There was a funeral for a Coffin Factory two weeks ago.

Since the late 19th century, when the collection of brick buildings at Niagara and Tecumseth Sts. were built, they’ve employed Torontonians. For nearly 70 of the intervening years, the National Casket Company produced funeral supplies here, but since the mid 1970s it has housed a different kind of worker: artists and other creatives who lived and worked there. They’re being evicted and the buildings will be renovated and incorporated into a residential condo development. Its imaginative residents gave it a sombre farewell.

If the Coffin Factory’s dozens of units were standard rental apartments, the story would be different: under Toronto’s rules, if an apartment building with 6 or more rental units is redeveloped, those units must be replaced with new rental units.

Places in and around the Coffin Factory were once bustling hubs of employment but have shifted toward residential due to market forces. Later, a modern form of industrial landscape was built in areas outside of the old city of Toronto. These too have lost a lot of the manufacturing jobs they initially had. However, unlike the Coffin Factory, they’re protected as “employment lands” and redevelopment to mixed uses is resisted.

Though the built form is largely the same, it doesn’t mean these places haven’t changed. Last weekend I went on a walk organized by 6Place Toronto, a University of Toronto project investigating these kinds of areas. We walked through the vast Etobicoke industrial lands that run south of Kipling subway station. On previous trips through these kinds of neighbourhoods I could hear bands rehearsing behind garage doors and saw people coming and going from places of worship that inhabit former industrial spaces.

On the 6Place tour, while crossing old rail spurs and near-feral hydro corridors, we stopped by the Tibetan Canadian Cultural Centre on Titan Rd. housed in a former lighting factory. Further south we visited a woodworking co-op where individual carpenters share space and machinery, cutting down the overhead needed to run their own shops. Traditional manufacturing and other shops exist here too. It isn’t exactly the Rust Belt, but it’s certainly in flux.

The recently released 2018 City of Toronto Employment Survey reveals these parts of the city are still home to considerable amounts of employment even if they seem not as they once were.

What do you think?

It’s an interesting tension. We do not want Toronto to become a bedroom community, so setting aside land reserved for work makes sense, but work isn’t what it used to be and separating it, as was the style in the 20th century, may not make sense anymore. At the same time, we need more housing in Toronto and with massive areas of detached housing neighbourhoods off limits to even gentle density, there could be mounting pressure to open employment areas up for residential development.

It’s reminiscent of the “Two Kings.” In 1996, Mayor Barbara Hall’s administration changed the zoning bylaws in two areas on King St., at Spadina Ave. and Parliament St., to allow commercial and residential development in these fallow industrial areas, leading to radical change.

Margie Zeidler, who runs the arts and culture hub 401 Richmond in a former factory, told me that there were similar arguments in 1996 around preserving the Two Kings areas exclusively for industrial employment.

With respect to our creative industries, we don’t value this kind of work as we should. As a country, that is. Canada is a resource extraction nation, and the remaining manufacturing jobs, despite not being as plentiful as they once were, remain the golden jobs that can vault working class folk into the middle class. We shouldn’t overlook the arts though.

The Toronto Arts Council’s 2014 report, “Toronto Arts Facts,” found that 174,000 people are employed in Toronto’s arts and culture sector and that it contributes $11.3 billion to Toronto’s GDP annually. Despite all this, our specific protections of employment areas doesn’t include where a lot of this kind of activity takes place.

Condos are not the enemy: they’re a neutral form of housing. Quite a few people are quite happy in them and they provide housing for many. Some are well designed, some not. Some are overpriced, and some, well, they’re all probably overpriced here. Instead, the villain in all this might be the lack of protection of live-work spaces for artists and craftspeople, and a general lack of proper affordable housing expansion.

“It’s obvious that absent dedicated funding and policy tools, even spaces towards the edges of the core will eventually be totally lost to redevelopment,” says Shauna Brail, an urban studies professor and the associate director of U of T’s School of Cities. “Perhaps it’s an opportunity for Toronto to lead with a made-in-Toronto solution that encourages preservation of at least some of what’s left of affordable live-work spaces.”

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If we’re going to preserve our valuable employment lands, we might as well expand the idea of what valuable employment is.

Read more:

As Toronto’s Coffin Factory dies, artists mourn their affordable live-work units

Five outside-the-box housing ideas that Toronto should try, according to report

Employment gap narrows between university-educated immigrants and Canadian-born counterparts