Nestled behind a Value Village in Toronto’s east end lies a 50-car city-run parking lot that wasn’t pulling its weight.
The lot off Amroth Street was losing money and Beaches—East York Coun. Brad Bradford thought the land could be used for something more valuable: housing.
In 2020, he started pushing city staff to find a way to build “missing middle” housing on the site — the kind of low-rise apartments found in other major cities but rarely in downtown Toronto due to restrictive zoning policies.
Four years later, the project just cleared a big hurdle.
It just finished going through the city’s rezoning process, an often long and arduous journey that must happen before shovels hit the ground. The proposed new building needed special permissions because it doesn’t comply with existing land-use rules.
Last week, city staff finalized a report recommending council approve three separate buildings boasting 34 total units — two three-storey stacked townhomes with six total units and a six-storey apartment with 28 units.
Staff didn’t just give the project the green light.
By subjecting themselves to the same approval process private developers often lament, officials learned key lessons about how housing does — and doesn’t — get built in a city in desperate need of more homes.
“If you want to see projects that get built, we need to understand the economic viability of them [and] the specific granular roadblocks that exist within the silos of our bureaucracy and our development review process,” Bradford said. “And what better way to understand that than putting ourselves through it?”
While the report outlines dozens of important takeaways, a few stick out for Bradford.
First, the “development review” process — referring to the various city approvals builders need before starting construction — is too expensive.
“Fees for development review have an outsized impact on missing middle development, and so that means we should revisit what those fees are if we want to have more of this type of housing,” he said.
The city paid consultants nearly $631,000 to shepherd its own Beaches development project through the approvals process, which translates to nearly $19,000 per unit.
Those fees are “generally comparable” across different types and sizes of projects, staff said in the report. This means they have a “disproportionate impact on overall project costs” for missing middle housing because, unlike a larger building, a smaller apartment can’t take advantage of economies of scale.
To reduce these costs, staff recommend making it legal to build more kinds of housing “as-of-right,” meaning developers could build without seeking additional city hall approval.
Bradford’s second takeaway is also related to financial viability.
Toronto’s land-use rules “actually discourage development of small-scale apartment buildings in neighbourhoods,” he said.
The city has specific rules about how much parking and indoor and outdoor amenity space a building needs, as well as rules about loading provisions, referring to how much space is dedicated to things like garbage pickup. Complying with all of those rules can raise costs and make buildings more difficult to construct.
For projects like this one on Amroth Street with more than 20 units, city rules require a minimum of 136 square metres of total amenity space, including 68 square metres of indoor amenity space, which can include something like a gym.
The Amroth building has a 292 square metre outdoor courtyard but no indoor space.
For small apartments, indoor amenity space “is difficult to achieve due to limited space,” staff noted. Including an indoor space would’ve led to either individual apartments getting cut, a larger building, or an underground space that would’ve raised costs and increased the project’s carbon emissions, which was a non-starter.
Existing rules also require a building like Amroth to have two parking spaces, even though the city has largely done away with minimum parking requirements for buildings near subway stations. The Amroth development plot is steps from Woodbine Station.
The proposed Amroth building doesn’t have any parking spots so it needed special permission to go ahead without them. Including them in larger buildings is often easier, staff said, because they can be put underground.
However, for a small building situated in a residential neighbourhood, “it is difficult to accommodate an underground garage … due to costs and site constraints,” the report said.
City rules also meant the Amroth project needed more loading areas for things like garbage disposals than the space could accommodate. Bucking this rule meant the building needed special approval.
“The provision of a loading space would be difficult to provide for the [project], as the site is simply not large enough. A loading space on this site would have reduced the constructability of the apartment building and would have taken up significant space within the public realm,” the report said.
The rules around garbage pickup are flexible. If a project proponent can show a building can be serviced by curbside pickup — which was the case with Amroth — exemptions are given. Staff noted, however, “this is unlikely to be the case in all scenarios” depending on the size and configuration of the land.
“Our policies that add costs, [including] the amenities’ space requirements, the loading provisions, those are all expensive things that, when they’re born out over the fewer number of units that these types of projects provide for, they could be show stoppers,” Bradford said.
Bradford’s final takeaway from the project is to update the city’s guidelines for low and mid-rise buildings so they include apartments like Amroth that are currently caught in the middle.
The city has different guidelines for different types of housing. If a project fits into a guideline, it’s easier to get approved. The low-rise guidelines apply to buildings four storeys or less, while the mid-rise guidelines generally apply to buildings on larger streets between five and 11 storeys.
While the city is working on updating the low-rise and mid-rise guidelines, there are none for buildings between four and six storeys not located on a major street.
“There's nothing that is specifically tailored to this type of project,” Bradford said. “We need to update guidelines that reflect missing middle housing.”
“That would streamline our review process,” he added. “if you check all the boxes as it relates to the guidelines, it’s sailing all the way through.”
Though one important stage in the project’s life is now done, there’s still more to do before shovels break ground.
On Wednesday, the city’s planning and housing committee signed off on the requested bylaw changes. Now it’s on to full council for final approval.
If and when the approval comes, CreateTO, the city agency spearheading the project, will offer the ready-to-build site to developers, which could be a private or non-profit developer.
For Bradford, even though building the actual apartment could still take some time, the project has already paid dividends.
“Really, the goal is unpacking and learning about all the stuff that this process helped us learn so that you can transfer it and replicate it on other sites,” he said.
