Dream of starter home fades in T.O.

City’s planner says young families should be looking to apartments

Toronto’s chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat grew up on a half-acre lot in the suburbs. She’s raising her own children in a house with a typical postage-stamp city yard.

When she talks to them about where they will raise their own families, Keesmaat encourages her kids to imagine an apartment.

That’s because the old idea of a starter house — a detached three-bedroom home with a yard — is a non-starter for many families in the city now, she told the Toronto Region Board of Trade (TRBOT) on Tuesday.

Single-family homes are prohibitively expensive and there aren’t many being built anymore.

“If they choose to stay in the city those are the odds — that they’ll raise their family very differently from how they were raised, just as I’m raising my family very differently from how I was raised,” she said, adding that it’s a good sign environmental footprints are shrinking.

A recent TRBOT survey, on the housing preferences of would-be homebuyers, shows how out-of-step with reality the perceptions of starter homes are, Keesmaat said.

The research showed that 81 per cent of aspiring homeowners don’t want a condo and 69 per cent want a house with at least three bedrooms.

But 83 per cent of housing units built between 2011 and 2016 in Toronto were midrise and highrise apartments.

Aspiring homeowners may be coveting an outdated dream, because there aren’t enough examples of complete communities where families can live car-free and amenity rich, she said.

The best schools and parks should be in the densest neighbourhoods. Condos should reconsider swimming pools in favour of gymnasiums, craft and media rooms for young and older children, she told the business group.

Toronto’s problems are part of a global situation in which the economic dynamics around housing have shifted and that is leaving young professionals caught in the middle.

“They are now competing with global capital. They are in entry-level positions making entry-level salaries, sometimes working more than one job and they are competing with capital from around the city that wants the same housing that they do,” she said.

Keesmaat’s speech was followed by a panel discussion of how the city could create more infill housing and starter homes — a growing challenge for renters, homeowners and builders.

Family-friendly amenities such as schools and transit already exist in neighbourhoods where the population is stagnant or declining, planner Sean Galbraith said.

“That’s a huge opportunity to add more people density,” he said, noting that 62 per cent of Toronto’s residentially zoned lands only permit single-family houses.

Co-housing and laneway suites — ways of adding what planners called “gentle density” — is one way of increasing affordable housing stock. But we need to leverage publicly held land, said Michelle German of Evergreen City Works.

“It’s a huge resource and low-hanging fruit for the government to say, ‘Here is some land,’ to build the kind of housing we need,” said German, who credited the provincial Liberals’ designation of some land for housing in its Fair Housing policy announced in April.

Toronto should be intensifying along the subway, said Steven Daniels, Tridel’s vice-president of development planning.

“The price of land has gone up exponentially,” he said, “to the point where we would look at sites where we would be $60, $70 per square foot. Now we’re up to $120 (per sq. ft.).”