We talk a lot about "missing middle" housing on this blog and, most recently, we've been talking about Toronto's proposed amendments to allow fourplexes across the city and to do away with density maximums (among other things).
Well, it's now time to make a decision. These proposed changes are headed to Planning and Housing Committee on Thursday, April 27th. If you'd like to attend in person or virtually, here's a copy of the public meeting notice.
The other option is to make a written submission. The good people over at "More Neighbours Toronto" have created this website which will allow you to quickly write the Committee.
There's an auto-generated response in support of legalizing multiplex housing -- and that's what I used for my boring email submission -- but, of course, you're free to edit the text as you'd like.
If you check the agenda, you'll see that there are already hundreds of email submissions in to the Committee, many of them coming from More Neighbours. Clearly this is a topic that, one way or the other, many people feel very strongly about.
Click here to make an email submission.
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.
Progress is happening slowly but surely.
Over the years we have spoken a few times about this nice little coffee shop on Shaw Street here in Toronto. It is a good looking and widely visited coffee shop that has made many guest appearances on urbanist Twitter.
The problem, though, is that it was a real battle to get it approved, thanks to the opposition of a single neighbor. That's all it takes to hold up a new project. In this case it was a coffee shop. But it could also be thousands of new homes.
But that was then. Today if you look on the City of Toronto's website you'll actually see this exact coffee shop on a page that speaks to the benefits and the historic role of small-scale retail, service, and office uses.
Right now these uses are only permitted in low-rise neighborhoods on major streets and through an amendment to the Zoning By-Law (unless the nonconforming use already exists). This is a lot of unnecessary work (see above) and it has translated into a steady decline in these sorts of uses across the city.
Thankfully, the city is now looking to change this and permit these uses on an as-of-right basis. So it looks like the good fight was worth it.
For more info, head over here. And if you'd like to attend the public meeting to talk about how brilliant this is, you can do that on July 5 over at City Hall.