The $42M Pool Planned for Queens Quay, and What Amenities Do to Property Values

Start with the part that matters most if you own or are shopping near Toronto's western waterfront: there is no new pool at Queens Quay, and there will not be one for years. What exists is a funded intention. The City has $42 million earmarked in its 2026 to 2035 Capital Budget and Plan for a park and aquatic centre at 318 Queens Quay West, the Rees Street parking lot. As of today the City is still doing environmental investigations, still reviewing preliminary options, and still developing the engagement strategy that will feed an international design competition that has not been held. Public consultations are expected in 2027.

So this is a good moment to ask a more useful question than "when does it open." The question is what a promised amenity is actually worth to the property around it, and when that value shows up. The research on this is better than you would expect, and it does not say what most listing copy implies.

Thinking about how neighbourhood plans affect what you own? Get a valuation and we will tell you what is already priced in.

What is actually planned

The site is a 2.4 acre open air parking lot with roughly 300 spaces, sitting between the Harbourfront Centre and the Rogers Centre with a clear view of the CN Tower. The City describes the plan as a new park anchored by what it calls a first of its kind aquatic centre, with complementary uses alongside it. The need was first identified in the 2018 Bathurst Quay Site and Specific Area Policy approved by Council, then reinforced by the 2018 TOCore Downtown Community Services and Facility Strategy and the 2019 to 2038 Parks and Recreation Facilities Plan, both also Council approved.

Those documents all pointed at the same thing: the downtown core was projected to add a great many residents and had nowhere near the recreation capacity to serve them. Anyone who has tried to book a lane swim downtown on a weekday evening already knew that.

The timeline is the story

Funding for this aquatic centre first appeared in the Parks and Recreation capital budget in 2019. That is seven years ago. An international design competition was actually held for the site back in 2018 and the resulting plan was scrapped. The current City page says further information will come as funding and timelines are confirmed through the 2027 budget process, which is a careful way of saying the money is allocated but the schedule is not.

None of that means the project is not happening. It does mean that anyone pricing a condo today on the assumption that a pool opens next door soon is making an assumption the City itself has not made.

Three more on how public decisions land on private property:

• Top 5 Public Pools in Etobicoke
• Toronto Just Cut Development Charges by up to 60 Percent: What It Means for Buyers
• A Massive Green Win for Etobicoke Lakeshore

What the research says about amenities and prices

The economics here is capitalization, which is the idea that a benefit you cannot buy separately gets absorbed into the price of the thing you can buy. You cannot purchase a swimming pool two blocks from your door. You can purchase a condo two blocks from a swimming pool, and the price of that condo quietly contains the pool.

Hedonic studies, which pull apart a sale price into the value of its individual attributes, have measured this repeatedly for parks and green space. A well known Portland study by Lutzenhiser and Netusil found homes within about 1,500 feet of a park gained roughly $1,926 in value for every 200 feet closer they sat. Work in Lodz found a significant positive effect inside 500 metres. A Prague study found the effect still detectable out to two kilometres, though weaker.

Two things are worth pulling out of that. The first is that the effect is real and consistently positive. The second is distance decay, the technical term for the fact that it fades fast as you move away. A pool at Rees Street is a meaningful amenity if you are at Bathurst and Queens Quay. It is a nice thing to read about if you are in Humber Bay Shores.

When does the value arrive

This is where it gets interesting for anyone holding property nearby right now. The research on transit infrastructure, which is the best studied version of this question, generally finds anticipation effects: prices start moving when a project is announced rather than when it opens. Studies in Hong Kong, Sydney and elsewhere have found benefits capitalized at an early stage, well before anyone rides the train.

The results are not unanimous, and the exceptions are instructive. A study of the Laval metro extension outside Montreal, tracking values from 1995 to 2013, found no measurable anticipation effect at all. The plausible reading is that markets price announcements they believe, and discount announcements they do not. A project that has been in a capital budget since 2019 without a design competition is exactly the kind of announcement a market learns to discount.

Put those together and the practical conclusion is uncomfortable for sellers and useful for buyers. If the market believed this pool were imminent, it would already be in the price, and you would be paying for it today. The fact that it likely is not in the price is itself information about what the market thinks of the timeline.

The problem with the obvious comparison

Someone will point at Regent Park. It got a City run aquatic centre, an arts centre, new parkland and athletic grounds, and values there have moved a great deal. The pool must have done that.

It did not, or at least you cannot show that it did. Regent Park's aquatic centre arrived inside a five phase, 25 year redevelopment of 69 acres that replaced the housing stock, changed the street grid and added thousands of market units. Attributing the price change to any single component of that is not analysis, it is storytelling. This is the endogeneity problem in one paragraph: cities build amenities where growth is already planned, so the amenity and the growth show up together in the data and refuse to be separated.

The Rees Street project has the same feature. The Council documents behind it justify the pool by pointing at projected downtown population growth. The growth is the reason for the pool. Any price effect you later measure will be tangled up with the growth that caused the pool in the first place.

What this means in practice

The counterpoint to all of this, and it is a fair one: the 2018 competition was scrapped in a different fiscal era, the money is now in a ten year capital plan rather than a wish list, and the ward has an active push behind it. If the 2027 budget process produces a firm schedule, the market will reprice quickly, and the people who bought while it was still theoretical will have done well. That is the trade. Just make it deliberately rather than by accident.

If you are looking at a specific unit and trying to work out how much of the story is already in the asking price, that is a question with an actual answer. Book a call and we will pull the comparable sales, separate what the building is worth from what the neighbourhood plan is worth, and tell you if we think you are paying for a promise.

Dave Dubbin
Real Estate Expert
Dave Dubbin & Associates
Real Estate Broker for Etobicoke and Toronto
Sotheby's International Realty, Canada