The St. Lawrence Market Complex in Toronto on May 2, 2025.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Frank Lewinberg is the co-founder and partner emeritus of Urban Strategies. He and photographer Vincenzo Pietropaolo are co-authors of the new book Housing for All: How Toronto Built the St. Lawrence Neighbourhood.
In the heart of downtown Toronto sits St. Lawrence, a neighbourhood whose major streets were first laid out more than two centuries ago by the country’s early European settlers, along the Lake Ontario shoreline traversed by Indigenous peoples for millennia before that. Studded with wharves, factories, railway lines and highways, it’s an area that had been home to waves of immigrants. But by the 1970s, with the phrase “housing crisis” appearing frequently in news headlines, this stretch of the city had become a sea of commuter parking lots, municipal store yards, and faltering industry – somewhere people parked but rarely lingered.
Visit there today, though, and you’ll see a thriving neighbourhood, considered by many to be a model of sensible, equitable, human-scaled urban development, chock-a-block with both affordable co-op and non-profit rental housing and high-priced real estate – real estate that owes its value in significant part to those St. Lawrence co-ops and non-profits that were on the leading edge of revitalizing the area.
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It’s a community I had a hand in creating. As a newly hired Toronto city planner in the early 1970s, I let my bosses know that perhaps this neglected part of the city might be suitable for redevelopment. It was, and in the 50 years since, the area has been transformed. Look more closely and you’ll also find lessons that can contribute to solving Canada’s housing crisis.
St. Lawrence’s first lesson? We will not solve the housing crisis by focusing only on owners of homes and condominiums. Various levels of government have subsidized ownership for generations, with federally-backed mortgage insurance, programs to allow tax-free mortgage down payments, and more. They are policies that have given owners and those who live with them security of tenure and an investment in real estate that is viewed as both desirable and safe, allowing owners to benefit as the cost of housing rises. But renters have been largely left to manage on their own, with few programs to assist them and fear of rent increases when housing prices climb.
People shop at the St. Lawrence Market South building in Toronto on May 2, 2025.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Who lives in rental housing? In Canada, the majority are low-income families, low-income seniors, young single people, couples in their student years or early years of employment, and immigrants – all groups that struggle as rents ramp up.
But a focus on renters by any single level of government isn’t enough. It took the co-operation of three levels of government to make St. Lawrence happen. The federal government provided a number of essential subsidies necessary for municipal developers and groups such as community organizations, unions, and church groups to act like private developers, by providing repayable loans to cities to acquire lands and hold them for future uses (a process known as land banking), as well as facilitating access to low-interest mortgages. Those mortgages came with conditions: each building in St. Lawrence was required to make a minimum of 25 per cent of the units available to the lowest-income residents, who would pay a maximum of 30 per cent of their gross income on rent. The other 75 per cent of the units would have rents set at the low end of market rates. And the community-based organizations creating the co-ops or non-profits were also eligible for small grants to assist them in organizing themselves to responsibly build and operate their buildings.
The provincial government provided 10-per-cent capital grants to developers. The municipality acted as lead developer, acquiring land, selecting developers for each building and working with them to ensure successful outcomes. Any infrastructure costs related to the development were ultimately rolled into the costs of the individual mortgages. All three levels shared the costs of subsidizing the gap between what rent-geared-to-income residents paid and market rent.
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The municipality had another essential role: to create a neighbourhood plan for the area, ensuring a mix of amenities, walkable streets and integration with the city around it. And here, a third important lesson emerged: to include private development. It was a decision that angered those who believed all lands should be allocated to non-profits and co-ops. But including private developers, in my view, had valuable outcomes.
First, it helped ensure a broad mix of income groups in the neighbourhood, mitigating the risk St. Lawrence would be stigmatized as an undesirable low-income area. Second, the private developments held the key to St. Lawrence’s financial success: holding and strategically selling some land to private developers allowed the City to recoup the development costs of securing the land, including the preparation of the neighbourhood plan and the repayment of the federal land banking funds. Each building ultimately paid its own mortgage, and building occupants organized within and managed their own buildings. In this is a fourth lesson: when building occupants look after their own interests, they are invested in their building’s long-term upkeep. Beyond the walls of their individual buildings, what brings residents together is the same as what brings residents together in any neighbourhood: mutual interest in the success of their community.
The model used in St. Lawrence produced a place for low-income people to live in the city together with others who are more fortunate. The rationale for abandoning the programs that made St. Lawrence possible was that given limited resources, we should only help those most in need. But these mixed-income programs weren’t replaced with programs aimed at those most in need: they were simply ended.
Apartments and condominiums along the Esplanade and Toronto waterfront in the St. Lawrence neighbourhood on June 11, 2025.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
The lessons learned in St. Lawrence boil down to three things: we need a supply of land, the financial backing of government for mortgages, and the political commitment of all levels of government to act in concert with private industry or alone. For 15 years in the 1970s and early 1980s, Canada built affordable rental housing, and we did it wholeheartedly, creating close to 300,000 such homes across Canada, including housing for some 10,000 people in St. Lawrence.
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And while individually negotiated developments like Toronto’s recently built Don Summerville mixed-income community are a positive step, one-offs like this won’t go far in solving the rental crisis: we need a national program that allows communities across Canada to match and exceed this country’s past efforts.
Can we afford to create 21st-century St. Lawrences across our country? We owe it to young families, working people and citizens of all income levels to seize the opportunity to learn from our past success and create housing solutions that make our cities livable for them and for all. There is plenty of land suitable for housing. Are we up to the challenge? We must be.