Report points finger at early ‘fully-planned’ communities in analyzing Toronto’s current housing affordability gap

Donovan Vincent
May16, 2019
Thestar.com

A new report looking into housing affordability in growing urban areas in Ontario says the current gap between have and have-not residents in Toronto has ties to the creation of fully-planned “garden suburbs” that popped up in the early 1940s in the city.

The 87-page study, put together by SvN Architects + Planners, with direction and help from the Ontario Association of Architects’ housing affordability task group, offers ideas on how to increase housing supply to meet the demands of more than one million people in the province and deliver more affordable housing.

In explaining how Toronto came to its current “affordability gap,” the report points to the 1943 growth plan for Metropolitan Toronto, which proposed seven new garden suburbs be created around the old city, one of them being what is now the Don Mills neighbourhood.

The study notes that prior to World War II “unplanned” communities in Ontario, including Toronto were places where between 40 to 60 per cent of all households had built their own homes -- 80 per cent of those units including a room or rooms for boarders/lodgers.

Housing affordability was high in these areas.

But city planners soon began to have a negative view of these unplanned areas.

They didn’t like the idea of piecemeal growth of the city, where people started their homes from shacks, building, adding to and changing them as time went along.

Planners thought of this approach as disorganized.

As a result “fully-planned” communities later sprung up between 1955 and 1975, featuring more expensive bungalows and townhouses that were ready-made, connected to services, with infrastructure around them.

The homes were built not to change.

And they were expensive.

These homes were only affordable to about 35 per cent of the population.

Seven of these “garden suburbs,” so dubbed because of the extensive green space around them, were constructed around the outer edges of Toronto’s core, the housing affordability report notes.

These areas had populations of about 30,000 to 45,000 people, and were self-contained, where residents didn’t need to travel to the city core, explains John van Nostrand, founding principal of SvN Architects + Planners and an architect, urban planner and developer.

Later, businessmen and landowners in these areas required labour that was close by. As a result, high-density, low-income rental towers such as Thorncliffe Park and Flemingdon Park were built near to the planned communities to house the labourers.

These homes were affordable to 65 per cent of the city’s income-earners.

“Thorncliffe, the first worker-suburb of the first garden suburb (Don Mills), was copied directly from Vallingby, a suburb of western Stockholm, Sweden,” van Nostrand adds.

“This was the beginning of the separation of incomes by building types and people having no real opportunity to get out of that. People in Thorncliffe were locked into poverty, because there was no other option than to rent,” van Nostrand adds.

That pattern has laid the foundation for what Toronto looks like today, with a fairly well off core, surrounded by a ring in the outer suburbs where there are many high density towers.

And poverty.

The housing affordability study proposes a list of “actions” that the authors say could increase the supply of homes to meet the demand of 1.5 million people in Ontario cities, including Toronto, over the next quarter century.

Among the key recommendations in the report:

Expand permissions for more semis, duplexes, triplexes, townhouses, and secondary suites in homes.

Allow for more low and mid-rise buildings along busy roadways or “corridors” especially ones with good public transit service.

Encourage and incentivize landlords to “develop their properties to full capacity” to provide the most additional residential units possible.

Encourage municipalities to update zoning allowances to promote a more diverse housing stock.

Encourage municipalities to ensure their densities go along with those outlined in Ontario’s latest Growth Plan.

The study calls for more “flexibility” in housing types to address the ever-changing needs of families and individuals and the way neighbourhoods, the economy and cities are changing.

The study goes on to say this flexible approach can help address under and over housing issues through measures such as creating smaller and more affordable “entry-level” housing and coming up with housing alternatives so people can age where they live.

Released earlier this year, the report says about eight per cent of urban households are “under housed” and that about 500,000 additional bedrooms are required across the province, including 350,000 in Toronto.

Meanwhile nearly two-thirds of the province’s urban households are “over housed” with five million empty bedrooms in the province, 2.2 million of them in Toronto’s neighbourhoods.

“Think of one’s life, going from being a single person, then finding a partner, having children, the children leaving, you getting older, then needing less space. That is the kind of cycle that goes on for everybody.

“But buildings don’t do a very good job of responding to that change,” van Nostrand says.

“Having that flexibility … means allowing for subdividing into secondary units, possibly even more,” explains Liana Bresler, a principal with SvN.

“Allowing flexibility that can help address the over housing and under housing, which is that suburban large house with an ageing population of empty-nesters who now maybe don’t have other options to live in the neighbourhood, so they are ageing in a place that is too large for them,” Bresler says.