Sam Mizrahi says the 12-storey, 93-unit building at 1451 Wellington St. W. is expected to be ready for occupancy by September.
The developer behind a troubled Toronto condominium project that has made headlines for being years behind schedule says his luxury condo in Westboro is on track to be completed this fall.
Sam Mizrahi says the 12-storey, 93-unit building at 1451 Wellington St. W. is expected to be ready for occupancy by September.
“We got landmark status for this project and its architecture design,” Mizrahi, the founder and president of Toronto-based Mizrahi Developments, told OBJ on Monday. “It’s been an incredible project for us and we’re looking forward to its completion.”
Known as 1451 Wellington, the controversial project at the corner of Wellington Street West and Island Park Drive has been more than a decade in the making.
The developer’s original proposal in 2013 stalled at the city’s planning committee over a zoning bylaw that prohibited any building taller than nine storeys.
After Mizrahi appealed, the Ontario Municipal Board – then the province’s final tribunal for municipal zoning disputes – ruled in 2015 that the developer would either have to cut the building to nine storeys or come up with a new design featuring distinctive “landmark” architecture.
The planning committee approved the revised architectural design that October, and the OMB gave the project its final stamp of approval later that year.
COVID-related delays
While the condo was originally slated to be completed in mid-2021, Mizrahi said the pandemic threw a wrench into construction.
Restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19 effectively shut down work on the site for months at a time, he noted, and labour and material shortages further disrupted its progress.
“COVID caused a two-year delay on every project,” Mizrahi said. “When you tell the world to stay at home and you can’t work … I think everyone’s forgotten what happened. Nothing was happening for almost two years, not only in production of materials in factories, but also in labour. Labour was very hard to get.
“We’re coming back to normal now, but it’s taken a year and a half for that to happen. You don’t just turn it back on and everything’s back to normal after closing the world for two years. It doesn’t work like that. We’re just getting back to normal now.”
Interest rate hikes and rising inflation have also wreaked havoc on the real estate industry in the past couple of years, prompting developers to pause or cancel major projects.
Mizrahi Developments has not been immune. The firm’s biggest project – The One, a building in downtown Toronto that was billed as Canada’s tallest condo tower with 85 floors of condo units, hotel suites and retail space – has fallen years behind schedule amid allegations of being hundreds of millions of dollars over budget.
However, Mizrahi said financing was not a major concern at 1451 Wellington.
“Interest rates are a factor, but they're not as big a factor as COVID was,” he said. “I would blame 80 per cent (of the delay) on COVID, 20 per cent on interest rates.”
Mizrahi said the building’s interior finishings are in the process of being installed and its copper roof is being manufactured.
Once all the interior work is done, the adjoining parkette and playground will be all that’s left to finish at the property, he added.
Meanwhile, Mizrahi said his company is “actively engaged” in talks to purchase two other sites in Westboro in the hope of launching more luxury condo developments in the capital in the near future.
“The housing (market) in Ottawa has been very strong, and we’re looking at completing this project and starting new ones in the Ottawa market similar to the type of project that we built here on Wellington,” he said.
“We think it’s a growing market. That’s the reason we came in in the first place.”
