A rendering of an 18 unit apartment building at 72 Amroth Ave., in Toronto.City of Toronto
When Fitzrovia, the rapidly expanding rental developer founded in 2017 by Adrian Rocca, began building its three-tower “Sloane” project four years ago, the company reckoned it needed to offer residents plenty of on-site amenities. Shoehorned onto a forbidding triangle of land next to the 401 off ramp to Yorkdale, the property’s neighbours include a Honda dealership and several industrial buildings. The mall is nearby, as the crow flies. But to reach it, Sloane’s tenants have to traverse Dufferin’s six lanes and then Yorkdale’s windswept parking lot.
Understandably, Sloane offers something of an all-you-can-eat buffet of options for its tenants. Besides the typical high-rise features – pool, party room, gym, terrace – there’s also a basketball court, a co-working space, a Montessori school, a movie room and a “pet spa.”
Such features, which figure prominently in Fitzrovia’s promotional material, reflect a complicated mix of marketing and municipal goals. Developers use them to add some lustre to their projects but City of Toronto bylaws require builders to provide amenity spaces.
The regulations specify two square-metres of indoor and outdoor amenity space per unit in buildings with more than 20 apartments (or 30 if the site is on a major street). Some of the indoor and outdoor areas need to be physically connected.
With large-scale projects situated in areas that are notably lacking in community spaces and services, such as Sloane, the regulations make both commercial and policy sense.
But what about for smaller-scale apartment buildings – those with five or six floors and perhaps 30 or 40 units – that council wants see developed along major streets?
The formula the city uses is the same for any project with more than 20 apartments, but the economics and the space constraints are trickier with smaller buildings, according to planners and developers looking to build so-called missing middle housing.
“Amenity space is challenging to provide in places that make sense on small building,” says planning consultant Sean Galbraith. “It makes sense to put it on the roof, because that’s the best location.” But, he adds, the wrinkle is that the city may count it as an additional floor, which can scuttle an approval in a predominantly low-rise area. “You either need to get planning relief for an additional storey, or you’re going to lose a storey that actually makes you money.”
Blair Scorgie, also a planning consultant, says city officials reviewing an application may also press the builder to add certain types of amenities, such as a pet-washing station or a playroom, even though the bylaws are silent about such choices.
Beyond these technical considerations, the existing amenity space regulations for smaller buildings overlook a few basic urban realities about the types of residential neighbourhoods that council has deemed suitable for missing middle housing.
One is that the older parts of the city have hundreds of small scale and generally desirable apartment buildings that were built without amenity spaces, except a laundry room.
The other is that such communities typically have plenty of amenities, from local parks to storefront gyms, cafés filled with people working on their laptops, municipal pools and arts hubs. “The city is the amenity,” says Abdur Chatni, president and co-founder of CLIP Homes, a missing middle design-build firm.
He lives in a 1950s building on Bathurst Street, near Eglinton Avenue, with 70 units and no amenity spaces or security desk – just large floor-plate apartments. Despite that lack, there’s always a long list of prospective occupants. “There will always be tenants for this,” Mr. Chatni says, “because the unit layouts are great. There are no extras. People know what they’re paying for.” Such a building would not be approved under the current regulations.
Builders, of course, are not disinterested participants in this conversation: the existing rules mean they have less “saleable” floor space in a project. Large multiunit buildings, simply by virtue of their configuration, often contain areas that simply can’t be used for residential living, including basements or spaces on the main floor.
Some of these, says architect Naama Blonder, founder of Smart Density, can be turned into functional amenity areas, such kids’ playrooms or stroller storage areas. “They’re the easiest to provide and actually useful when you raise kids in condos.”
The same, however, can’t be said of smaller projects, where space is at a premium and the developers can’t count on economies of scale.
Mr. Chatni adds that amenity features also add cost in the form of the monthly maintenance outlays that are tacked onto condo fees or rents. Indeed, for those who aren’t interested in a small pool or prefer to work out with friends at the local fitness centre, those fees may eventually chafe, particularly when eye-candy features like saunas stop functioning.
City planning officials in the past year came face-to-face with the constraints of the existing amenity space rule during the planning of a missing middle pilot project in the east end. The proposed 28-unit apartment building, meant to be shoe-horned into an oddly-shaped Green P lot off Danforth Avenue near Woodbine Avenue, exceeds the minimum threshold for amenity provision. The city’s designers realized the additional space requirements may render it uneconomical.
In fact, these are precisely the kinds of constrained properties or consolidated lots that missing middle developers are now targeting, says Mr. Scorgie, who is working on a number of projects in the 30- to 45-unit range. “It becomes very challenging actually to find space for indoor amenities,” he says. “There’s different pressures at that scale.
Ms. Blonder and others working on such compact projects argue that the city should follow the approach it took with underground parking two years ago. Instead of requiring a minimum number of spaces, council voted to leave the decision up to the developer.
“I don’t think the city should ultimately be mandating [amenity space],” says Igor Dragovic, senior manager for development at Concert Properties. [If] you speak to a lot of developers or people in the industry, I think they will sort of agree on that.”
Mr. Galbraith’s view, on the other hand, is that with council’s push to get developers to build small-scale apartment buildings on major streets, the projects with fewer than 60 apartments – such as the one in which Mr. Chatni lives – should be exempt.
It’s interesting to note that the debate over the city’s amenity space regulations was only thrown open by council’s recent decision to begin encouraging the sort of low-rise apartment buildings that were constructed decades ago – well before developers sought to promote themselves with sexy enticements in order to attract either buyers or tenants.
Ironically, those amenity-free older buildings today have long wait-lists while tiny condos in towers fitted out with roof top terraces or weight rooms are seeing rents stall and market values plunge. As Ms. Blonder puts it, “When you live in an apartment in Paris, no one expects to have a theatre room and a gym and a pool.”