Toronto missing the middle on housing
City shutting out affordable homes from more established neighbourhoods, advocates say
Walk south on High Park Ave. in the Junction from Dundas St. toward Bloor St. and you’ll see detached houses rubbing shoulders with humbler semis and walk-up apartments.
“You’ve got it all right there,” says Toronto planner Sean Galbraith.
High Park Ave. is a model street, he says, when it comes to one of the hottest topics in the Toronto region’s pervasive housing conversation. It’s a rare example of “the missing middle,” a planning term for homes that fall between a single detached house and a midrise apartment building. It includes semis, laneway homes, secondary suites and townhouses. In some settings, small apartment buildings are considered part of the missing middle.
It’s the kind of housing that a growing number of politicians, planners and urbanists say we need to build if we’re going to encourage gentle densities and make the region’s prized neighbourhoods vital and accessible to young families.
It’s not that this type of housing doesn’t exist. It’s just too scarce for the growing number of young families who can’t afford a detached house but want to live close to transit, shops and schools.
Zoning rules have shut missing middle homes out of large swathes of the city. There are about 20,000 hectares where it’s virtually impossible to build anything except single-family detached houses, said Galbraith. (Toronto coversa little more than 64,000 hectares.)
“I can’t remember the last time somebody built a small walk-up apartment like a fourplex, something like you see in Parkdale or the old Annex,” he said.
He blames the city’s official plan for freezing neighbourhoods to protect against the blockbusting of the 1960s. That’s when developers bought up homes, tore them down and built apartment towers in the middle of established areas. Now, he said, “You can knock a bungalow down and build a two- or three-storey house as long as there’s only one unit in it. Doesn’t matter if it’s the scale of the neighbours or not, which makes no sense to me.”
It’s not that time has stood still in Toronto. City council has adopted a report setting standards for laneway suites. City planners have been focused on avenues such as Eglinton, making them more transit-oriented, walkable and bike friendly. Missing-middle advocates admit the city can’t do everything at once.
But they also recognize it is difficult for politicians to persuade home-owning constituents that gently increasing the density of their neighbourhoods with missing middle housing won’t erode their property values.
The 905 communities surrounding Toronto are often seen as an affordable alternative to families who can’t afford to buy in the city. But like many global cities, even Toronto’s commuter communities are becoming prohibitively expensive.
A stacked townhome in Brampton might go for $300,000 or $400,000. It sounds like a lot but in today’s housing market that’s relatively affordable, said Michael Collins-Williams, director of policy at the Ontario Home Builders Association.
Space and distance are two inevitable compromises of the region’s rising property values.
“Even with this missing middle, they’ll have to accept less space,” he said.
It helps that there’s a spreading ethos embracing the idea that smaller is better and rejecting the accumulation of stuff, said Collins-Williams.
“Housing is much more expensive now in terms of the multipliers of average income. If you want the space, you’re going to have to compromise on location and live far, far away from the city to afford the traditional subdivision. If you’re willing to compromise on space, you may be able to get a better location. You could ride transit instead of having a car,” he said.
To meet provincial growth targets, Mississauga has been building its own vibrant skyscraping downtown. But without more stacked and backto-back townhomes and small apartment buildings, Mayor Bonnie Crombie fears her city will be missing another middle — the middleclass families with annual incomes between $50,000 and $100,000, for whom Mississauga has traditionally been a destination.
So the city has developed a missing middle strategy with zoning and tax provisions to encourage the development of affordable — not just subsidized — housing.
“Many middle-income households in Mississauga are struggling to enter the housing and rental market due to rising prices.
“One in three households are spending more than 30 per cent of their gross household income on housing, which is considered unaffordable,” Crombie told a Peel Region housing summit this year.
But a lack of data may be undermining the suspected urgency behind the need for more missing middle homes, said Cherise Burda, executive director of the Ryerson City Building Institute.
“We have over 100,000 multi-unit homes coming down the pipe over the next five years. The question is, are we building the right type of housing?
“We’re building a lot of studios and one-bedrooms in high rises but is that for families or is it a lot of building for investment?” she said.
If we aren’t building for families, there’s nowhere for millennials to go once they leave their small condos except further away from their jobs, transit and existing infrastructure. It adds to congestion and puts more pressure on the limited supply of family-friendly housing in urban centres.
“When you talk about affordability, it’s the housing that’s in our more location-efficient neighbourhoods that is holding more value. If we don’t build more of that appropriate housing, we’ll gut out the city and young families will have to live away,” said Burda. CMHC measures the number of condos built, but it doesn’t break down their size or whether they are highrise apartments or stacked townhouses.
The province sets growth targets, but the ministry of housing told the Toronto Star that it’s up to municipalities to forecast their own needs and track the kind of housing built there.
But a senior researcher with the Centre for Urban Research and Land Development at Ryerson University says the Toronto area is behind other Canadian cities in building the missing middle.
“Twenty per cent of (housing) completions in 2016 were in the missing middle in the GTA, compared to 30 per cent in both Calgary and Vancouver and 43 per cent in Montreal,” wrote Diana Petramala in a recent blog post.
Other cities, including San Francisco and New York, are also promoting the missing middle, says urban policy consultant Brian Kelcey.
“The difference in Toronto is, there is a real sense from people who work on smaller developments that the city and city planners and prominent urbanists are talking a lot about this but they’re not actually doing anything,” he said.
Kelcey points to North Vancouver, where residential, detached housing lots have been rezoned to allow for the building of up to three units.
“There is no such thing as a one- home lot in North Vancouver,” he said.
But missing-middle housing isn’t an overnight solution to the Toronto region’s sprawl and affordability challenges. It’s part of an evolution, not a radical makeover, stressed Galbraith.
“This is a 20-year idea, not a twoyear idea. It would allow neighbourhoods to evolve and reflect basic demographic changes. We don’t have as many kids as we used to, so why do we need a five-bedroom house with one person living in it when that person could replace it with a duplex? They still live there, sell the other half or rent it out,” he said.
“I can’t think of any real valid reason we wouldn’t want to do this from a public perspective.”