Toronto has been making great progress when it comes to allowing more housing in its low-rise neighborhoods. We now allow laneway suites, garden suites, multiplexes, and soon we'll allow 6-storey apartments. But interestingly enough, there is one small part of the city that is looking to regress. This past summer, council asked planning staff to bring forward a zoning by-law amendment to remove garden suite permissions for some of the properties backing onto Craven Road, near Danforth and Coxwell.

Here's a community consultation flyer that went out to residents and that shows the affected properties:

We've spoken about Craven Road before. It's a relatively odd street with a unique history. Its most obvious characteristic is that it's a kind of single-sided street. For the most part, there are homes on the east side of the street, but no homes on the west side. On the non-home side there is typically a garage, or the longest municipally-owned fence in the city. Here's some of the backstory on Craven Road's infamous fence (which occurs on a stretch further south), and below is what the study area in question looks like today:

So why remove the garden suite permissions here? The answer is to block housing. The people who live on Craven Road like it the way it is and don't want anyone to build new housing on the other side of the street. What's interesting about this is that it roughly mirrors what happened over a century ago. We couldn't figure out how to broker a deal between two adjacent streets and so we just said "screw it, let's build a really really long fence and call it a day."

Today we're saying, "yeah, we really need more housing in the city, but I dunno, somebody might get upset here." There is nothing sacrosanct about the old garages, or the fence, that line the west side of Craven. It is a street, proximate to a major subway station, that is missing homes on one entire side. It's low hanging fruit for infill housing. In fact, there's an easy argument to be made that garden suites aren't nearly enough density for a location like this. We should be encouraging a lot more.

But this is just my opinion. If you'd like to share yours, the City of Toronto is hosting a community meeting this week on September 19, 2024 from 7 - 830 PM. To participate, register here.

Back in March, we spoke about how Toronto wants to allow small-scale apartments on all of its major streets. Well today, this study -- known as the Major Streets Study -- passed at Planning and Housing Committee.

It still has to pass at Council. And the Committee did ask for city staff to look at certain amendments, such as reducing setbacks and increasing the maximum dwelling count from 30 to 60 suites. However, all signs point to this new policy being fully approved sometime in the coming months.

There's still work to be done. For example, I don't know why there even needs to be a maximum number of homes. Maybe one of you can explain it to me. We are already dictating the overall built form, so why not let people just build as many homes as possible.

It feels like we're saying: "We desperately want more homes on our major streets, but you know, we don't want the economies of scale to be too great. We'd rather see more, smaller projects. This way each home is more expensive to build!"

In any event, this is still meaningful progress. It is what so many urbanists have been clamoring for over the years; more homes in our low-rise neighborhoods. So I think it's important that we recognize today as such. Nice work.

This is a telling map from Jens von Bergmann. It shows the changes in population density across Toronto from 1971 to 2021 (measured in people per hectare). What is obvious is the spikiness of our city. We have been very effective at adding lots of people downtown, along the central waterfront, and in certain other pockets. But at the same time, we have let our older inner city neighborhoods move in the opposite direction and lose people.

The irony of this outcome is that we have long created policies that refer to these areas as being "stable" neighborhoods. The idea was that they weren't supposed to change, at least not too much. But what this data shows is the opposite. By restricting growth, we actually created the right conditions for them to lose people as demographics changed and household sizes got smaller, among other things. We created unstable neighborhoods.

Thankfully, we have started to change course and allow some intensification. We're not there yet, but I do believe that the next 50-year map will look quite different than the one you see here.