When I visit Toronto I usually stay with my sister in The Beaches, an older neighbourhood on Lake Ontario east of downtown and the Don Valley. This eclectic neighbourhood started off as a cottagers’ paradise and Toronto’s playground until the 1920s when the impact of the street car extension into the area encouraged the city to expand eastward.
My sister’s home is a modest 1,800-square-feet semi-detached duplex. Her end of the street is an exceedingly friendly mix of single-family homes and semis originally designed to house the working class.
Just down the road, the housing forms continue to diversify with stacked duplexes, triplexes, quadriplexes and small multiplexes, courtyard apartments and city-owned rent-controlled housing beach-side next to multi-million dollar homes, both historical and newly developed. Mid-rise apartments above street-front commercial/retail line Queen Street, where independently-owned businesses dominate a vibrant commercial hub for the neighbourhood.
It’s a typical pre-WWI development that delivers diversity, integration and choice within proximity, and developed before zoning regulations homogenized our neighbourhoods. It’s a study in what “new urbanists” call “the missing middle” and makes me wonder every time I walk its streets and boardwalks about how we can get back to this integrated approach to neighbourhood building.
The “missing middle” refers to diverse housing forms and tenures that include stacked townhouses, duplexes, triplexes, quadriplexes, bungalows, live/work studios, laneway homes, courtyard housing of various kinds, small apartment buildings, pocket neighbourhoods and purpose-built rental; essentially everything in between single-family homes and mid-rise condos that seem to dominate new development.
The missing middle by design adds more families to low-density neighbourhoods, while still preserving form and character. It provides attractive and affordable housing for growing seniors and youthful populations, and accommodates the middle-income workers that drive our economy and who are significantly challenged by our current housing crunch and lack of options.
We’re already doing some things that are encouraging this shift, but how do we unlock and diversify our housing and inspire a new generation of developers and financiers to really deliver the missing middle?
Perhaps we consider reconfiguring McMansions into small multiplexes of three to five dwelling units? Perhaps we set quotas or inclusionary zoning to ensure a diversity of housing forms within a development or neighbourhood?
Or do we impose height restrictions on a certain percentage of units in a development that could create the opportunity to build small, courtyard bungalows that every senior I talk to would like to downsize into?
Perhaps history has some lessons to share and can offer insights into how we should move forward in the future.
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