I am positive that it had absolutely nothing to do with this post about fourplex feasibility, but I was happy to receive this notice in the mail yesterday:

It is a public meeting notice for the City of Toronto's proposed multiplex policies (defined as duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes). And as you can see from the highlighted section, they're looking, among other things, to make this form of housing exempt from floor space index maximums.

Good.

I don't like this "where applicable" business, but I'm going to conveniently ignore that for now and just say that this is positive. Removing density maximums is a mandatory ingredient for helping to make this type of housing feasible.

No FSI maximums. No DCs. And let's modernize how HST is charged on new rental housing.

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.

At the beginning of the year, I wrote this:

The desire to add more housing to single-family neighborhoods will continue to pick up steam across North America. How exactly this plays out will be market specific, but in Toronto I expect to see new planning policies put in place, as well as supportive building code changes.

And this continues to happen. Right now, the City of Toronto is working on making fourplexes permissible in all low-rise neighborhoods across the city.

This is exciting. But it's not done yet. And it's not perfect.

The biggest change that I think still needs to happen is around maximum densities. If we actually want to encourage more missing middle housing, we need to increase the permitted FSIs or, better yet, remove them all together.

Urban planner Sean Galbraith does a good job of explaining this in NRU:

I responded to the city's multiplex survey last night and this was one of my main comments. If you'd also like to voice your opinion, you have until March 10, 2023. Here's the link.