Pedestrians walk past apartment rental buildings along Queen St. East in Toronto’s Beaches neighbourhood on Mar 11.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Does Toronto want to build more housing?
It’s a simple question, but the answer is never clear. Even when City Hall makes it easier to build new housing – as it likely will Thursday with a city council vote – it undermines its own efforts with policy that’s timid and overcomplicated.
The policy being discussed by council is the Major Streets Study, part of a larger effort called Expanding Housing Options in Neighbourhoods, or EHON. On paper, the proposal sounds positive. Townhouses and small apartment buildings up to six storeys tall will now be legal on 31,000 more lots on major roads.
But hold on a moment. Why were townhouses ever banned in the first place? Why will six-storey buildings now be allowed, but not 16-storey buildings? Why does this new policy only affect a few streets and not others?
These are the questions that Mayor Olivia Chow should be asking, along with anyone who supports her bold plan to deliver “generational change” to Toronto’s housing system.
The answers are sobering. For 60 years, Toronto – like almost every city in North America – locked down its house neighbourhoods. Apartments were generally forbidden. This has begun to change in the past five years. Toronto’s EHON work mirrors efforts by cities across the country to open up their house neighbourhoods to more people.
Today, “the city needs to be thinking of the next two steps,” said Graig Uens, a former Toronto planner who spearheaded the EHON program and is now in the private sector, in an interview. “When we were working on permitting laneway housing and garden suites, we always had it in our minds that this was a first step towards bigger change.”
He added that the city needs “to look at introducing apartments all over the neighbourhoods. That’s perfectly fine and reasonable in a fast-growing city like Toronto.”
For the moment, the Major Streets changes are minor. They touch only the fringes of the house neighbourhoods, which consume about 200 square kilometres.
The report from city planning staff says “the edges of the neighbourhoods are Toronto’s opportunity to welcome the introduction of … building types which have been sparsely permitted [and] meet the needs of current and future residents.”
Why only the edges? Why should tenants have to inhale the fumes and tire particles of speeding cars? Why not make apartment buildings legal everywhere, as Mr. Uens suggests?
Planning staff seem afraid to ask, even as the city experiences a housing crisis. Policy is shaped by a century-old prejudice against apartments and the people who live in them. Even though Toronto temporarily changed course during its last housing shortage, building hundreds of thousands of apartments in the 1950s and 1960s, the older dogma remains powerful. Big buildings and small buildings must not mix!
You can see it in the flawed, albeit well-intentioned, Major Streets proposals. Staff recommend leaving “setbacks” from the side yards of as much as 5.5 metres; this means two apartment buildings next to each other would be 11 metres apart. Why? To provide soft landscaping, biodiversity and amenity space for tenants. (Keep in mind that these buildings will also pay huge fees to subsidize public amenities.)
This is a familiar kind of kludge: burdening new housing with a hundred policy objectives. It has costs. Buildings will end up smaller and more expensive. The city’s own analysis finds that 30-unit buildings might just barely make economic sense, and only if they are sold as condos.
Translate this into architecture and built form, and this model will generate a patchwork of small, cheaply constructed buildings with awkward side yards. At best. At worst, it will generate paperwork until the city decides to try again.
Such timidity is a chronic problem, and it’s hard to pinpoint its source. Toronto planning now has an interim director: Kerri Voumvakis, a veteran city staffer. Do she and her colleagues actually want to be so cautious? Or are they afraid of the pushback from councillors and busybody resident associations?
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Ms. Chow and council have vowed to dramatically increase Toronto’s housing construction and deliver tens of thousands of affordable homes. To do this, the physical city needs to change dramatically and quickly. And to do that, the entire corpus of city planning needs to be gutted and remade – not just around the edges.
Big change is required, and this week it’s not coming.