On TOCore

We recently made a deputation for the Planning & Growth Management Committee on TOCore, the Downtown Secondary Plan.

There’s a lot to like in this Plan, though it does unfortunately introduce a lot to not like as well.

For our deputation, we focused on the fact that all land designated as Neighbourhood per the Official Plan was excluded from any analysis or review in TOCore. It therefore continues to be protected from any meaningful intensification, despite our current housing availability and affordability crisis.

The Yellowbelt, as it were, continues to be the most important housing supply constraint in Toronto.

We’ve included video and copy of our speech below.

Good morning.

My name is Chris Spoke and I’m a member of Housing Matters.

We are a group of Torontonians who advocate for increased housing supply to address the housing availability and affordability crisis that is pricing many renters, young people, and middle class families out of our city.

We take very seriously the common sense notion that, if we want more people to have housing in Toronto, we’re going to need to build more housing.

I appreciate being granted the opportunity today to comment on TOCore, the Downtown Plan Official Plan amendment, and would like to start by thanking Planning Staff for the diligent work that went into its preparation.

There is a lot to like within its 78 pages. Downtown is certainly one part of Toronto where we have not shied away from much needed-intensification, and we believe that the city is all the better for it.

That said, we would like to highlight the treatment of Neighbourhoods within the plan and what we view as a missed opportunity.

Given the Official Plan’s guidance to have any new development proposed within our Neighbourhoods protect and reinforce existing physical character, the housing market in Toronto has bifurcated quite dramatically.

On one hand, we continue to build highrise condominium housing at a reasonable rate, to the benefit of the thousands of people who now have homes downtown where they otherwise would not, and on the other, we continue to protect our Neighbourhoods from any meaningful intensification.

This phenomenon has lead to a missing housing typology known as the missing middle.

Missing Middle housing refers to multi-unit housing types such as duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, townhouses, and walkup apartments that provide diverse housing choices and generate enough density to support transit and locally-serving commercial amenities, but that we rarely see built anymore, despite their popularity.

As a consequence, even downtown, we see very low density housing, including detached housing, within a short walking distance of many subway stations. In a rapidly growing city, with rapidly rising prices and a 1.1% rental vacancy rate, we believe that we should take advantage of every opportunity available to rethink this approach, including as part of this Official Plan amendment.

We recognize based on prior conversations that this perspective is not foreign to Planning Staff and that it would likely need to be unpacked as part of a larger discussion addressing the appropriateness of maintaining the stability of our neighbourhoods at the cost of housing availability and affordability, but our purpose today is to simply highlight its importance for the record.

TOCore represents a proactive approach by the Planning Department to unlock more land for intensification in our growing City, and we hope to see this ethos extended beyond mixed use areas to our Downtown Neighbourhoods as well.

Thank you.