Toronto's Anti-Apartment Hysteria

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Holland bartholomew was the architect of single u zoning in saint louis, and he was hired by cities across north america like memphis, chattanooga, rochester and even vancouver. Toronto passed a law 60en 61 which banned all apartment buildings and residential areas. On those streets, all you could build were detached, single family homes. Lots of clever lopes actually found a way to profit off toronto's anti apartment hysteria,. including one man named alfred hawes who basically threatened to build apartments there until the neighbors bought it from him.

Downtown Toronto has a dense core of tall, glassy buildings along the waterfront of Lake Ontario. Outside of that, lots short single family homes sprawl out in every direction. Residents looking for something in between an expensive house and a condo in a tall, generic tower struggle to find places to live. There just aren’t a lot of these mid-sized rental buildings in the city.

And it's not just Toronto -- a similar architectural void can be found in many other North American cities, like Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston and Vancouver. And this is a big concern for urban planners -- so big, there's a term for it. The "missing middle." That moniker can be confusing, because it's not directly about middle class housing -- rather, it's about a specific range of building sizes and typologies, including: duplexes, triplexes, courtyard buildings, multi-story apartment complexes, the list goes on. Buildings like these have an outsized effect on cities, and cities without enough of these kinds of buildings often suffer from their absence.

The Missing Middle