{"id":35243,"date":"2026-05-07T04:18:39","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T04:18:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/35243\/"},"modified":"2026-05-07T04:18:39","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T04:18:39","slug":"buyer-raises-a-stink-over-a-new-high-rise-with-no-garbage-chutes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/35243\/","title":{"rendered":"Buyer raises a stink over a new high-rise with no garbage chutes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Bauhaus, a condo building at 284 King St. East, in Toronto on Tuesday.Fred Lum\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n

Most people don\u2019t want to think about garbage too much, but new residents in a downtown Toronto condominium have been forced to do exactly that. <\/p>\n

For Mary Rizvi, the discussion about entering into a preconstruction purchase agreement to buy an apartment at 284 King St. E. (a condo building known as Bauhaus) in 2022 was about typical topics: size, location and cost. <\/p>\n

One thing Ms. Rizvi didn\u2019t think about was garbage, junk, waste and how to dispose of it. She\u2019d lived in apartments before and assumed there would be a garbage chute to conveniently whisk away any trash from the 18th-floor apartment. Now the building is almost complete, some folks are moving in ahead of registration, which is due to begin in weeks, and it\u2019s become clear that there are no garbage disposal chutes on any of the floors of the 33-storey building.<\/p>\n

Garbage was \u201cthe last thing on my mind,\u201d Ms. Rizvi said. \u201cIf you\u2019re paying the kind of money they\u2019re asking for \u2013 like a million-dollar apartment \u2013 and you don\u2019t have a garbage chute?\u201d <\/p>\n

Lamb Development Corp. is behind the project (its principal Brad Lamb may be familiar from his series of \u201cThis Lamb Sells Condos\u201d billboards advertising his real estate brokerage). Mr. Lamb and other principals at his company didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment about the decision not to include garbage chutes.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a number of buildings where we haven\u2019t provided garbage chutes on the floors,\u201d said Adam Feldmann, an associate at architects-Alliance, the company that designed Bauhaus. He said garbage chutes are not universally employed in tall buildings across Canada, and several of the company\u2019s Toronto clients have asked for buildings without one.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

There are no garbage disposal chutes on any of the floors of the 33-storey building.Fred Lum\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re designing a 17-storey building that doesn\u2019t have one right now,\u201d Mr. Feldmann said, adding that most of his projects that don\u2019t have chutes are mid-rises. He said each decision is client-driven and architects-Alliance has done buildings with as many as three chutes (one for each waste stream) and as few as none, but the taller a building is, the more issues they can have with damage, jamming and cross contamination.<\/p>\n

As industry experts point out, garbage chutes may be commonplace, but they are not a requirement in the building code in Ontario for any size of multifamily building. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like having in-suite laundry. That\u2019s an amenity, but that\u2019s something people expect in their buildings,\u201d said Blair Scorgie, a professional planner and principal of Scorgie Planning, who said that while it\u2019s not unheard of to have residents haul their own trash-bags down elevators or stairs in mid-rise, multifamily buildings \u2013 even in those closer to 20 storeys \u2013 it\u2019s rare among newer high rises and high-end condominiums. He speculates that a mix of cost-cutting and site constraints could have informed the decision.<\/p>\n

Installing chutes is not a major cost when compared with high-rise budgets, which can easily soar above $100-million in Toronto, according to Elliot Steiner, president of ELM Development Corp. \u201cThe whole thing is under $10,000 per floor. You\u2019re probably saving yourself $300,000,\u201d he said. However, while not criticizing the decision, he said the architectural drawings suggested the somewhat tight space for each floor of the Bauhaus \u2013 which has only eight apartments per floor on the upper levels \u2013 could have meant losing valuable living space to carve out a couple square metres for the garbage rooms.<\/p>\n

In the disclosure documents that came with Ms. Rizvi\u2019s purchase, there\u2019s no explicit mention of garbage chutes.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s next for the Canadian housing market, according to our reporters<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe condominium has a garbage room on level 1 of the condominium which can be accessed and used by the residents of the condominium for its garbage. \u2026 Owners or their tenants are responsible for recycling of paper, glass, plastic and metal refuse in the garbage room,\u201d the document reads. <\/p>\n

\u201cAs a real estate lawyer, I would never have thought to look for chutes. You can\u2019t think of every single thing,\u201d said David Feld, a partner in Feld Kalia Professional Corp., who says buyers are usually more focused on deposit terms and delivery timelines. That said, in recent years, he has begun checking for some potential lifestyle-cramping issues, such as whether the building will ban large pets.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would have been good if they had disclosed it cleanly, so that the buyer is aware. It may have turned some people away; I don\u2019t think I would have bought it,\u201d Mr. Feld said. He has spoken with some clients in the building who hoped the failure to disclose the chute-less garbage situation might be material enough to dispute the purchase contracts, but as of now, he\u2019s not hopeful there are sufficient grounds.<\/p>\n

As a planner, Mr. Scorgie has run into building sites that make it difficult to manage garbage disposal, such as awkwardly shaped land that was snapped up and redeveloped during the condo boom. And there are issues associated with chutes: They can get blocked. If they have automated sorting systems, those can break down. And there\u2019s even a City of Toronto program aimed at convincing buildings to close the old-style single-chamber chutes, which would mix and cross-contaminate organic, recyclable and solid waste streams. For all those reasons, Mr. Scorgie wouldn\u2019t be surprised to see more buildings under construction without garbage chutes.<\/p>\n

He also warns anyone buying into a chute-less high-rise has to think about potential future costs associated with the extra wear and tear on elevators all those intra-building garbage runs could create. That\u2019s especially true when a building has the minimum two elevators, such as at Bauhaus.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like a recipe for putting more strain on vertical circulation,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd now you\u2019ve got garbage in the elevators. It\u2019s not a perfect solution,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

Mr. Steiner of ELM has built a building without garbage chutes before, in Halifax, but doesn\u2019t think that choice is a great fit for his company\u2019s projects in Toronto. <\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t like it for me, I\u2019ll never do the non-garbage chute thing again,\u201d he said. \u201cI want to build something I want to live in.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Bauhaus, a condo building at 284 King St. East, in Toronto on Tuesday.Fred…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35244,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[484,1362,7771,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-35243","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-toronto","8":"tag-noastack","9":"tag-real-estate","10":"tag-the-listing","11":"tag-toronto"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35243\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}