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Toronto's chief planner, Gregg Lintern, published this piece in the Toronto Star over the weekend where he argued that "expanding housing options in [Toronto's] neighbourhoods is the missing piece of the growth puzzle."
What he is saying is that if we're going to have any chance at reasonably accommodating the 700,000 or so people who are expected to move to this city over the next three decades, we're going to have to evolve our low-rise neighborhoods. That includes more retail, more amenities, more density, and yes, built form that houses multiple units.
I immediately thought that this was meaningful progress in the right direction. It is acknowledgement that things need to change and that our low-rise communities need to change.
But others felt that this was a case of soft-serve ice cream, arguing that there's "danger in praising incremental, belated change when dramatic change is what's needed." I also see this point.
To quote the late architect Daniel Burnham, "make no little plans." But this is arguably a little easier to subscribe to when you're rebuilding after a great fire has decimated your entire city (he was instrumental in the rebuild of Chicago following its fire of 1871).
The unfortunate reality today, at least in this environment, is that bold vision isn't often rewarded politically. The status quo bias is simply so great. Change is painfully slow. That's why we rely so heavily on pilot projects when it comes to city building.
So while I too am a fan of bold vision, I also see value in what Simon Sinek and others refer to as consistency over intensity. Small, repetitive, and compounding actions can have powerful long-term results. You just have to keep going in the right direction.
And I think that many of us, or perhaps most, will agree that the right direction is rethinking our low-rise neighborhoods.
Photo by Tungsten Rising on Unsplash
The Globe and Mail published an interesting article this weekend talking about how Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto, is the only major city in Canada to have lost people in the last census. Here are the population changes for the top 10 largest municipalities in the country:
There is a simple explanation for this and it is one we have talked about a number of times before on the blog. Many/most of our low-rise single-family neighborhoods are actually losing people. Empty nesters are becoming over-housed and young people aren't backfilling in quite the same way.
Mississauga has a lot of these neighborhoods and is heavily geared towards this kind of built form. But they are certainly not alone. The same phenomenon is happening in places like Toronto; there is just enough other growth to offset these negatives so that the headline number still remains positive.
However, this is slowly changing. Toronto is working to "expand housing options" in its low-rise neighborhoods; it is considering how to better intensify its major streets; and it is re-introducing small-scale retail uses so that people living in a house can easily walk to a corner store for milk.
It is a shift in mindset. But I believe that this trend will only continue, and eventually it will make its way to the suburbs.
Images: The Globe and Mail
This is a lovely little infill rental project in Tokyo by ETHNOS (architect) for Real Partners (developer):
https://youtu.be/zXRlxh237Bo
The building is 4 storeys plus a rooftop terrace. From the plans, it looks like there are 8 units, all of which are two-storey suites.
The A and B suites are accessible from the ground floor. For the A suites, you enter at grade, and then go down into the first basement level. And for the B suites, you enter at grade and then go up to your second level. One of the entrances (suite B-3) is via an exterior walkway.
The middle of the ground floor is the lobby entrance and there's a single elevator that services the second and third floors (it then drops off for the fourth floor). On the second level is a co-working space, and so the upper C suites (these sound fancy) are all accessible from the third floor.
The fourth floor and fifth floor terraces are all accessible from within the C suites, which means that the only real common area corridors in this building are on the third level. And it looks like they wanted this particular corridor to have a view to the street, because they could have easily reduced it even further to increase the building's overall efficiency.
What is also interesting to look at this building's dimensions. Based on the above section, the floor-to-floor heights are 2500mm, which is low compared to the 2950/3000mm that is typically used here in Toronto for new reinforced concrete builds.
In terms of the overall building, it is only about 10m deep and it is less than 10m tall if you exclude the stair popups on the rooftop terraces. For context here, our Junction House lot is about 30m deep and the build is about 30m tall, so actually a similar kind of box proportion.
But let's scan more of Toronto.
If you move away from designated "Avenues" (which is where Junction House sits) and look at some of our other major streets (which is something the City of Toronto is in fact doing), you can sometimes/oftentimes find even deeper lots.
Below is a random area that I quickly panned too on Dufferin Street -- these single-family house lots are around 36m deep:
Now obviously Toronto is not Tokyo and Tokyo is not Toronto. But my point with all of this was to demonstrate just how much space we actually have within our existing boundaries, should we ever feel the need to increase our overall housing supply.
As I have argued many times before, I think one of the greatest opportunities to quickly do this sits along our majors streets.
Architectural drawings: ETHNOS
Toronto's chief planner, Gregg Lintern, published this piece in the Toronto Star over the weekend where he argued that "expanding housing options in [Toronto's] neighbourhoods is the missing piece of the growth puzzle."
What he is saying is that if we're going to have any chance at reasonably accommodating the 700,000 or so people who are expected to move to this city over the next three decades, we're going to have to evolve our low-rise neighborhoods. That includes more retail, more amenities, more density, and yes, built form that houses multiple units.
I immediately thought that this was meaningful progress in the right direction. It is acknowledgement that things need to change and that our low-rise communities need to change.
But others felt that this was a case of soft-serve ice cream, arguing that there's "danger in praising incremental, belated change when dramatic change is what's needed." I also see this point.
To quote the late architect Daniel Burnham, "make no little plans." But this is arguably a little easier to subscribe to when you're rebuilding after a great fire has decimated your entire city (he was instrumental in the rebuild of Chicago following its fire of 1871).
The unfortunate reality today, at least in this environment, is that bold vision isn't often rewarded politically. The status quo bias is simply so great. Change is painfully slow. That's why we rely so heavily on pilot projects when it comes to city building.
So while I too am a fan of bold vision, I also see value in what Simon Sinek and others refer to as consistency over intensity. Small, repetitive, and compounding actions can have powerful long-term results. You just have to keep going in the right direction.
And I think that many of us, or perhaps most, will agree that the right direction is rethinking our low-rise neighborhoods.
Photo by Tungsten Rising on Unsplash
The Globe and Mail published an interesting article this weekend talking about how Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto, is the only major city in Canada to have lost people in the last census. Here are the population changes for the top 10 largest municipalities in the country:
There is a simple explanation for this and it is one we have talked about a number of times before on the blog. Many/most of our low-rise single-family neighborhoods are actually losing people. Empty nesters are becoming over-housed and young people aren't backfilling in quite the same way.
Mississauga has a lot of these neighborhoods and is heavily geared towards this kind of built form. But they are certainly not alone. The same phenomenon is happening in places like Toronto; there is just enough other growth to offset these negatives so that the headline number still remains positive.
However, this is slowly changing. Toronto is working to "expand housing options" in its low-rise neighborhoods; it is considering how to better intensify its major streets; and it is re-introducing small-scale retail uses so that people living in a house can easily walk to a corner store for milk.
It is a shift in mindset. But I believe that this trend will only continue, and eventually it will make its way to the suburbs.
Images: The Globe and Mail
This is a lovely little infill rental project in Tokyo by ETHNOS (architect) for Real Partners (developer):
https://youtu.be/zXRlxh237Bo
The building is 4 storeys plus a rooftop terrace. From the plans, it looks like there are 8 units, all of which are two-storey suites.
The A and B suites are accessible from the ground floor. For the A suites, you enter at grade, and then go down into the first basement level. And for the B suites, you enter at grade and then go up to your second level. One of the entrances (suite B-3) is via an exterior walkway.
The middle of the ground floor is the lobby entrance and there's a single elevator that services the second and third floors (it then drops off for the fourth floor). On the second level is a co-working space, and so the upper C suites (these sound fancy) are all accessible from the third floor.
The fourth floor and fifth floor terraces are all accessible from within the C suites, which means that the only real common area corridors in this building are on the third level. And it looks like they wanted this particular corridor to have a view to the street, because they could have easily reduced it even further to increase the building's overall efficiency.
What is also interesting to look at this building's dimensions. Based on the above section, the floor-to-floor heights are 2500mm, which is low compared to the 2950/3000mm that is typically used here in Toronto for new reinforced concrete builds.
In terms of the overall building, it is only about 10m deep and it is less than 10m tall if you exclude the stair popups on the rooftop terraces. For context here, our Junction House lot is about 30m deep and the build is about 30m tall, so actually a similar kind of box proportion.
But let's scan more of Toronto.
If you move away from designated "Avenues" (which is where Junction House sits) and look at some of our other major streets (which is something the City of Toronto is in fact doing), you can sometimes/oftentimes find even deeper lots.
Below is a random area that I quickly panned too on Dufferin Street -- these single-family house lots are around 36m deep:
Now obviously Toronto is not Tokyo and Tokyo is not Toronto. But my point with all of this was to demonstrate just how much space we actually have within our existing boundaries, should we ever feel the need to increase our overall housing supply.
As I have argued many times before, I think one of the greatest opportunities to quickly do this sits along our majors streets.
Architectural drawings: ETHNOS
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