People romanticize the affordable homes of the post-war baby boom era, but those homes were often tiny by today’s standards: the famous Levittown starter homes immediately after World War II were as small as 750 square feet. By the 21st century in the GTA, the average new detached home was close to 3,000 square feet. Accommodating that growth was simple enough in the great postwar boom — highways to new greenfield sprawl. We’ve turned away from that strategy in Ontario, particularly in the last 20 years, instead focusing growth within existing cities. But we haven’t done a great job of accommodating the growing demand for square feet even as we restrict development to less and less land.
For people with less money, this has meant simply smaller and more crowded homes, reversing some of the prosperity of the 20th century. For people with the means, there’s always the option of buying multiple homes and combining them — often converting historic rooming houses or small neighbourhood apartments into single-family homes, which is how you get something like a quarter of Canadian census tracts actually losing units of housing in five years.
The housing shortage is a shortage of square feet, more or less. One facet of the housing crisis, then, is simply: how do we accommodate the demand for new space in a way that works with our other priorities, like making efficient use of our massive public transit spending and not gobbling up more farmland than necessary?
In Toronto, this is being discussed as part of the city’s multiplex zoning reforms. Multiple reports are headed to the city’s planning and housing committee this week, which include welcome reforms to make multiplexes more feasible to actually build across the city. A missed opportunity, however, is city staff’s decision not to recommend increasing height permissions to four storeys city-wide (the recommendations top out at three storeys). This is despite their own acknowledgement that the additional space allowed by a fourth storey translates into more and roomier apartments, and that the city’s own official plan has contemplated four-storey apartment buildings within residential neighbourhoods for a generation.
In sincere defense of the provincial capital, the housing policies being discussed by Council are substantially more ambitious than anything being discussed by the premier or his cabinet. It’s also true that provincial policy is needed to truly make four-storey sixplexes both affordable and feasible — and so Toronto can reasonably argue that its hands are tied. Without changes to provincial policy, even expanded height permissions won’t make sixplexes meaningfully easier to build.
Ontario’s building code generally requires two staircases for any apartment building over two storeys and that second staircase comes with costs both financial and architectural, as it forces buildings into inefficient shapes with smaller apartments. There is no evidence that the North American building codes favouring dual staircases actually lower fire risks.
The Housing Affordability Task Force report of early 2022 recommended the province allow single-staircase construction of up to four storeys; that recommendation has been as thoroughly ignored as much of the rest of that report. But earlier this year the province did announce (at the same time as the underwhelming introduction of Bill 17) that it would look at tinkering with the building code to allow four-storey attached single-family homes. That is, skinny, tall townhouses that are currently difficult to get permitted.
The housing crisis is advanced enough that it’s getting tiresome to praise governments for baby steps forward, but yes, allowing four-storey townhouses in Ontario would be a baby step forward. Better still would be allowing the same height for apartments, given some basic additional fire safety modifications, so that we can call Toronto’s bluff and demand even more housing ambition on the multiplex file.
Urbanists get criticized for prescribing a kind of lifestyle through planning policy that lots of people have no interest in, and I want to be clear that’s not my intent here. If you don’t want to live in a four-storey sixplex nobody’s going to force you to. What we have in Toronto is a simple geometry problem: the space of the city is already all filled up, but the demand to live here continues to grow. We can (and should) keep building more condo towers, but we’ve struggled to actually provide people with the square feet they want. Four storey plexes and townhouses give us a plausible path to meeting that demand — if we allow them to.
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