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Unlocking family-friendly housing through density
Young families need more climate-friendly choices in the communities they love.
By Mike Moffatt – founding director of the PLACE Centre @ Smart Prosperity Institute and member of the Task Force for Housing & Climate
Canada has a shortage of family-friendly housing. This is especially true for our big cities, where wannabe homeowners and renters are being forced out by a lack of housing options that match their needs. A high-rise condo or two-bedroom apartment simply doesn’t cut it for every household and lifestyle type.
How do we fix this? With gentle family-friendly densification of our cities and suburban neighbourhoods.
Gentle densification means creating more family-sized units in apartment buildings and adding more “missing middle” housing types like fourplexes, townhomes and mid-rise developments. This is the only way to provide more choice for families and other multi-member households while also improving housing affordability, providing better value for taxpayers, and creating greener neighbourhoods.
The alternative is a worsening trend of “drive until you qualify” (a phenomenon examined in Baby Needs a New Home), which has seen an outmigration of young families to smaller, suburban and rural communities, where sticker prices are lower but commutes are longer and costs add up. Also, as we’ve documented in recent modelling, this outmigration from cities also leads to increased climate emissions.
It’s for these reasons that our Blueprint for More and Better Housing talks about “legalizing density”. Too many rules and perverse incentives currently make building more family-friendly density in existing cities and communities too prohibitive. The Blueprint provides two solutions for fixing this.
- The first is to allow for more construction of family-sized units in apartment buildings. The documentary Why North America Can’t Build Nice Apartments notes that outdated Canadian and American building code rules around staircases make building larger units cost-prohibitive. The Blueprint recommends solving this by adopting Sweden’s single-egress rules for buildings up to 16 storeys and removing any floorplate restrictions to allow larger and more efficient high-density towers. By doing so, we can have more 3-bedroom and larger units, which are particularly attractive for families with children. A variety of other changes, including tax reform to establishing province-wide zoning standards or prohibitions on everything from angular planes to floor space indices, would also allow for developers, both for-profit and not-for-profit, to build apartments with more economically attainable family-sized units.
- The second solution is through allowing the construction of gentle density housing in existing neighbourhoods. This gentle density can include everything from laneway housing to fourplexes to 3-5 storey apartment buildings. The Blueprint recommends legalizing gentle density by eliminating unit maximums on all forms of residential housing and abolishing parking minimums, by legalizing the construction of CMHC pre-approved housing designs as-of-right, and by adopting ambitious as-of-right density permissions near transit. This will create attainable housing options for middle-class families, though the Blueprint also recognizes that the market will not be able to create affordability across the income spectrum. Governments need to build affordable housing options, which can be facilitated through repurposing land, such as surplus school lands.
Increasing gentle density naturally leads to the question “can the infrastructure in our existing neighbourhoods, from sewers to parks, handle this level of population growth?”. In the majority of cases, the answer is a resounding “yes!”. Below is a map of population growth in the City of Toronto between 1971 and 2016, courtesy of Censusmapper. Areas shaded in green indicate census tracts where the population has increased since 1971. Areas in pink show areas of population decline.
Outside of downtown Toronto, which has seen the construction of hundreds of high-rise condos and apartments, the vast majority of Toronto’s neighbourhoods have actually de-populated over the past 50 years. That’s because shrinking family sizes and an aging population have meant that homes which, two generations ago, may have housed five to seven residents are today only housing one or two. This leads to infrastructure like parks and schools and transit routes being underused (and occasionally closed), and water and sewer systems only using a fraction of their capacity.
This isn’t to say that no infrastructure improvements are needed to advance gentle densification but, generally, our existing infrastructure has in many cases the capacity to support larger populations, leading to reduced infrastructure costs and providing substantial savings to taxpayers.
More homes for families with children, shorter commutes, lower greenhouse gas emissions, and slowing the growth of property tax increases – what’s not to love? The Blueprint for More and Better Housing provides a roadmap to make it a reality.
Recommendations for government
How can governments legalize density? By legalizing walkable, accessible, inclusive, transit-rich, climate-friendly neighbourhoods: In many cases, existing zoning regulations and rules such as parking minimums make it illegal, or economically unviable, to create great climate-friendly neighbourhoods accessible to all. Governments should ensure that rules allow for the building of great neighbourhoods while also ensuring that those neighbourhoods have the necessary infrastructure to support their population, from sewers to green infrastructure such as parks and trees.
Specifically, the Blueprint for More and Better Housing makes the following recommendations:
Federal government should:
1) Tie all federal infrastructure, transit, and housing funding to provincial and municipal adoption of the following recommendations:
i. Municipal governments should:
- Eliminate unit maximums on all forms of residential housing and abolish parking minimums on residential, commercial, or industrial properties.
- Utilize hazard maps to ensure no new housing is built in high-risk areas prone to climate impacts, in particular flooding and wildfires.
ii. Provincial governments should:
- Require municipal action.
- Adopt BC’s transit density rules for larger communities in every community with high-frequency transit.
- Urgently make public hazard maps of areas where new housing could be at higher risk of climate impacts.
- Utilize hazard maps to ensure no new housing is built in high-risk areas prone to climate impacts, in particular flooding and wildfires.
- Create a more permissive land use, planning, and approvals system, including repealing or overriding municipal policies, zoning, or plans that prioritize the preservation of the physical character of the neighbourhood.
- Exempt from site plan approval and public consultation all projects that conform to the Official Plan and require only minor variances.
- Establish province-wide zoning standards, or prohibitions, for minimum lot sizes, maximum building setbacks, minimum heights, angular planes, shadow rules, front doors, building depth, landscaping, floor space index, and heritage view cones and planes.
2) Develop a federal strategy for seniors housing, aging in place, and rural intensification to build desirable housing options and diverse typologies for aging seniors to remain in their communities and unlock housing supply for the next generation of families with children.
3) Establish a dedicated fund to provide grants to local governments specifically for projects that promote walkable, accessible, inclusive, transit-rich, and climate-friendly neighbourhoods. This funding should:
i. Support infrastructure development, transit improvements, and green space creation.
ii. Require municipal governments to eliminate unit maximums on all forms of residential housing and abolish parking minimums on residential, commercial, or industrial properties.
iii. Facilitate public-private partnerships to leverage private sector expertise and investment in developing sustainable neighbourhoods. It should encourage collaborations focusing on innovative urban solutions, such as smart city technologies and green infrastructure.
iv. Be a commitment that extends over multiple years, providing stability and certainty for long-term planning.
v. Have regular funding cycles, such as annual or biannual disbursements, that allow local governments to anticipate funding availability and schedule their projects accordingly.
vi. Include provisions for tracking the performance and outcomes of funded projects. Regular public reporting on these projects will ensure accountability and enable ongoing assessment of the effectiveness of the funding program.
Provincial governments should:
1) Abolish parking minimums, and unit maximums, and limit exclusionary zoning in municipalities through binding provincial action to allow “as of right” residential housing.
2) Permit “as of right” secondary suites, garden suites, laneway houses, multi-tenant housing (renting rooms within a dwelling) and conversions of underutilized or redundant commercial properties to residential or mixed residential and commercial use.
3) Adopt ambitious as-of-right density permissions adjacent to transit stations, and consider adopting British Columbia’s transit density rules targeting larger communities in every community with high-frequency transit, subject to context-specific considerations and supportive infrastructure.
4) Create higher density zones, including a potential minimum allowable height of 8 storeys, and a minimum allowable density (FAR) of 3.0, for sites less than 800m from a university or college campus, to facilitate the construction of student housing for students.
Municipal governments should:
1) Institute the following changes to zoning:
i. Abolish unit maximums on all forms of residential housing and abolish parking minimums on residential, commercial, and industrial properties, and limit exclusionary zoning in municipalities through binding provincial action.
ii. Adopt ambitious as-of-right density permissions adjacent to transit stations, and consider adopting British Columbia’s transit density rules targeting larger communities in every community with high-frequency transit, subject to context-specific considerations and supportive infrastructure.
iii. Create higher density zones, including a potential minimum allowable height of 8 storeys and a minimum allowable density (FAR) of 3.0, for sites less than 800m from a university or college campus, to facilitate the construction of student housing.
iv. Revise and update zoning laws to allow the establishment of small-scale retail spaces in residential areas, prioritizing locations that are highly accessible by public transit and conveniently walkable for residents. The amendment should include specific criteria to ensure these retail establishments integrate seamlessly into the neighbourhood.
v. Permit “as of right” secondary suites, garden suites, laneway houses, multi-tenant housing (renting rooms within a dwelling) and conversions of underutilized or redundant commercial properties to residential or mixed residential and commercial use.
2) Waive development charges and parkland cash-in-lieu and charge only modest connection fees for all infill residential projects up to 10 units or for any development where no new material infrastructure will be required.
3) Prioritize the transformation of existing streets and roadways for active transportation by adding additional space that meets the needs of pedestrians, cyclists, and individuals with mobility challenges, such as older adults and persons with disabilities. This transformation can be accomplished by incorporating protected bike lanes and the principles of universal design into a contiguous “everywhere-to-everywhere” network that makes cycling a safe mobility choice for people of all ages and abilities and every resident in every neighbourhood.
4) Expand and upgrade EV charging infrastructure. Collaborate with utility companies, businesses, and community organizations to increase the number of public EV charging stations in neighbourhoods, public parking areas, and other strategic locations.
5) Waive office space requirements in all downtown building conversions and re-developments.