For more than a decade, the City of Toronto’s official plan has called for accommodating more growth in the province’s largest city along a handful of major streets (so-called avenues) by way of buildings between six and 12 storeys tall. “Midrise on avenues,” it was thought, would accommodate the growth projected for the city without concentrating all the new construction in small — and therefore super-tall — projects, spreading the growth out instead.
As far as its stated policy goals are concerned, “midrise on avenues” has largely been a failure. It hasn’t been the main way that Toronto has accommodated demographic growth, and in some years it hasn’t even served the implicit objective of protecting the city’s protected residential neighbourhoods: depending on the year, the places designated “neighbourhoods” under the plan have added more new housing than the avenues have. Despite the preference expressed in the city’s plan, high-rise condo towers have consistently been the primary form of new housing production in the city, largely concentrated south of Bloor Street and around a handful of transit nodes — literally the opposite of what was the avenues plan was aiming for.
So what went wrong? A new report commissioned by the environmental non-profit Environmental Defence identifies planning and building policies that have hampered the construction of midrise projects. Analogous policies exist in cities throughout the province, and the throttling of housing production isn’t just a contributor to economic misery — it’s also environmentally destructive.
“It’s important for the environmental movement to get its head around the fact that Ontarians are going to prioritize getting a home that meets their family’s need over the protection of endangered species or other goals they do care about,” says Phil Pothen, in-house counsel and Ontario land-use lead at Environmental Defence.
“Nobody is going to choose to be homeless if that’s what it takes to protect the redside dace,” he adds, referring to an endangered species of fish threatened by sprawl in the Greater Golden Horseshoe.
Addressing environmental and economic needs at the same time, however, means clearing the policy obstacles to midrise housing. Prior research has highlighted obstacles including restrictive planning policies and the building code’s requirement for two stairwells in any apartment building taller than two storeys and suggested allowing more widespread use of mass-timber construction to reduce the need for steel and concrete.
The new report also highlights a perhaps less obvious culprit: the city’s policies for garbage collection. Apartment buildings above a certain size need a dedicated loading area big enough for garbage trucks to collect waste and then fully turn around and exit. Unless that requirement is waived, it can be difficult for builders to fit that loading space into the smaller footprint of a midrise building.
“Not only does it cost the developer floor space that could be lived in, it also significantly reduces the street-level quality of life when you have to allow a garbage truck in and turn around,” says Pothen.
At a time when more and more leaders, both provincially and federally, are speaking about the need to “legalize housing” and urging municipalities to lower the regulatory and planning barriers to getting more homes built, the report amounts to a to-do list for housing-oriented leaders in the provincial capital. It covers not just the city’s planning policies (a much-criticized requirement that buildings narrow as they get taller and step back from the streetscape adds cost but little function) and solid-waste collection policies, but also things like the placement and design of electrical transformer boxes required by Toronto Hydro, the city-owned electrical utility.
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Which is to say that, while “legalize housing” is a good slogan and the right attitude with which to approach the housing crisis, acting on it is more complex than provincial and federal leaders could reasonably be expected to understand. That doesn’t mean doing so isn’t ultimately their responsibility — certainly not if they want to avoid being driven out of office by voters furious about a cost-of-living crisis in the country’s biggest cities.
Pothen acknowledges that the report can’t project how many homes would be built in Toronto if its recommendations were followed, much less how similar reforms would affect housing markets elsewhere in Ontario. However, enacting reforms like the ones laid out in the report will be necessary if the province wants to seriously tackle its stated goal of getting 1.5 million homes built by 2031, regardless of the specific choices policymakers adopt to get us there.
“These changes are necessary, but we’re not saying they’re sufficient,” says Pothen.
“There’s a raging debate about how much public investment will be needed to supply homes for the lower-income needs of the market, but whether we’re building housing on a non-market basis or whether we’re incentivizing private market builders to create more housing, all of these changes are necessary in order to get the cost of construction down low enough for enough units to be viable.”
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