History
Strategic Regional Research Alliance (SRRA) began in 2008 as an informal partnership between the Canadian Urban Institute (CUI) and Real Estate Search Corporation (RESC), working collaboratively on independent reports commissioned by the Toronto Office Coalition and the City of Mississauga. Those reports blended the CUI’s experience in land use public policy and employment and industrial land preservation with RESC’s specialized knowledge of commercial real estate. These ground-breaking publications benefited from RESC’s unique data base of every office building their tenants and development history in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area.
The positive response from both private and public sector stakeholders to these early reports led to the formation of SRRA as a membership-based non-profit in 2011. SRRA was created to provide evidence-based analysis of critically important infrastructure and development trends without regard for partisan politics. An important part of its research is the collecting and then adapting innovative practices from around the world for application in the GTA.
SRRA began to hold regular meetings known as Forums to engage with a wider network of expertise. These Forums feature guest speakers and insights from the editors and researchers of SRRA publications.
By 2016, SRRA had expanded its mandate to coordinate employment land, transit and housing policy into a single argument for managing the extreme growth of the region. To support this work, SRRA has added to its data base all multi-unit residential built form. The initiative to connect transit and real estate policy led to the publication of groundbreaking research into why development occurs at transit locations and why it does not.
Further work on the location of multi-residential buildings related to transportation, the value of preserving employment land and the importance of policy innovation to enable affordable housing directly connected to transportation hubs is planned for the post-COVID era.
COVID overturned the world of office-based work in March of 2020 when all but essential personnel were forced to leave offices and work remotely. This caused immense economic hardship to transit agencies, retailers, service providers and others, in office building clusters around the world. With financial support from Toronto’s larger Business Improvement Areas (BIAs) and the City of Toronto, SRRA developed and delivered unique bi-monthly data-driven reports on office occupancy to monitor the impact and evolving trends related to remote and hybrid work – the only regional economy to benefit from such a resource.
