Many years ago now, the city of Toronto embarked on a plan to “harmonize” its city-wide zoning rules, having inherited the expansive bylaws of its six predecessor cities when they were amalgamated in 1997. This process was even more dull than it sounds, and it admittedly already sounds extremely dull. Zoning is, after all, largely an exercise in drawing lines in space, delineating where permitted activities begin and end. But that doesn’t mean it’s simple. A question that seems straightforward — “how tall should we let houses be?” — depends on the answer we’ve arrived at for “how do we measure the height of houses?” The six pre-amalgamation cities of Toronto literally measured the heights of buildings in different ways, and harmonization was in large part about ironing out those differences. This is the kind of story I tell people to illustrate why playing SimCity as a kid doesn’t really prepare you for the realities of contemporary planning.
But there’s nothing so obscure and technical that it can’t also be political, and when it came time to harmonize height regulations, city staff had to produce a lengthy report exploring all the different ways a home’s height could be measured, taking care to note that council had to think hard about this issue because, if they were sloppy about it, they could accidentally allow owners of two-storey buildings to build third-storey additions without having to go through a laborious rezoning process first. Gasp, horror: Can civilization persist if homeowners have neighbours with a home that’s incrementally taller than their own? Best just to make it as difficult and costly as possible — never mind that the Ontario Architects Association (among others) pointed out that the city was prohibiting the construction of the kinds of homes that had existed in some cases for decades.
Because my brain is badly broken from covering this stuff, that episode has lived rent-free in my head for more than a decade. But it came to mind again after the most recent torrential downpour flooded the city earlier this month and, more specifically, after I read the Toronto Star’s reporting on one of the city’s most flood-prone areas, where people have had their finished basements ruined multiple times in a decade.
In response to such stories, conventional wisdom tells us to lament the city’s shoddy work when it comes to flood-proofing vulnerable areas and to discuss the kinds of infrastructure investments needed to safeguard people’s property. And undoubtedly that’s part of the story here. But why are people finishing and refinishing basements in flood-prone areas in the first place? In large part because that’s one of the only ways the city makes it reasonably easy to add square footage to their homes, thanks to those zoning rules I was just mentioning. We could choose to do things differently — allow people to add square feet to their homes upward, not downward — but that would mean changing our ideas of what a more climate-resilient city should look like. “Build important stuff above the high-water line” is one of the oldest rules of human civilization, so maybe we should rediscover the wisdom of the ancients here.
To put it bluntly, even in the most optimistic scenario, in which the city has both the money and the political willpower to implement a strong stormwater-management program, it’s difficult to imagine building something that wouldn’t be overwhelmed by a storm like the one we got a few weeks ago, which pounded the city with a month’s worth of rain in a matter of hours. When that much rain falls on a city — something that’s happening more frequently and will likely happen even more often in the decades to come — systems fail. If you live in a low part of the city, a literal torrent of water is going to try to find its way into your basement with every storm. And after enough storms, the water will always win. Where possible, we can work to harden those systems so they’ll fail less often, but, if we’re honest, the “stormwater management” we need in 2024 is several decades of aggressive climate policy starting in the 1980s. Since time travel is not an option, we need to look elsewhere.
Climate scientists and insurance companies have started talking a lot about “managed retreat” — the idea that some parts of the globe that were previously safe or at least livable are going to become increasingly less so as the effects of climate change become more severe. It’s usually applied to low-lying coastal areas dealing with cyclones or sea-level rise or to exurban areas subject to wildfires. Basically, move people out of the way of the risk. In Ontario, we have the precedent of Hurricane Hazel, which prompted the creation of conservation authorities and restrictions on construction in floodplains. But the philosophy doesn’t apply solely to the regional or global levels — we can apply it to our neighbourhoods and our homes as well.
The world is changing. The world has changed. A lot of the stuff we built in the 20th century is maladapted to the 21st. We can grieve the real harms that climate change has brought and is bringing, but we can’t live in denial about them. The last stage of grief is acceptance, and accepting the future that’s coming means we’re going to have to start doing things differently — by confronting big global questions of migration and also by tackling things that are hyper-local and small, like how tall our homes can be.
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