Toronto Apartments

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

At the time, canada's aletes were largely british. The fear was that if people went and lived in an apartment, well, they'd never become parents. And that's where you would get this idea of race suicide. Developers started buying up land to build apartments but faced fierce resistance from the city. They had one vision of an urban centre, but it was at odds with another vision of toronto as a city of homes.

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