61-storey condo tower to replace abandoned Toronto hotel

A Toronto that was repurposed into an emergency homeless shelter could soon be torn down for an ambitious condo development that would soar over 200 metres into the midtown skyline.

Developers Reserve Properties and Westdale Properties have become the biggest players in the local condo boom sweeping the midtown area, and the team is once again proposing to shake up the local skyline with a proposed 61-storey condo tower that would rise just north of a new Eglinton Crosstown station.

The site in question at 808 Mt. Pleasant Road is home to a vacant 10-storey hotel that formerly operated as the Best Western Roehampton Hotel until 2020, when it was leased out to the City of Toronto as an emergency homeless shelter.

Also included in the redevelopment is a surface parking lot north of the hotel, along with a pair of single-family homes along Roehampton Avenue that were recently acquired by the developer and folded into the land assembly.

Plans to redevelop the site have been in the works for seven years, though the current proposal stands almost double the height of a 35-storey version of the plan that was approved via a provincial settlement in 2021. 

Two years later, Reserve and Westdale scooped up the site from former owner Streetwise Capital Partners, paving the way for the supersized resubmission presented to the City roughly one year later in late 2024.

With a height approaching 205 metres, the Sweeny &Co Architects-designed tower would stand as one of the tallest buildings on the midtown skyline. This height is a major step up from the approved height of almost 119 metres.

As one would expect with such a drastic height increase, the unit count has skyrocketed to nearly double what was proposed in 2021, increasing from 514 to just shy of 900 condos.

This new residential space would be anchored to the major thoroughfare with over 812 square metres of commercial space at street level.

In terms of parking, vehicle spaces have been slashed from earlier versions of the plan, and the current proposal now calls for a two-level underground parking garage housing 64 spaces for residents and visitors, while the bicycle parking component has been given a generous boost up to 988 spaces.

The proposal is just the latest in a string of increasingly ambitious plans for the area that will soon be served by the Eglinton Crosstown LRT when it finally enters service as the TTC’s Line 5 — currently anticipated to take place in mid-2025 after numerous delays and legal challenges.