Montreal has a bylaw that came into effect on April 1, 2021 and that requires developers to contribute to the city's supply of social, affordable, and family housing. (All three of these have their own definition.)

Developers can meet this requirement in a number of different ways:

• They can build the social, affordable, and/or family housing

• They can contribute land or a building

• Or they can pay cash-in-lieu

Usually, I think of inclusionary zoning as being the first of these three bullet points: a hard requirement to build a certain amount of non-market housing. That is not an absolute requirement here, and so I see this policy as being IZ lite.

Since the bylaw came into force, there have been approximately 150 new projects by private developers in Montreal, according to this CBC article. That has resulted in about 7,100 new market-rate homes. At the same time, it has resulted in exactly zero non-market homes.

From what I can tell from the article, every single developer has opted for option three: pay the cash-in-lieu instead of actually building the housing. Supposedly this has produced about $24.5 million in new fees, which sounds like a lot. But if you divide it by 7,100 homes, it isn't all that much: just under $3,500 for each new home.

So what is clear is that this is the least expensive option. That's why everybody is choosing it. If the fee was significantly higher and it was cheaper to just build the social/affordable/family housing, then every developer would just do that. This is how development pro formas work.

But at the end of the day, we are still taxing new housing and new home consumers for the purpose of trying to create a smidgen of more affordable housing. And this has never sat well with me, especially considering that there are plenty of other things that we could be doing to make new housing more affordable for everyone.

Last week I wrote about Toronto's plan to make fourplexes as-of-right across the city, but also why this form of missing middle housing shouldn't have a maximum floor space index.

Today, let's look at the numbers in a bit more detail.

If you look at a zoning map of Toronto, you'll see that many neighborhoods across the city have a maximum floor space index (FSI) of 0.6. What this means is that if you have a piece of land like this:

• Lot width: 20'

• Lot depth: 115'

• Site area: 2,300 sf

Your total allowable gross floor area would be 1,380 square feet (0.6 x 2,300 sf).

If you build a laneway suite in this city, that won't count towards your total allowable GFA (otherwise they'd be very challenging/impossible to build). But if you want to build something like a triplex or a fourplex, it counts.

The one important caveat is that if you're building a residential building -- that isn't an apartment building with 5 or more homes -- you can deduct the floor area of the basement:

This, of course, helps the situation. But it doesn't solve all of our problems.

If you assume that the basement can be one home, that still only leaves 1,380 square feet for the other three, technically permissible, homes. This equals: 3 homes x 460 square feet.

Another option would be 2 homes x 690 square feet. But still, we're not exactly making it easy to deliver more "family-sized homes" in the city.

And herein lies one of the problems (plural, because there are others). We can say that fourplexes are allowed across the city, but it may not actually be technically feasible or practical to build them.

Note: I am not a planner. If you are, leave a comment below.

I am a big fan of Victoria-based developer Aryze. And their Pearl Block project is a good example of why. Developed on an awkward triangular lot that had been sitting vacant for nearly 65 years and that presumably every other developer had been overlooking, the project brought six family-oriented townhouses to the Oaklands neighborhood of Victoria, BC.

Each of the towns has 3 bedrooms. Each has a living room facing the street (but with privacy from the neighbor). Each has a large rooftop deck (with 5 foot parapet walls so no kids fall over). And according to the developer, each sold for less than the average price of a single-family home in the Oaklands area. Not surprisingly, the project also won all sorts of awards.

It is a great example of the kind of beautiful and mid-market missing middle housing that so many of us are always talking about. Why build 1 home when you can build 6? Why build 6 homes when you can build 18? Still, there remains far too many obstacles in the way of any sort of housing that doesn't conform to the status-quo:

It shouldn't be this difficult. And it shouldn't take this long. Actually, let me rephrase this. It can't be this difficult and it can't this long; that is, if we're expecting to actually come close to meeting the demand for new housing. There is no great mystery as to why the missing middle is, you know, missing. We made it that way.

Keep up the great work team Aryze.

Photography: Ema Peter via D'Arcy Jones Architects