Rendering of an 18-apartment building at 72 Amroth Ave., Toronto.City of Toronto
They are like the unicorns of Toronto housing: small-scale apartment buildings with a few dozen units that could fit effortlessly into low-rise neighbourhoods.
Hundreds dot Toronto’s older areas and even some of its post-war suburbs, but newer versions haven’t been constructed for decades. Toronto’s official plan and its residential zoning bylaws have outright banned or explicitly discouraged such buildings in much of the city. And in places where they might be approved, e.g., on wide arterial streets, developers aren’t interested because they will earn far better returns building mid-rise or high-rise condos.
Yet, some housing advocates have argued for years that these unassuming four- to six-storey purpose-built rental buildings – the quintessential “missing middle” typology – can help ease the housing crunch, reverse population decline in prohibitively expensive house neighbourhoods, and perhaps even make some residential areas more financially accessible.
Earlier this month [May 9], council’s planning and housing committee debated a far-reaching proposal (see sidebar) that would allow small apartments with up to 30 units to be situated on so-called “major streets,” a broad category that includes everything from local roads such as Rogers Road or Oakwood Avenue to thoroughfares like Mount Pleasant Road and Bayview Avenue.
This change, which marks the final move in the city’s “Expanding Housing Options in Neighbourhoods” reforms, has yet to pass council and may well end up at the Ontario Land Tribunal before it becomes official policy. Even if it does, there’s no guarantee that developers or smaller scale contractors will step up to try their hand at this long dormant form of housing.
However, the city itself is test driving this kind of development with a “missing middle pilot project,” situated on T-shaped 54-spot Green P parking lot just steps from the Woodbine subway station. Though not on a designated major street – the formal address is 72 Amroth Ave., a leafy residential street lined with small houses – this missing middle prototype will have a six-storey, 28-unit apartment building, together with two standalone stacked townhouse blocks for a total of 34 homes.
Conceptual site plan for 72 Amroth Ave.City of Toronto
The design, developed by the architectural firm Superkül, calls for a range of environmental and energy-efficient features, and may include some affordable units, according to Vic Gupta, CEO of CreateTO, the city agency that formally owns the property. He says his group will likely call for bids on the project, which may include some kind of partnership between an affordable housing agency and a developer.
According to Bram Bulger, the city official managing the project, the planning department will present the design to a community consultation session this summer and then seek council approval for a site-specific zoning bylaw amendment and official plan amendment by year end. After that, CreateTO and its selected development partner will formally submit a development application that will be subjected to all the normal technical assessments.
Opponents of the 72 Amroth plan, if they come forward, won’t be able to derail it at the Committee of Adjustment or the Ontario Land Tribunal because council has signed off on the formal land use policies designed to enable this particular project. Consequently, Mr. Gupta says he’s cautiously optimistic about starting construction next year. “We get in the ground in probably by mid-2025 if all goes well with the site plan and an approval.”
What’s most noteworthy about this seemingly modest venture is that the city, as the proponent, finds itself with the regulatory shoe on the other foot – in effect, forced to confront many of the very restrictions, both large and small, that it has imposed on private developers over the years. Mr. Bulger, the planner, says an important part of this exercise is for the city to “identify barriers” in the approvals process and make recommendations to council on how to avoid them on future missing middle projects.
“There’s a lot of stumbling blocks that they are going to come up against,” observes Graig Uens, director of planning at Batory Management and a former city of Toronto planner who is on the technical advisory team for this venture. “Hopefully they learn the lesson about what they have to change.” Those learnings, in fact, will likely determine whether the City’s latest efforts to add small scale apartments to major streets proves successful.
Brad Bradford, the east end councillor whose ward includes 72 Amroth, pushed hard for this pilot project back in 2021, when council first began debating ways to add new forms of neighbourhood housing, including laneway suites, garden suites and, eventually, multiplexes, while chipping away at a legacy of exclusionary zoning.
“I ran in 2018 very much on a YIMBY [yes-in-my-backyard] agenda and as a millennial on council who’s constantly confronted with housing challenges,” says Bradford, who worked as a city of Toronto planner before jumping into politics. “We didn’t get here overnight. These restrictive policies that were put in place very much entrenched and codified the status quo. We’re also not going to fix it overnight.”
Mr. Bradford points to a number of city rules that would ordinarily prevent an infill project such as the one proposed for 72 Amroth. These include having more than one building on the site, setbacks from property lines that effectively restrict the number of units, and lot coverage ratios embedded the local zoning bylaw that have the effect of blocking any project with floor space in excess of the lot size. In the case of this particular property, the councillor has heard from local residents that they’re upset about losing the parking lot and are concerned about spillover on a block with more than its fair share of street parking permits.
He points to another roadblock: under city regulations, multi-unit residential buildings must have indoor and outdoor amenity spaces. In soaring condos, the rule translates into features such as gyms or rooftop patios. But in virtually all of Toronto’s older small-scale apartments, amenity space means nothing more than a laundry room.
“These types of buildings are neighbourhood oriented and often will be in parts of the city that are quite amenity rich when it comes to park spaces and community centres,” Mr. Bradford says. “So why are we requiring smaller scale buildings to provide those things when we know that they impact the viability of these projects?”
Architect and planner Naama Blonder adds that another major challenge for small-scale developers with projects that include more than ten units is the amount of time it takes for their applications to receive technical feedback from all the various city departments that are expected to respond to development proposals. “I always tell my clients that site plan approval takes a year at the very least, so just add a year to your calculations.”
In the case of 72 Amroth, however, the city, not a private developer, will eat the cost of securing all the various zoning approvals and steering the proposal the Committee of Adjustment, which earlier this spring shot down a comparably more modest 10-unit infill project on a deep lot in Seaton Village. As Mr. Gupta confirms, the bidders on the project will have all the approvals in place, which is a luxury rarely accorded private developers.
But Mr. Uens, who represented the developer that failed to win approval for the Seaton Village multiplex at the Committee of Adjustment, stresses that beyond all the planning minutiae, city officials, councillors and residents all need to remember to think about the big picture, which is the role these kinds of infill projects can play in Toronto’s future well-being.
“There are fundamentally exclusionary [zoning] policies that are holding the city back from realizing its potential as a place that can support people across the spectrum, of families and incomes and ages,” he says. “It’s a real anchor on the city’s productivity and has been for the last several decades. If the city wants more housing on major streets to be the outcome, then they have to create a supportive environment for that to happen.”
Major Streets plan
Toronto council later this month will debate the most far-reaching of its recent housing reforms – an ambitious proposal to permit the development of townhouses and small apartment buildings, with up to 30 units and rising up to six storeys, on any of Toronto’s “major streets,” which includes virtually every roadway that isn’t in the middle of a residential neighbourhood.
At present, the city’s land use policies channel mid- or high-rise projects onto broad arterials, such as Eglinton Avenue East, as well as into designated growth nodes like Yonge and Eglinton. Recent provincial planning reforms will direct much more high-density mixed-use development to the immediate vicinity of subway and LRT stations.
But until now, the far-flung network of workaday four-lane streets that connect neighbourhoods – some of them lined with shops or strip malls and others with houses or older small apartments – have remained relatively untouched by any form of intensification.
That omission may soon change. City planners see these streets as having considerable potential to add smaller-scale rental apartments of the sort Toronto hasn’t built in generations. They have prepared maps identifying potential locations all across the city as well as a range of potential project formats, including townhouse complexes.
The planning department has also commissioned a study examining the economics of such projects – i.e., under what conditions they would be financially viable – as well as a residents survey, which found a high level of support for the construction of this kind of project.
Besides the proposed height and unit limits, the proposed bylaw changes recommend that these small-scale apartments be no longer than 25 metres (80 feet) and cover a maximum of half the lot, leaving the balance available for greenery or parking. If a developer wants to build a longer structure, they’ll have to maintain a 7.5-metre setback (25 feet) from the properties on either side.
Some planning consultants have privately warned the city that those restrictions are too onerous and may discourage small-scale investors. “The 30-unit cap doesn’t make any sense,” says Graig Uens of Batory Urban Planning. “Are you telling me that a 31-unit building in the exact same form as a 30-unit, bylaw compliant building will necessitate a pile of variances? The city is framing this in a way that is very permissive while also keeping a very tight lid on what can actually happen.”
Perhaps the most crucial factor will be the city’s ability to actually approve the kinds of projects it claims it wants to see more of – and also do so in a timely way. Firms like Batory are already getting inquiries from small-scale builders, but, as Mr. Uens cautions, if the approvals process is lengthy and uncertain, “[it] deters people from pursuing these kinds of projects.”