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.
Following yesterday’s post on small-scale apartments, a number of people commented on the 6m front yard setback that was shown on the city’s drawings and that I mentioned in my post. Well, it turns out that I wasn’t entirely correct about the 6m. What is proposed in the draft zoning by-law is the following:
The modelling has illustrated building setbacks that are appropriate for townhouse developments and small-scale apartment buildings on major streets in a Neighbourhoods context. Based on the review, Urban Design staff recommend that the front yard setback be implemented through use of the average of the existing neighbouring setbacks, or a minimum of 3 meters, whichever is greater. This approach maintains consistency with the existing character of the Neighbourhoods supports protection of existing mature trees.
As you might expect, the approach with these small-scale apartments is to be mindful of the existing low-rise context. But as many of you rightly pointed out when you saw the 6m, the existing context may not be appropriate or ideal for the planned context, especially if there’s retail at grade.
This is just one of the many details that we’ll need to be careful with as this initiative moves forward.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
