Downtown Toronto has a dense core of tall, glassy buildings along the waterfront of Lake Ontario. Outside of that, lots of short single family homes sprawl out in every direction. Residents looking for something in between an expensive house and a condo in a tall, generic tower struggle to find places to live. There just aren’t a lot of these mid-sized rental buildings in the city.
And it’s not just Toronto — a similar architectural void can be found in many other North American cities, like Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston and Vancouver. And this is a big concern for urban planners — so big, there’s a term for it. The “missing middle.” That moniker can be confusing, because it’s not directly about middle class housing — rather, it’s about a specific range of building sizes and typologies, including: duplexes, triplexes, courtyard buildings, multi-story apartment complexes, the list goes on. Buildings like these have an outsized effect on cities, and cities without enough of these kinds of buildings often suffer from their absence.
For starters, cities with lots of “middle housing” offer more rental options, and tend to be more affordable as well. Meanwhile, cities without middle housing tend to be harder for pretty much everyone except the wealthy — they also tend to be more segregated. So it’s easy to see why there’s some conflation between the “missing middle” and a lack of “middle income” housing options – because these two concepts are absolutely related.
When the Middle Went Missing
Toronto’s missing middle problem is pretty serious, and it can be traced back to early 20th century zoning laws. In the late 1800s, there was a big wave of immigration to North America, and most of these immigrants were moving to cities. In Toronto there was already an established population of British immigrants, but much of this new wave was eastern European. New multi-unit tenement buildings cropped up to house these new people.
But there was a backlash against these new immigrants, and in 1912, Toronto banned apartment buildings in most of the city. This ban was an early version of exclusionary zoning — the kind of residential zoning where large swathes of urban centers are reserved for single family homes, and only single family homes. Cities across North America were passing these kinds of zoning laws, and they were driven by a misguided perception that apartment buildings were dens of iniquity.
Developers at the time were trying to associate their buildings with European class and luxury, but were being met with accusations of facilitating immorality, fueled in part by racism. At the time, Canada’s elite were still largely
British. Toronto’s puritanical WASPs were scared these apparently filthy apartments would be too tempting for nice British families.
In reality, early apartment buildings were actually aimed at the city’s elite. The first two were built around the turn of the century and were so luxurious that they didn’t even bother including kitchens in every unit — residents were simply expected to order meals from the building’s restaurant. They were marketed to the rich.
But there were factions in Toronto that had a very different vision of its future, as a place filled with single-family homes. And while the debate went on, Toronto was growing rapidly. It went from 200,000 people at the turn of the century to half a million in 1920. With that, developers started buying up land to build apartments, but they faced fierce resistance from the city, including smear campaigns.
Some developers used fear around apartments for personal profit, like Alfred Hawes, who bought a lot, and threatened to build apartments in order to motivate others to buy it back from him simply so he wouldn’t follow through. When they did, though, he not only made a tidy profit, he also went across the street, bought another lot, and built an apartment building called Spadina Gardens.
Defiant Apartments
Spadina Gardens was only the fourth apartment building constructed in the city, and it received real pushback. The city didn’t grant Hawes a permit, and even rushed through a bylaw in an effort to stop his construction. But Hawes didn’t care. He built Spadina Gardens without a permit. He ignored the bylaw. And somehow, he got away with it.
Today, Hawes’ apartment building is still there and it’s now the oldest in-use apartment building in the city. It was marketed to elites, and to this day, it remains an expensive place to live — in part because those who want to live in this kind of place don’t have a lot of options.
Toronto could have had similar buildings across the city, and in cities like Chicago or Brooklyn, this building would not be particularly remarkable. But in 1912, Toronto instituted a ban on apartment buildings in most neighbourhoods called Bylaw 6061. This stopped developers from building all kinds of apartments, including expensive places for the city’s wealthy and fashionable residents, but also the kind of housing that’s affordable for middle class families.
Despite its success, Spadina Gardens didn’t kick off a trend of rogue developers defying the bylaws and putting up apartment buildings everywhere. Because after Bylaw 6061 was passed, city planners continued to be hostile to apartment buildings.
Doubling Down
In the 60s the city of Toronto began to spread out and absorb surrounding municipalities. In these places, city planners designated many residential neighborhoods as “inviolate” meaning they couldn’t be touched by new development. The only new thing you can build there are single family homes. On the city land use map, these “inviolate” neighborhoods were colored in yellow. As result, Toronto evolved something called “the yellow belt,” a sea of neighborhoods where new development was limited to detached single family homes, which is more than twice the size of Manhattan.

Urbanists say the lack of middle housing in Toronto has led to a divided city. If all you build are single family homes, that makes lots of residential neighborhoods unaffordable. Ironically, too, despite the fact that zoning was designed to “protect” single-family neighborhoods, it has led to problems in these theoretically utopian areas. Many of these neighborhoods are dropping in population, which in turn has consequences, like: local schools shutting down for lack of students.
If You Build It, Will They Come?!
Toronto has been building lots of giant condo towers in the last few years. In fact, between 1996 and 2016, Toronto built housing at roughly 1.5 times the pace of new residents coming to the city.
In theory, these condos should provide more housing, and bring prices down, but these new condos haven’t fixed the city’s housing woes. Toronto is still way behind in terms of housing availability, and the legacy of banning most buildings that would have made up the missing middle is partially to blame.
A report found that in 2020, Toronto had 360 housing units for every 1000 residents. That’s well below the average for cities in G7 countries, which is 471 units. And prices are high. A one bedroom apartment typically rents for over $2,000 a month, and that number keeps going up. These units aren’t putting downward pressure on the price of a detached house, which averages around $2,000,000.
The problem with condos is in part the hefty HOA fees, but also the fact that they serve a very limited demographic, mostly: young single professionals who want a clean, central, low-effort place to live, ideally close to where they work toward the city’s core.
Perverse Incentives
There are developers who want to build middle housing, but in most places it’s still illegal to build anything except single family homes. And in the places where you can put up taller buildings, all the incentives push you in the direction of giant condo towers.
Investors want to maximize returns, and in a place where permitting can take years, houses and high rises offer outsized returns — houses can be sold for a lot of money, and condo towers benefit from sheer scale.
On the condo side in particular: there are high fees and red tape, so once one goes through all of that, monetary incentives lead them toward ever-taller projects. If it takes the same amount of time to get a thousand unit building approved as it does a ten unit building, and the fees are high for both, there’s just little incentive to build smaller.
Thinking Outside the Zone
Toronto isn’t the only city with this missing middle problem. In fact, other cities with a missing middle have taken concrete steps to fix it, including Portland, Oregon, which has been working toward greater livability.

Portland eventually managed to ban single-family zoning, which is a significant step toward filling in that missing middle. It took a lot of work, and a lot of politics, but the bill passed in 2020, suddenly allowing things like cottage clusters and small apartment buildings almost everywhere. If someone wants to tear down an old relic of a house and turn it into a four-plex, that’s now possible. There are a lot of potential benefits, including: higher density and profits for developers.
But even with this new freedom to build, the situation on the ground has been slow to change. There are still profit calculations to be made and lines of red tape to be cut. Still, while zoning reform isn’t a silver bullet for a housing crisis, it’s a big first step. American cities like Minneapolis and Seattle have also recently banned exclusive single-family zoning to address this problem head on. But it will still take years of planning and development to create new apartments, and fill in that missing middle, but at least it’s a start.
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Where is the Queens building? I look forward to going to your website to see the photos of certain things you’re talking about in the episode and I feel very denied that Roman got to see the photo and we can’t… #😔
Roman and Team —
Love the show, and have for many years. Interesting story regarding Toronto, but massively disappointed when the thesis was how exclusionary zoning laws caused the missing middle. Unfortunately, the story highlighted how so often the narrative when talking about the housing crisis is to direct our ire to “zoning”.
No doubt that zoning has often been an insidious tool to keep certain “types” out of certain neighborhoods. But as pointed out later in your piece, it is highly reductive to expect tweaking zoning laws to fix the housing market. The Portland, Seattle and Minneapolis initiatives further support this, in that there have been no marked improvements. This obviously calls into question the original thesis, and begs a deeper search into why zoning was applied in such a fashion in the first place, and why these methods endure to this day. Unfortunately, the answer is not so simple as old white people.
Further, by cherry picking Harland Bartholomew as the face of zoning policy in its early days also highlights the dearth of scholarly analysis on the origins of zoning. (I wrote an article about this issue a few years ago in a legal publication.) Clearly there were a lot of racists in support of zoning, and there remain a bunch who remain so. But that does not tell the whole story.
The conundrum of zoning is a lot like redistricting: it’s very difficult to get it right, but in the end, the lines have to be drawn somewhere to serve a multiplicity of purposes. This is the story still to be told.
Thank you, and looking forward to the next episode.
Greg Alvarez
Why is Minneapolis an afterthought? Minneapolis was first to ban single family zoning, the city led on this issue.
Fascinating history – and amazing production! Thank you.
I also moved to Toronto in 2019 (from Europe), and have noticed the “missing middle” and all its implications. Take our neighbourhood: midtown Toronto, Blythwood- Lawrence Park area. Our neighbourhood, which was mostly built in the 1920s an 1930s, is quintessential “yellow belt”. What became apparent for me in the past three years that almost all the middle housing plans are blocked by some rather interesting forces.
A couple of specific examples that demonstrate what is happening:
Exhibit 1: 41 Chatsworth Condo
https://urbantoronto.ca/database/projects/41-chatsworth
This would be classic middle housing; a 4-storey condominium with 30 units. It would be on the corner of Yonge Street and Chatsworth Drive; about 3 minutes walking distance to the subway, a main urban intersection (Yonge and Lawrence).
Status: development has been blocked since 2014. The single, detached family homes in the area more than doubled their value since then. In essence, the neighbourhood owners are saying: “we don’t want unsavoury characters with only 1-2 million dollar homes on our street! Let’s keep them away!” The average home price on Chatsworth is 3-5 million.
Exhibit 2: 2851 Yonge Street
https://urbantoronto.ca/database/projects/2851-yonge-street
Another middle housing project, a proposed 7-storey rental building, with 29 units. It’d be on a key boulevard, 2 minutes from the subway. Currently, it’s a shabby parking lot.
Status: idle since 2015. Still a shabby parking lot. Single detached family homes behind the lot 2.5x in value since 2015 though.
Exhibit 3: 200 Keewatin Ave
Another proposed middle housing project in the neighbourhood, 4-storey townhomes on the corner of Mt. Pleasant Road and Keewatin Ave.
Status: originally proposed in 2015, the ground has been fence offed since then with no movement. There might be building finally starting now – even if that is the case, it would mean about a decade between the original proposal and a likely move in date for new owners. In the middle of a housing crisis, this pace is mind boggling.
I also find the politics interesting. Liberals seem to always win in the area, both in the federal and provincial elections. The educated homeowners will say that they value and stand for diversity, inclusion and belonging. But when it comes to their neighbourhood, they promote policies that essentially even keeps the upper middle class out (e.g. a family of two professional adults with kids, making over $200K a year, but lacking 3M+ for a single detached home in the area).
For more information about Toronto’s apartment ban, read ACCIDENTAL TORONTO by Robert Fulford.
“The old city of Toronto in the 1950s was a gray lady – “a good place to mind your own business,” as Northrop Frye said. Built on the shore of Lake Ontario by generations of architects in a strange and challenging ravine-threaded landscape, the city is now the home of the Canadian National Tower, of an extraordinary subway system, of the Blue Jays and their SkyDome, of the Royal Ontario Museum, of Roy Thomson Music Hall. Today Toronto bristles with vitality, glitters with everything that architecture, planning, and cultural and intellectual life can give to a city. It has saved itself from the worst mistakes of urban planning, for its development over the past thirty years has been a tale of chance and fortuitous accident. Robert Fulford’s graceful narrative, moving from one region of Toronto to another, paints a portrait of the city, its recent history, its urban planning, and its economic development.
Also see The Shape of the City: Toronto Struggles with Modern Planning by John Sewell ex-mayor.
Critics have long voiced concerns about the wisdom of living in cities and the effects of city life on physical and mental health. For a century, planners have tried to meet these issues. John Sewell traces changes in urban planning, from the pre-Depression garden cities to postwar modernism and a revival of interest in the streetscape grid.
In this far-ranging review, Sewell recounts the arrival of modern city planning with its emphasis on lower densities, limited access streets, segregated uses, and considerable green space. He makes Toronto a case history, with its pioneering suburban development in Don Mills and its other planned communities, including Regent Park, St Jamestown, Thorncrest Village, and Bramalea.
The heyday of the modern planning movement was in the 1940s to the 1960s, and the Don Mills concept was repeated in spirit and in style across Canada. Eventually, strong public reaction brought modern planning almost to a halt within the city of Toronto. The battles centred on saving the Old City Hall and stopping the Spadina Expressway. Sewell concludes that although the modernist approach remains ascendant in the suburbs, the City of Toronto has begun to replace it with alternatives that work.
This is a reflective but vigorous statement by a committed urban reformer. Few Canadians are better suited to point the way towards city planning for the future.
Hi there, could you update the attribution of the yellowbelt map you used. Its currently credited to A House Divided, which is incorrect. The map was made by mapTO for an article on our website.
http://www.mapto.ca/maps/2017/3/4/the-yellow-belt
Thanks
The leader of the effort in Portland and Oregon overall was the Speaker of the House, Tina Kotek. You should through some credit her way.
Here’s an example article. https://www.npr.org/2019/07/01/737798440/oregon-legislature-votes-to-essentially-ban-single-family-zoning
Toronto here. Too right. Just wanted to say that there does exist – in very limited supply – something like the NYC brownstone – on main streets, above stores – I first encountered these on Queen East shopping – second hand bookstore, a carpet place – vaulted ceilings, brick walls, some really unusual touches (re: windows). On Queen West I remember visiting a friend (long time ago) who lived above a store at Queen/Bathurst – HUGE – I had no idea. I’ve been trying to get info on possibility of building on top of existing structures – along Danforth etc. – where there are long stretches of stores with just one or maybe two floors. The buildings aren’t of any historical interest, for the most part – just boxes – and it just seems like such a waste of space. Medium densification, spread out, flats big enough for families, walking distance to TTC etc. Non-imposing additions?
This article is getting circulated amongst a few social media groups on urban life in Toronto, particularly as a response to the ongoing grief of NIMBYism that continues in full force here. But what it also does is spell out the consequences of a vacuum of intelligent critical writing on the urban environment and architecture generally here in Toronto.