Since about the mid-2000s, planning policies in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area have favoured higher-density development in already built-up areas, instead of on greenfield lands. The objective was to curb urban sprawl, use our already developed lands more efficiently, minimize our environmental footprint, and encourage a built form that is conducive to non-car forms of mobility.

As an urbanist and promoter of walkable, transit-oriented communities, I applaud this approach. Toronto is far from full. But I also recognize that this has restricted housing supply and shifted the market toward housing types that cost more to deliver for homebuyers and tenants. Reinforced-concrete buildings are more expensive to construct than wood-framed houses in the suburbs. The most affordable housing markets tend to have highly elastic supply.

A recent report by Frank Clayton for the C.D. Howe Institute agrees. Planning policies in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area have become disconnected from consumer preferences, limiting the kind of housing supply that people want the most: grade-related housing. The proposed solution is to increase the supply of serviced greenfield land, reduce the barriers to development, and diversify the housing types built in our traditional suburban subdivisions.

I think this is an important topic, and I have two immediate thoughts.

Firstly, is it really true that Canadians and residents in the GTHA have an overwhelming preference for grade-related housing? The 50 people who responded to my Twitter poll seem to generally think so, but as I have argued many times before on this blog, I think it's hard to know exactly right now. There could be a large segment of households who might prefer to live in a mid-rise courtyard building with a large private green space in the middle and lots of ground-floor amenities. Until this becomes an available housing option, we won't really know.

Secondly, unlocking additional greenfield land does very little to change the market forces playing out within our existing urban areas. The Toronto CMA lost about 77,500 people last year to domestic outmigration, presumably because they found greater economic opportunity and/or more affordable housing elsewhere. At the same time, 92% of the housing starts in the City of Toronto in 2025 were apartments. This is not because we're holding back greenfield land within the city proper boundaries, it's because intensification is the only option left.

The broader CMA is a different story. Only about a third of its land area is physically urbanized. The remaining two-thirds is heavily restricted by environmental protections, which is precisely where Clayton sees opportunity for more grade-related housing. “Housing policy cannot succeed if it ignores consumer demand,” says Clayton. “Canadians continue to aspire to ground-related homes. Planning for the housing people want, rather than simply counting units, is key to restoring affordability.”

I'm all for giving housing consumers as much choice as possible. Not everyone would prefer a Parisian apartment to a house in the suburbs (which is what the algorithms will tell you about me). But let's not forget that we have yet to solve this problem: How do we create attainable family-friendly housing at scale in our existing urban areas and reorient the city toward a post-car future? Toronto is now an apartment city and this is only going to become even truer, regardless of what happens on the periphery.

Change is starting to happen with our new major street and multiplex policies, which can be a form of grade-related housing. This typology is just denser, often has no parking, and is delivered in an urban, transit-supportive format rather than a car-dependent subdivision. To argue that "planning policies have missed the mark" is not wrong, but we've also been missing the mark by not building enough of what people may want within our urban areas.

Cover photo by Dillon Kydd

Real estate development is cyclical. Supply adjusts slowly to demand, and so it's common for developers to get ahead of their skis and build too much space. This is what happened in the 1980s when American developers built more office space than in all previous years of the republic's history (yes, it's true), and then nationwide vacancy rates went from 4.6% to 16.9%. And it's what happened following the dot-com crash when office vacancy in Silicon Valley went from almost 0% to over 20%.

Today, things feel kind of similar.

According to Cushman & Wakefield, nearly 37% of the office space in downtown Seattle is now vacant. Since 2020, it is estimated that these office properties have in aggregate lost about $15 billion, or almost half, of their value. This has people repeating the regular refrain that "this time is different" and that "the office market may never come back." And indeed, the commonly held belief is that this time isn't just cyclical, it's also structural. How and where we work has changed.

But unless you believe that offices as a spatial construct will fully cease to exist at some indeterminate point in the future, then the reality is that the demand curve has simply shifted. We may not need office space in quite the same way, but we will still need some office space. This means that, at some point, we will find a new supply-and-demand equilibrium and, at some point, developers will get back to building, and overbuilding, office buildings. It's just impossible to determine when that might be.

Cover photo by Zhifei Zhou

The way CMHC typically tracks and categorizes housing types is as follows: single, semi-detached, traditional row, and then everything else. This "everything else" bucket is called "apartment," and it includes high-rise apartments, mid-rise apartments, low-rise apartments, duplexes, triplexes, multiplexes, and anything else that doesn't fit into one of the other categories.

This taxonomy reflects our bias toward single-family, grade-related housing because if you look at the distribution for a city like Toronto, it doesn't really make sense to do it in this way. For example, if we were to look at housing starts in Toronto proper for 2025, the distribution looks like this:

• Single: 5.2%

• Semi-Detached: 0.4%

• Row: 2.5%

• Apartment: 92%

If we were to look at the entire Toronto CMA, the distribution updates to the following:

• Single: 12%

• Semi-Detached: 0.5%

• Row: 14.2%

• Apartment: 72.8%

Do we really need a separate category for semi-detached houses? And would it not make sense to get a bit more granular with the apartment category given that it's basically what we're building these days? Obviously, markets vary, but in the case of Toronto, we have flipped to an apartment city.

Now, if you were to look at an aerial view of the Toronto CMA, you would see the opposite. You would see concentrations of towers surrounded by seas of low-rise housing, and you would be forgiven for thinking differently about the city. But this is a lagging indicator. The leading indicator is housing starts, and it's pretty clear what that is saying.

These are important stats to think about because they help illustrate the housing problem that needs to be solved. Last year, Toronto saw a net domestic out-migration of 77,500 people. One possible explanation is that some of these people left for more affordable, single-family housing. For the sake of argument, let's assume that's the case.

A portion of this segment may only be interested in single-family housing, and if that is the case, Toronto will never again create the housing they want at scale. But I would wager that there's another meaningful segment that would have stayed in Toronto if only they could have found housing that met their needs. And that is the opportunity that exists today for city builders.

We know that apartments are the future of Toronto, but we also know that they can take many forms, from 100-storey towers to small "missing middle" projects that are still grade-related. The housing solutions we seek are necessarily going to lie within the black box we today call "apartments."

Cover photo by Venrick Azcueta