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UrbanToronto is celebrating Earth Month throughout April with features that examine the issues and challenges of sustainability in the development industry.
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In today's Toronto, clusters of post-war apartment towers loom over single-family homes, walk-ups are camouflaged amid Old Toronto houses, and residential neighbourhoods stagnate or shrink as the population booms. These incongruencies speak of short-lived attempts to distribute growth more evenly across the city’s vast residential areas.
Until recently, growth had nowhere to go but up and out, putting pressure on the apartment-friendly areas that have served new immigrants and the working poor for decades. The result of this uneven and unequal allocation of supply is seen most starkly in images like the one below at Yonge and Eglinton.
If the previous zoning regime is responsible for Toronto's irregular growth and density, perhaps updated zoning can provide a corrective. That was the hope of Toronto’s City Council last year when it voted in favour of Official Plan and Zoning by-law amendments to allow multiplex housing citywide, which effectively ended single-family zoning. Informed by studies spearheaded by City of Toronto’s Expanding Housing Options in Neighbourhoods (EHON), the new rules aim to make it easier to create a gentle density boost across the vast residential areas of the city. ReHousing, a research initiative that contributed key design research to the EHON study, offers an evolving how-to guide that explores what’s now possible in the ‘Yellowbelt.’
“It’s not enough to change the rules of what you can build,” ReHousing co-director Michael Piper told UrbanToronto. “In California, garden suites have been allowed for about 10 years,” said Piper, “however, research suggests that it was only after tools to help people were developed that they began to see a lot of uptake.” This is what prompted the group to create their own free set of tools and guides for Toronto. Conceived in collaboration among the University of Toronto, Tuf Lab, and LGA Architectural Partners, ReHousing aims to provide current and prospective landowners with the knowledge needed to convert single-family homes into multi-unit housing — or from 1 to up to 5 units. The comprehensive website, which earned the group the 2023 CMHC President’s Medal for Outstanding Housing Research, takes users through a step-by-step process that shows what’s feasible and considers key rules and constraints, budget, and more.
At the heart of ReHousing’s how-to website is a catalogue of 13 housing types organized according to location and age, each with over four paths for transformation that range from minor renovations to new builds (divided into low, medium, high, and new depending on cost, complexity, and number of units added). Three-dimensional drawings and floor plans, real-estate listings, and a map locating a sample house make it easy for current or prospective owners to identify their house type.
Navigating through each of the house types in the catalogue shows that the solutions offered can be quite different. The Postwar Bungalow and the Metroburb Wide, two house types on roughly similar-sized lots (12x38m and 13x33m respectively) usually found around Scarborough, Etobicoke, and North York, are a case in point. The Postwar Bungalow, the website explains to the user, is a single-storey house with finished basement that typically features a detached garage with a side entrance. It often sits small on its lot and is aligned to one side to allow for parking access. The Metroburb Wide, a two-storey “snout” house with a protruding two-car garage and an unfinished basement, commonly occupies a higher percentage of the lot—and takes up its full width.
The Postwar Bungalow and Metroburb Wide house types lead to solutions of varying cost and complexity, each accompanied by prototype plans and three-dimensional drawings, which ultimately arrive at 5 units with anywhere from 10 to 15 beds. But the key difference is in the quality and type of units that each site can produce. While for the most part, the transformations to the Metroburb Wide are confined to its existing building footprint, the characteristics of the Postwar Bungalow mean that it can grow beyond it—typically in the form of a garden suite and a side addition.
ReHousing’s guide goes into a high-degree of granularity for each of the four types of transformations. The Postwar Bungalow's first option (“low”) works within the building's existing footprint to create two generous 3-bedroom units: To make the basement transformation possible, it converts the existing side door and stair into a private entry and introduces light wells. In addition to bringing light into the basement, ReHousing’s prototypical solution explains, the new light wells ensure the code requirement for a second means of egress is satisfied.
The second option (“medium”) builds on the previous transformation and increases the unit count to four. Within the bungalow’s footprint, the basement alteration is maintained and the ground floor is split into two new units through the addition of a rear entrance. The generous proportions of the lot, ReHousing’s prototypical plans note, allow for a two-storey garden suite with firefighting access. The third option (“high”) combines all previous transformations and adds a fifth unit. A 2.8m wide side addition to the bungalow and two new sunken courtyards provide the space and access points needed to split the basement into two units. The final option (“new”), not shown here, contemplates a full rebuild in the form of a walk-up or stacked townhouses.
“The goal [of the ReHousing initiative] is to empower groups that are not commonly part of the larger development community,” Piper told UrbanToronto, “whether that’s a small nonprofit housing provider or multiple generations of a family looking to live together.” ReHousing’s future work includes further improvements to how it delivers its guides and tools, and expanding its scope beyond Toronto. As more mayors look to gentle density increases to alleviate the housing crisis, ReHousing is gearing up to provide them with the necessary tools: “The next step is to work toward a more dynamic platform that can serve municipalities across Canada,” Piper said. “We’re reaching out to other municipalities [...] it’s a national-scale issue.”
Those interested in more information on ReHousing’s options for expanding housing can visit their website for all of the details.
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UrbanToronto has a research service, UrbanToronto Pro, that provides comprehensive data on construction projects in the Greater Toronto Area—from proposal through to completion. We also offer Instant Reports, downloadable snapshots based on location, and a daily subscription newsletter, New Development Insider, that tracks projects from initial application.
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Thank you to the companies joining UrbanToronto to celebrate Earth Month.
