Want to solve the housing crisis? Build these, experts say | About That

foreign even when times were tough Canadians dreamed of having a backyard of their own a place where they could relax find happiness and let their children romp today that dream is being shattered backyards have become expensive luxuries the houses in front of them even more so the population is growing and there isn't much land left the cost of a home in Vancouver has increased nearly 30 percent since January there are many many people are hurting in the present economic circumstances particularly in the area of the housing crisis and it's not a crisis that it's going to go away overnight there are lots of houses for sale in any big city the problem is being able to afford one [Music] amazing Toronto for all of its wonderful multi-faceted existence is pretty binary when it comes to housing there are lots of neighborhoods like this single detached family homes and lots like this a jungle of condo and apartment Towers but there's not much in between like where I used to live in Montreal my whole neighborhood was made up of duplexes and triplexes and I I loved it it was this kind of seamless integration of you know density walkability rich with amenities connected by public transit lots of green space and you know not a high-rise in sight that's what urban planners call the missing middle a type of housing that we used to see all the time you know kind of Middle Ground between single-family homes and big tall apartment buildings but it's something that's fallen out of favor over the decades so today on about that where exactly did the missing middle go and why do we need to find it and build it now more than ever so I'm just outside the downtown office of Nama blonder she's an architect urban planner and she co-founded a firm called smart density and they're real champions of this missing middle concept and she's going to tell me all the best let's just dive right into the missing middle because if you had to explain in as succinct away as possible what do we actually mean when we say those words the missing middle so the missing middle is yes if you want to the clear definition buildings up to four stories in height but it opens up really the the middle of maybe income and the size of the unit and different demographics right it's not just the height of the building right and so here we can see a few different examples I mean yes there are the plexes right so duplex you know Triplex you know quad plexes mid-rise buildings townhouses to I mean laneway Suite like all those kind of things which fit into this category yes because even with the laneway suite that should be really the bare minimum of the the missing middle we are talking about all of the sudden more than one unit right because the the laneway suite will be a secondary Suite on the same property so we now have two families living in the same in the same property which is better than just one in the crisis that we're at absolutely was there was there ever a time when city planners did gravitate towards this kind of housing there are and they're beautiful examples in the City built beautiful three or four stories multi-unit but at some point in the in our planning systemic change for almost four decades it was not even an option and just so I'm clear when you say not even an option what do you mean illegal it's not it's not part of it's not allowed it was illegal it was illegal yeah so this part of the story is is actually really interesting because the missing middle wasn't always missing so I'm in church Wellesley Village or just the village if you know the area and in the early 1900s there was an explosion of apartment buildings sort of like this one right here you know Toronto's population was booming First World War soldiers were coming back home immigrants were arriving and they were drawn to manufacturing jobs and this building actually so it's called The Royal George Apartments it was built in 1911 a year later in 1912 Toronto passed a law essentially Banning the construction of apartment buildings it was it was based on the belief that these you know sort of closely packed tenements were filthy and run down and sort of immoral and not fit for Toronto and you know of course wealthy homeowners didn't want those kinds of neighbors living on their street and Incredibly that thinking certainly in a legal sense stayed pretty deeply entrenched in Toronto for a long time and and prevailed for most of the last century okay let's get into a few examples here this here we can see how the property has been modified so in this case one of the proposals was converting a garage that perhaps is not in used into a residential Suite so it could accommodate you know your elderly parents or if your kids go to they want to leave the house but it's not an option rent is too expensive how can you create a secondary Suite it is the very bare minimum of the missing middle because this would fit your family needs perhaps but it want to meet the city's needs right there's a lot more than just my grandma that needs to find a place absolutely yeah I seriously think what about this I mean this is so a bigger unit in this case a garden Suite very similar is a laneway suite so the difference between a laneway suite and a garden Suite is just if you have a laneway or not but in 2019 the city approved the laneway suite pilot to allow a secondary Suite what are we looking at here I mean this this is a much bigger construction but it's starting to approach what we're actually talking about now we're getting into what we call the plexus so the plexus could be a Triplex a four Plex and eight Plex and this starts to solve the problem we're starting to get there I I'm not sure how much it would you know really move the needle in it for Toronto but if we're talking about Mississauga the Cambridge you know smaller municipalities that need to to take an active part right like the province has uh um they just announced specific targets for each of the municipalities this is definitely how they could and should meet the those targets and even this is sort of just a a small idea of how how Grand we can get with this vision of the missing middle because this is an actual project that you've worked on we we must have that discussion because there are some streets in our neighborhoods and think of in Toronto Christie Dufferin Lansdowne these are these streets are just as wide as Bloor College Dundas yet because of their language designation all they could have are those houses so if you walk along Dufferin Christie you just see houses the missing middle if you really wanted to make a change we need to perhaps upset the neighbors a little bit but we we have to do something that it will move the needle because if not we're just gonna stay with those cute apologies exactly that will be great for your grandmother but not really great for newcomers because if I was to ask you what is the single biggest hurdle to having more missing middle housing built in the city you would tell me what you know when the city approved the garden Suite A pilot I thought wow this is the harmless policy ever like how much can we talk about it they got so much opposition Appeals not in my backyard um and I thought wow this is really hard to get things done and that's just for a garden suite and that is for the garden exactly okay so Nama we're looking at two different land use maps one for Vancouver one for Toronto what should I be noticing about these well you tell me what is the most prominent color you see it's a lot of yellow yes exactly and the yellow is the lenius designation of neighborhoods what does that mean what kind of houses do you see there what kind of homes detached semi-detached townhouse no yeah and that's the vast I mean swaths of Vancouver and Toronto that's just what it looks like exactly I want to make sure I understand this so let's slide this off here right off the table we're going to make this really simple for me okay okay so let me dump these blocks out okay this we have a hundred blocks every block is one percent okay of the Cherry this this is Toronto and so the green I mean there's actually a fair bit of this city where the land use is designated as sort of Green Park space Open Spaces right so that's one section we have lots of other areas these are the sort of the darker colors and what do those mean this would be in this context of your blocks anything that is not residential or roads the blocks things that uh employment industrial uses are okay in those purple blocks okay then we're left with these we care about these people live here exactly exactly and so we have I guess apartment buildings sort of bigger bigger buildings exactly that we see all the time the old rental ones exactly like this one apartment buildings rental the ones that we refer to as rental mixed use so oh and it's so funny because when we talk about the affordability crisis this is exactly the reason scarcity of land now how many of these yellow are just single detached that are we start counting okay four is getting a lot of these seven this is eight okay this 31 percent single detached all of this just single detachments yes so how do we turn this into that so the discussion of the missing middle is actually not converting this to that we're not talking about high density like mid-rise or tall buildings where we will see in the Reds kind of this is near Transit this is in commercial streets we're just talking about taking this and turning it from a single right family to more families and the limit is the the city identified is four stories so it's almost like instead of having all of these single blocks if you'd start doing a little something this this is our City more beautiful and more welcoming and there's a vision that we need to start stepping towards and we need to make those decisions and we need everyone on board in here are some very common concerns complaints about missing middle housing and I'd like for you to draw from the pile you have no idea what's in here but I think you're well equipped to handle it okay [Music] thank you hey uh welcome back to about that we are talking about missing middle housing in this country and and so you you know when I use that term I mean you know any kind of housing where you can fit more people in that then you could fit in a single family home for example but something that isn't a gargantuan condo Tower because when you look at you know a city like Toronto where almost a third of its space is used pretty inefficiently right like Zone single-family homes big chunks of of the city and lots of cities across the country maybe there's a better way so what we're about to do here we're going to bring Travis Hanks into the conversation uh Travis you're a principal architect with hexity this is a an architectural firm in Vancouver and we're going to talk about a project that you've been working to get off the ground for a little while that that correct me if I'm wrong it manages to fit 13 units into a single residential lot is that right that's right there 13 total units it is an oversized lot it's not a standard lot and we've got a video that that you folks have provided for us so this is uh part of Vancouver and this is what it could look like the major move that that we've made that we've been advocating for is a courtyard psychology so there's actually two primary buildings on the site one that's pushed a little closer to the street than you might see uh you know in previous developments here um and one that's on the laneway in the back and what that allows is to have you know pretty substantial green space in the middle you get lots more light into all of those units and you have a great social space right at the heart of the project that brings all the neighbors together hi my name is Shirley Shen and I'm an architect at hexy Studio architecture I want to tell you about how long this project is going to take from beginning to end this project actually started in 2015 when a different architect was exploring a low-rise apartment for the site this project was shelved in 2016 because the site simply could not support the parking that was required in 2019 parking regulations were reduced for rental housing and so that's when conversations were restarted it took a year to confirm with the city the underground parking was not required for a rental project on the site we were brought on board in 2021 to develop a missing middle type project with only surface parking we were able to get through the pre-application process in only a year and we were able to submit our rezone application in 2022 the reasoning approvals will take about a year and after that we still have to get a development permit and a building permit and if all goes well we'll start construction in 2026 and people might be able to move in in 2027 or 2028 so as you can see the project timeline is measured in years not months and our involvement will have total of seven years for the developer they would have spent about 12 years working on the project this is a timeline that is appropriate for a high density high-rise project definitely not for a small scale missing middle type project and that is why you don't see very much missing metal projects being built in Vancouver today now there is one interesting thing about how some in Vancouver want to tackle housing density and create more of it so there's this thing called the floor space ratio or the FSR and you can think of it as how much total square footage you're allowed compared to the size of the lot so you know let's say you've got a 4 000 square foot lot which is you know pretty typical and FSR of 0.7 would mean your total square footage like your total living space could be 70 of the lot or 2 800 square feet for single detached homes that actually is the max limit by law for multiplexes the FSR is 1.0 which means on that same lot you could build like this or like this or like this you get the idea but some say that's still too small like if you want to get serious really serious about density you need to set the FSR at like 1.5 or even 2.0 which might look like this or this or this the result more units on the same lot which in theory makes them more affordable okay so Nama we wanted to address some of the concerns that some people might have about this idea of building this kind of you know missing middle housing in their neighborhood can you just wait here just one second I have something okay this um think of this as like the uh about that complaint box [Laughter] in here are some very common concerns complaints about missing middle housing and I'd like for you to draw from the pile you haven't seen these before clearly no you have no idea what's in here but I think you're well equipped to handle it okay go ahead and pull from the start right from the beginning higher density developments will reduce property values in my area I love that okay we started with the classic one so developments whatever they are small or or large they actually tend to improve the environment that they're coming in we have as part of our planning process when you get let's you're a developer and you're getting a building approved we have in the mechanism built into the process things that you need to contribute it's called Community benefits it's called Parkland dedication to ensure that development actually improves our city you want to take another complaint okay developers care only about the money and not for the true needs of my community I would say you would be surprised by how many of them are willing to come to the table and listen and Implement ideas that are coming from the community into their projects and it's okay that they care about the bottom line because if the bottom line will be negative it won't be built as simple as that and if we want more housing being built I would love to see more and more communities discussing and having a fruitful dialogue with developers about the things that matter like public Improvement and what their Community can can get done try this one the Shadows of the building will block my sunlight I would say that I have a problem that you know we prioritize backyards over someone a place to call home because this is our planning system we're saying okay let's protect your backyard From Shadows and in the process we'll just cut 30 units of the of the new developments so not in the context of the missing middle because come on guys this is a four-story height of the house but definitely we need to address the elephant in the room right you're saying that even if this argument applied to the missing middle which it doesn't because the buildings just aren't tall enough to cast those kinds of Shadows high as a house you're saying even if it I mean it's just are we really prioritizing shadows two more okay I'm worried about the impact to existing Services infrastructure and environment okay I love this one because now it's like it's not them it's the pipes it's this the sewage pipes that can handle new people right and I the answer for that and I hear that a lot almost every open house I hear that one we need to remember that the this discussion is the purely professional discussion with the engineering department and there are many steps in the process that these arguments are being reviewed and being discussed and being changed and development pays for for upgrades so and I never heard of any project that the engineering department recommended against it but cancel approved it anyway it doesn't happen but the concern is real right if people are worried about parking spaces if people are worried about you know the park capacity near them in their local neighborhood schools I mean whatever right one of the advantages of density okay building inwards and upwards means that we have more space left as open space right and the opposite of it is building more and sprawling out and consuming more land and so if anyone is concerned about open space they should be actually Pro density not against it this has been fascinating thanks so much for doing it thank you for having me foreign [Music] hey welcome back to about that so here's the thing about the missing middle you know depending on where you sit the idea of cramming 13 units into a single residential lot you know may sound like a wonderfully Progressive idea or the worst kind of neighborhood nightmare but what is certainly true is that even its most passionate proponents don't see the missing middle as a cure-all solution to this country's housing crisis because you know making home ownership more affordable again it's just going to take a hell of a lot more than what the missing middle can provide but you know think of it this way like like the thin edge of a wedge you know a way to introduce density into communities where that word density is is like Kryptonite it's like a way to to ease the transition from single-family home neighborhoods to something with a little more density built in all the way up to dense you know City cores with big tall buildings in a way having an in-between depolarizes the conversation and that Advocates say is worth fighting for I'm Andrew Chang thanks for watching take care [Music]

Channel: CBC News

Views: 205,698

Keywords: housing, housing crisis, urban planning, city planning, missing middle, land use, zoning, zoning map, canadian cities, downtown core, about that, andrew chang, cbc, cbc news, cbc explore, exploreapp

Id: GJbfrAuhrZ4

Length: 23min 35sec (1415 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 21 2023