digital platforms like Instagram and TikTok, these spaces have also begun drawing
visitors from other parts of the city, eager to find “hidden gems” and other kinds of cultural
cuisine.
“Even though they’re more suburban in style, [strip mall plazas] are these really important
Main Streets, even though we don’t always look at them like that,” says City of Toronto planner Evan Sinclair, who worked on the report.
But Toronto’s strip malls and the businesses within them face two major challenges. Many of them end up being redeveloped into residential or mixed-use communities, which often displaces those businesses.
Plazas that remain intact have often been designed as “islands in a sea of cars,” and may lack easy pedestrian access or an attractive public realm in favour of plentiful surface parking.
According to City of Toronto data, there are currently 33 strip mall plazas with active development proposals in the city. Though
most applications propose some replacement of non-residential gross floor area (GFA), the amount being replaced is often less than what the original strip mall contained. In fact, the replacement rate of non- residential GFA on these sites is only 56 per cent.
“That’s really challenging,” says Sinclair of mitigating displacement. “I think it’s what
we spent a lot of time thinking through, and what a lot of those emerging directions startto get at: ‘How can we continue to provide the functions that the plaza provides today in a
new development that brings in really important things like more housing?’”
Other plazas, says Sinclair, may not be good candidates for redevelopment, or may have landowners who have no intention of taking on a development project. Those strip mall plazas may instead be candidates for public realm
improvement, which is where the report’s second theme of ‘enhancing the physical plaza
experience’ comes in.
Many of these strip mall plazas, says Sinclair, contain large, underutilized surface parking lots, which could lend themselves to forms of
activation that improve the public realm. This could take the form of adding landscaping
or seating, such as through the PlazaPOPS initiative.
Since 2019, PlazaPOPS has organized 12 temporary installations in privately-owned
plaza parking lots across the city, mostly in the form of parkettes or seating areas.
PlazaPOPS director of design and research Brendan Stewart says their pilots have resulted
in a broader diversity of strip mall visitors than what these plazas might normally see, with various age and cultural demographics attracted to what he calls a “third space” that public activations often provide.
Stewart says these activations work best in parking lots that already have an oversupply of parking spaces, are close to a transit stop, and have high-volume businesses close by, such as restaurants, libraries, or other neighbourhood services.
“We would definitely like to see a scaling up of PlazaPOPS, and we do think there’s a lot of potential for the model we’ve developed to spread throughout the city,” says Stewart.
In North York, which is home to 25 per cent of Toronto’s strip mall plazas, ward 6 York Centre councillor James Pasternak says plaza redevelopment proposals should be required to replace any retail or commercial space being demolished.
“It is crucial that we protect the various businesses—both large and small—that make up our suburban plazas.
These locations are often the commercial and social centre of a community and provide
local residents access to vital shopping, business, and medical services.”
While the City’s report does not provide specific
recommendations, staff are hopeful it will eventually inform the creation of policies, programs, or tools that might help achieve some of the report’s directions in terms of supporting and enhancing the businesses within the city’s strip malls.
Sinclair says that will require conversations with
other City divisions, including economic development and culture, and finance.
“We don’t want this to be a siloed project. We want to plug ourselves into other initiatives happening at the City because we see that as being our best opportunity to have [these themes] actually go somewhere,” he says.
