Why Is the 19 12 in Aleganti Apartment Lot Still in Use?

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It was built some time around 19 23 ish. It's kind of vague when you look at the records. This is a really small area around these apartments, by the way, just a few streets wide. But because it got there pre that ban, it had this thing called legal non conforming status as long as it's continually in use. The previous owner wanted to change it into two houses and they never finished the job. Instead, they sold the property. And now this building is technically too ridiculously big, boarded up empty houses.

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