Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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Tag: EHON

  • Toronto is looking to remove garden suite zoning permissions from this street

    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.

  • Toronto’s Major Streets Study approved at Planning and Housing Committee

    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.

  • Toronto’s unstable neighborhoods

    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.

  • Toronto wants small-scale apartments on its major streets

    This week we speak about the problem of not enough density next to transit stations. More specifically, we spoke about Toronto’s low-rise residential neighborhoods, which are colored yellow in the city’s Official Plan. Well, as many of you know, the city is, in fact, working to “expand housing options” in these neighhorhoods through their EHON program. One component of the program covers laneway and garden suites, another covers multiplexes (up to fourplexes), and another hopes to allow 6-story apartment buildings on all major streets.

    Here are the city’s major streets:

    And here’s what these “small-scale apartments” might look like:

    The setbacks are intended to be 6m in the front (to be consistent with existing neighborhood setbacks); 1.8m on the sides (so there’s rear access and so that these elevations only get fenestration for secondary rooms); and 7.5m in the back (which is consistent with the current mid-rise guidelines). Now, directionally, and without referring to any of the specific details, this is good. Toronto’s major streets are, in most cases, painfully underdeveloped; the existing built form feels generally entirely out of place. But the important question remains: Will developers actually build these at scale?

    Bloor Street and Danforth Avenue, for example, already allow mid-rise buildings that, for the most part, are bigger than what is being proposed here as part of the EHON program. But again, they remain underdeveloped. And there’s a subway running underneath these streets! So why will it be any different on our other major streets? One key difference is that these small-scale apartments are expected to be fully as-of-right. Meaning, no rezoning process and no community meetings. This will save a lot of time and money.

    Still, this is almost certainly going to require some iterative finessing to get it right. I think you’ll see developers looking to do little to no parking, no basements, no dedicated loading areas (certainly no type “G” spaces), slab-on-grade construction, and standardized and repeatable designs. And even then, this may not be enough. Rental replacement policies are yet another major barrier to consider. It’s going to have to be all about speed and efficiency, which is why it will likely also create a greater push to rethink some building code items, such as the requirement for two means of egress.

    At the end of the day, I want something like this to happen. It would increase housing supply, and make Toronto far more vibrant and far more conducive to non-driving forms of mobility. It’s, no doubt, a really positive thing. But for this to become a reality, it needs to work at scale. Meaning, the development pro formas need to work at scale, and with sufficient margin that developers won’t just automatically look to other opportunities. If the development community can make money building this housing typology, they will look for every opportunity to build it. But if they can’t make money, they won’t. It’s as simple as that.

    Images: City of Toronto

  • Toronto’s laneways should be mixed-use

    Up until last year, non-residential uses within Toronto’s low-rise neighborhoods were typically legal non-confirming uses. Meaning, the use wasn’t technically allowed, but if it had been there for a long and continuous time, we would let it slide and say it’s legal.

    Then we decided that small-scale retail, service, and office uses might be kind of good in our neighborhoods. Especially if they empower people to perform their daily necessities without a car. So we agreed to allow these sorts of uses provided they don’t annoy too many people.

    But what about in Toronto’s laneways? Can and should they go there, too?

    Recently, we’ve spoken a lot about the case for bottom-up city planning, and the value of micro-spaces and micro-businesses (à la Tokyo). And my overarching argument has been that these are a positive thing for cities. They create opportunity by lowering the barriers to entry.

    But we need to get out of the way and we need small and affordable spaces. Which is why it’s hard to imagine a more ideal place than in our laneways, especially considering that there’s a long history of these spaces being used for exactly this. (Read this recent article by John Lorinc.)

    Fortunately, this idea continues to gain positive momentum, thanks to people like the late Michelle Senayah (co-founder of the Laneway Project) and Blair Scorgie (a partner at Sajecki Planning). So in my mind, it’s only a matter of time before we start getting out of the way.

  • Consistency over intensity — rethinking Toronto’s low-rise neighborhoods

    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

  • Mississauga is the only major city in Canada that lost people in the last census

    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

  • What might Toronto learn from this infill rental project in Tokyo

    This is a lovely little infill rental project in Tokyo by ETHNOS (architect) for Real Partners (developer):

    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

  • What should Toronto do with its major streets?

    The City of Toronto’s Official Plan directs growth to areas of the city that it refers to as Centres, Avenues, Employment Areas, and the Downtown. In other words, these are the areas where most new development is intended to take place. So if you own land in one of these areas, it is probably worth more than if it were outside of them, all other things being equal.

    Avenues are what you might expect. They are major streets that run throughout the city (pink ones in the above map). But not all major streets are “Avenues.” There are lots of major streets that provide connectivity across the city but still feel like residential streets (tired ones I might add) and that have land use policies that only allow low-rise housing. I have always viewed this as a mismatch and I have long been critical of it on the blog.

    But as part of the City’s Expanding Housing Options in Neighourhoods (EHON) initiative, this exact problem is being looked at. And I think it is one of the most important land use studies currently underway in the city. Because if we are truly serious about housing affordability and our low-carbon goals, we are going to need to blanket our city with a lot more transit-supportive density. And our major streets are great place to start.

    I just hope that everyone involved will be as bold and visionary as possible. If you have any thoughts, please leave them in the comment selection below. And for the latest on this study, click here. It is an agenda item at next month’s Planning and Housing Committee meeting.