Ontario has been gripped by a growing housing crisis for most of the last decade and its impacts are causing some serious anxiety for those responsible for solving it. 

Young workers and their families are leaving the Greater Toronto Area, driven out by housing costs and limited options. The Toronto Board of Trade calls this “a massive threat to our economy.” Toronto’s strength as a place of enormous employment opportunity rests on our ability to house young people.

At a recent Toronto Board of Trade event, housing and banking experts convened with thought leaders. A picture emerged of leaders and innovators desperate to fix a problem that was decades in the making with initiatives that will also take decades to fulfill, such as adherence to one national building code, amassing capital to build water and waste water systems and further cutting costs such as taxes, fees and development cost charges. 

Can we talk about solutions that reduce the high costs, instead of shifting them to someone else? Given the opportunity to fix some of the conditions that have led to the housing affordability and supply crisis, we would be insane not to take it.  

Here’s an idea: make more market-oriented homes available at a size, location and price point that many would be interested in buying. Current reforms to mid-rise buildings on major streets and avenues in Toronto are an important part of this solution.

Right now, the City of Toronto is consulting on how to increase the number of mid-rise buildings on Toronto’s avenues and major streets. Mid-rise buildings (five to 14 storeys, depending on the width of the road) can provide attractive, efficient and affordable homes, including family-sized units, if the building industry is enabled to build them at scale. Mid-rise is a scale of building that dominates around the world, but is rare in Toronto. This type of gentle density can fill a large niche between sky-high condos and detached or semi-detached homes built far away on farm and forest land.

Favouring these mid-rise homes will allow us to concentrate scarce labour and material resources in building family-sized homes where we will get the best bang for our buck, write David Crombie and Tim Gray

Removing barriers to market-based, mid-rises will also help make building non-market, deeply affordable homes easier and less expensive for not-for-profits and governments. This will make sure that the money cities, the province and the federal government have available go much further and allow more homes to be built. This is a key change required if we are to address the estimated need for 1.5 million new homes by 2032.

Favouring these mid-rise homes will also allow us to concentrate scarce labour and material resources in building family-sized homes where we will get the best bang for our buck: in our towns and cities where services, jobs, transportation and infrastructure are already in place.

Finally, and also of great importance in a time of rapid climate change and biodiversity loss, building more mid-rise homes in our towns and cities can ensure we meet the needs of the more than four million additional residents expected to live in Ontario by 2051. More people living in towns and cities will reduce the need to build sprawl in agricultural spaces outside these areas. 

This way, we can protect the farmland we need to feed ourselves. We can also protect the forests and wetlands that provide us with clean air, water and flood protection. This way, we also avoid the expenses and impacts of building and maintaining the far-flung road networks that car-dependent, low-density building requires.

Fortunately, the City of Toronto has already taken up pursuing some of the solutions presented in the Mid-rise Manual, released last year by SvN and LGA architects and Environmental Defence — and is working to resolve some of the procedural, regulatory and technical barriers that have been identified. 

But for this initiative to succeed, we also need communities to support this building type and ask for more of it to be built along the larger streets where they live. We need to adopt these practical housing solutions that have proven successful for many decades in fabulous cities around the world and in most older Toronto neighbourhoods. 

The city’s consultation on rezoning for mid-rise has begun in two downtown wards and will continue, ward by ward, into 2027.

For the sake of existing community members who are unhappily housed (like 30-somethings locked out of the housing market or empty nesters unable to downsize because alternatives are too expensive), our tax bill and our quality of life, it’s time to support a solution that works. 

David Crombie is a former Toronto mayor and federal cabinet minister known for championing socially responsible urban development and waterfront revitalization. Tim Gray is the Executive Director of Environmental Defence, one of Canada’s leading environmental advocacy organizations. 

© National Observer