What happens to a tree in downtown Toronto that needs to come down?

Usually, it is ground up into wood chips for landscaping mulch. But in 2016, Robert Jarvis and Sinéad Wills saw the opportunity to both reduce the CO2 emissions of that process and celebrate the beauty of urban trees by transforming them into functional furniture and beautiful objects.

After winning a bid with the City of Toronto to salvage trees downtown, Jarvis and Wills connected with us at TAS to set up shop at our 2 Tecumseth Street site.  For five years, their company Just Be Woodsy milled, kiln-dried and handcrafted these felled trees at the former abattoir.

“We are incredibly grateful for our time at 2 Tecumseth. We felt part of a historical place and did our best to honour it by making use of the old infrastructure, salvaging useful resources and re-animating it for the community. Our favourite saying was Hogtown to Logtown. It truly provided us a foundation to build a company,” said Robert Jarvis, co-founder of Just Be Woodsy.

Today, Just Be Woodsy has a 7-person team. Its furniture can be found all over Toronto and it has major contracts with the 1 Hotel and the University of Toronto. A signature of its work is the engraved coordinates of the tree’s place of origin, connecting buyers to the urban forest around us.

Beyond giving these trees a second life, this process also sequesters carbon. Wood is about 50% carbon and when that wood becomes a table or tray, the carbon is secure. According to Just Be Woodsy, the team has salvaged over a million kilograms of CO2, which is the equivalent to planting over 15,000 seedlings and watching them grow for 10 years.

At TAS, we are determined to activate our sites while we work through the research, engagement, design and municipal approval processes. Our partnership with Just Be Woodsy is a perfect match. Our two companies are aligned in our mission to create beautiful designs while reducing emissions and harm to the planet. We’ve been proud to incubate and watch their business grow over the past 7 years.

In late-2022, Just Be Woodsy moved to a new home at 772 Warden Avenue, a building in TAS’s Commercial Community Hub portfolio. Learn more about their impact story at justbewoodsy.com and come visit their new showroom to see the projects for yourself!

We’re excited to share this guest blog post from The Backyard Urban Farm Company (BUFCO) CEO Arlene Hazzan Green, who is launching their operations from a new home at our 10 North Queen Street project.

10 North Queen Street is part of TAS’s Commercial Community Hub strategy, which sees us transform a portfolio of underutilized warehouses across the GTHA into new, sustainable spaces for a lively mix of office, social enterprise and not-for-profit tenants.

Pinch us, we must be dreaming. How is it possible that our yearning to live off the land in harmony with nature has made itself manifest? And to our surprise, it didn’t take moving away from a bustling metropolis to farmland in the country. It happened by cultivating the best of country living in the city and by discovering a thriving community of city-dwelling nature-lovers who share the very same dream.  

Despite the mounting challenges of exorbitant real estate prices, outdated food policies, inflation, and systemic inequities, many local food growers, producers and businesses have found innovative and sustainable methods of bringing healthy, fresh food to our tables. And we are thrilled to be counted among them. 

But we haven’t done it alone. Thanks to our growing relationship with the very forward-thinking TAS, we’re excited to announce that we are part of their new initiative to transform existing industrial warehouses into dynamic commercial community hubs where like-minded businesses can thrive.  

What it means in practical terms is that after 12 years of operating from our home in Roncesvalles Village, we have found a new home with TAS in south Etobicoke where we can lay down roots for the long term. We moved into the building and have built our own hoophouse, established a woodworking shop and setup portable offices and storage where we can serve our clients with greater ease and efficiency.  

TAS and BUFCO’s missions align so beautifully. We are thrilled to have this opportunity to partner with a high impact company that champions conversation and collaboration in order to push the boundaries of innovation and explore what is possible. We have experienced this firsthand, with support over the years through discussion, planning, dreaming, problem solving and visioning for the future. #TeamTAS understands the many challenges that small, local businesses like ours face and have been key to helping us establish our permanent home at 10 North Queen Street.  

We are not the only small business that benefits from their clear vision of livable cities of the future. TAS believes that affordability, climate change and social capital are the most pressing issues facing our neighbourhoods, and thankfully they both talk the talk and walk the walk. As happy beneficiaries of this vision, BUFCO is now able to expand our ability to inspire, enable and empower urbanites to grow their own food and help them to reconnect with nature. 

We welcome those who have made an online purchase for vegetable, herb, fruit and flower seedlings and other garden goodies to pick up their orders at our new yard at 10 North Queen Street in Etobicoke. We are not set up as a retail operation and can’t accommodate drop ins but please stay tuned for possible events in the near future. And if you haven’t ordered your certified organic seedlings yet, there is still plenty of stock available at bufco.ca/seedlings.

About BUFCO: After three successful decades working in the motion picture industry, husband and wife team Arlene Hazzan Green and Marc Green co-founded The Backyard Urban Farm Company (BUFCO), an award winning, organic vegetable landscaping company in Toronto. They are on a mission to inspire, educate, and empower urbanites to grow their own food and help them reconnect with nature.

Impact is Our Purpose, Real Estate is Our Tool

A note from our President & CEO, Mazyar Mortazavi:

Positively impacting people’s lives has always been at the heart of what we do here at TAS – it’s embedded in our DNA and in our approach to life. As new immigrants to Canada 40 years ago, my parents founded TAS because they saw custom home building as a powerful tool that could help families thrive. Our toolkit and impact ambitions have evolved significantly since those early days.

We started building mixed-use condominiums in the early 2000’s and we experienced a serious setback during the financial crisis of 2008. I learned some hard lessons about over-leveraging in the pursuit of profit, and it forced me to reflect on the company’s purpose. When I set out to rebuild TAS, I was determined to create a new and different kind of development company – one that sets a new standard for how business can drive profit as well as positive outcomes for people and the planet.

And so, for the last few decades, building on our roots as a people-focused company, we’ve been testing, trying and innovating for impact. For TAS in 2021, real estate is our tool, not our purpose. And that’s why we describe TAS as an unconventional impact company. We promote connected neighbourhoods and caring, committed communities. We believe that profit is foundational, but not the only goal. We measure success in our ability to push the boundaries of innovation to better serve the people of today and future generations.

On behalf of the entire TAS team, I am thrilled to introduce this impact framework which marks a major step forward in our long-standing commitment to support society and the environment through our work.

The framework is the result of decades of deep engagement with the communities we serve, a healthy dose of learning-by-doing, and an in-depth evaluation project over the past six months to review the best available impact methodologies and practices. Our new framework formalizes our approach to impact through an ambitious set of objectives – including environmental, social and governance factors – and charts a path forward for how we’ll track our progress over the coming years and decades.

We have selected the Future-Fit Business Benchmark to strategically anchor our approach. In our view, it is the most comprehensive and leading-edge methodology out there. Grounded in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Future-Fit provides a roadmap to:

1. Comprehensively assess and eliminate any and all negative externalities created by our work; and
2. Focus our pursuit to positively impact people and the planet by tackling climate change, broadening affordability and equity, and building social capital.

To demonstrate our unwavering commitment to creating a society that can flourish in the 21st century, we are the first real estate platform in the world to declare ourselves a Future-Fit Pioneer. I’m proud that we’ve taken this bold leap, which expands our long-standing ambition to positively disrupt and lead a systems-change towards purpose within our industry.

It is critically important to highlight that none of this can be done alone. We all need to work together – across public and private sectors – to ensure a vibrant and resilient shared future. Our TAS team will continue collaborating with a wide range of partners to deliver and scale our impact, and we hope you’ll join us and take part in this collective journey. If you have any questions, suggestions or a great partnership idea, please get in touch – we look forward to connecting.

The impact framework we’re releasing today is a statement of intent. It sets out our strategy, shares our ambitious long-term objectives and highlights the initial actions we’re taking to achieve these targets. We’ve embedding the framework in our management systems and will publish a detailed metrics-based progress report annually starting in mid-2022. We are committed to showcasing our work so that others can learn from our successes and failures as we make our way on our journey. And so, moving forward, when we research a new building material, find a new way to underwrite for impact, develop a new commercial equity sharing model, or explore a new policy idea – you’re going to hear about it. We will act as an open-source innovator in pursuit of positive impact.

We hope that you’ll find this framework as exciting as we do, and that it will spark new ideas around how you, your colleagues and your partners can make a lasting positive impact that we can all celebrate.

Let’s create that together. Download our Impact Framework HERE .