Toronto promised to legalize six-unit buildings when it accepted $471-million from Ottawa's Housing Accelerator Fund in 2023.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Toronto City Council had a chance this week to take a clear, practical step toward solving its housing crisis.
Surprise: It did not. Instead, the city’s leaders cowered before the most reactionary elements in local politics and seemed ready to waste $60-million in the process.
With Thursday’s vote, council had to decide whether to legalize “sixplexes” – apartment buildings of up to six units – across the city. Suburban councillors responded by claiming that this, in effect, would destroy Toronto.
There was real money on the line. Toronto had promised to legalize six-unit buildings when it accepted $471-million from the federal government’s Housing Accelerator Fund in 2023. This year, then-housing-minister Nathaniel Erskine-Smith confirmed that Ottawa expected the city to hold up its end of the bargain, and warned that about $60-million could be withheld.
In the end, council passed a compromise motion that may or may not pass muster with Ottawa. The new, looser rules apply in just nine wards, including old Toronto, East York and the Scarborough North ward of Councillor Jamaal Myers. The remaining two-thirds of the city will remain safe from an imagined influx of tenants.
This weak policy was years in the making. For decades, Toronto – like most North American cities – effectively banned new apartments across most of its low-rise areas. In 2020, the planning department assembled a young, reform-minded team to begin loosening those restrictions. The resulting “Expanding Housing Options in Neighbourhoods” policy was, at least in theory, a step toward inclusion.
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The arguments in favour of legalizing multiplexes citywide are just common sense. Allegedly “stable” neighbourhoods are already being rebuilt with monster homes. Putting more people in these places – already served by roads, sewers, schools and transit – is good planning. In demographic terms, large chunks of Toronto have fewer people than they did 30 or 50 years ago. Most of those areas continue to shrink. Clearly, they have extra capacity: Empty schools, empty parks, and water systems that could work harder.
But from the beginning, this idea was shackled by political timidity. EHON was diluted into a series of incremental measures – laneway suites, garden suites, duplexes – each accompanied by years of studies and consultation. None of these changes produced a meaningful number of homes. And still, the blowback from some residents came loud and hard.
Thursday’s vote followed the same pattern. What could have been a clear, affirmative decision turned into a weak gesture. No one at City Hall seemed willing to say what should be obvious: A city cannot solve a housing crisis by pretending it lives in 1973.
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To their credit, a handful of councillors tried. Gord Perks, Alejandra Bravo and Jamaal Myers laid out a clear argument: If we want a city that working people can live in, we must change the rules that exclude them. The City Hall left has, at last, embraced the reality that banning apartments is not progressive. Mr. Myers in particular showed courage in backing real change for his constituents.
And Mayor Olivia Chow? She barely spoke. She ultimately supported the compromise, but she declined to stand up for a bolder vision. For a mayor elected with a mandate to address housing and equity, that silence was striking.
Meanwhile, the opposition – led by suburban councillors – offered little beyond incoherent panic. “We are risking suburban alienation,” said Parthi Kandavel of Scarborough Southwest, as though allowing modest apartment buildings might rupture the civic fabric. “A one-size-fits-all approach does not fit the bill.”
For Mr. Kandavel, as for a thousand politicians before him, one-size-fits-all is fine as long as that “one size” gives the loudest homeowners exactly what they want – and preserves economic segregation by keeping tenants away from where they don’t belong.
This sort of rhetoric would be familiar at any council chamber in America. But in Toronto, it carries a particular absurdity. Apartment living isn’t an alien threat – it built this city. Postwar Metro Toronto was shaped by mixed neighbourhoods, where rental towers and single-family homes shared the same areas and sometimes the same streets. In Mr. Kandavel’s ward, at least 52 per cent of residents lived in apartments as of 2021. Nearly half are renters. To speak as if tenants are invaders is to insult the very people he represents.
If the federal government decides to withhold that $60-million, it would be entirely justified. A city that won’t allow a sixplex – a building the size of a large house – is not serious about housing, about urbanism, or about its own future.
Cities must evolve or calcify. Toronto, again, chose the latter.