BY JOHN LORINC | AUGUST 7, 2020 |
It took council and city planning officials almost exactly a year to adopt a policy meant to make Toronto’s abundant, overpriced and increasingly depopulated low-rise neighbourhoods safe for so-called missing middle housing types.
The narrative arc here extends from a motion last July by Mayor John Tory and housing czar Ana Bailão to a unanimous vote at last week’s council meeting. But the real story ripples much further back, first to a recent groundswell of advocacy and media attention on overly restrictive zoning regulations; then to anti-block-busting/”stable neighbourhoods” measures approved between the 1970s and the 1990s; next to the car-oriented suburban development orthodoxies of the 1950s and 1960s; and, if you really want to peel the onion, the anti-apartment building campaigns waged by wealthy homeowners and Toronto’s morality police going as far back as the 1910s.
In some ways, Toronto isn’t all that different from many North American cities when it comes to mixing low and moderate density housing (allowed before World War II; largely banned thereafter). And unsurprisingly, Toronto has arrived with customary hyper-caution at this particular moment in its planning history. Other cities — Minneapolis and Seattle, to name two — have been more daring in their moves to approve more gentle density as of right in residential/single-family neighbourhoods.