Addressing Canada’s Housing Supply: Can Regulations Drive Housing Innovation?

Full Panel
Transcript

Note to readers: This video session was transcribed using auto-transcribing software.  Questions or concerns with the transcription can be directed to citytalk@canurb.org with “transcription” in the subject line.

Addressing Canada’s Housing Supply: Can Regulations Drive Housing Innovation?

City Talk, March 20, 2025

Mary W. Rowe  I’m Mary Rowe from the Canadian Urban Institute, I’m coming into you today from Toronto where I happen to be … the Urban Institute is across the country. We have staff in, I think, nine cities but we have listeners all across Canada, North America, and in Europe, and in Asia, and in Africa. And we’re appreciative that this is a global conversation and boy oh boy, anybody that reads the newspapers or listens to social media in Canada knows that we are at the moment living in a very global world, just saying. So as I always joke, you know, I’m from southern Ontario and when I was watching television as a child, we would watch news that would come out of Rochester, New York, and the host, somebody on the chat will correct me on this for sure, but it was I think it was coming out of Rochester or Buffalo and the host was Irv Weinstein. And he used to ,at the six o’clock news, say “pictures at 11:00”. And I feel like that’s the current environment that we’re living in now – it’s that you just don’t know quite what the next piece of news is going to be, but we’re appreciative that we have a space like this to be able to bring people together from across all sorts of places, working in all sorts of environments and in different capacities to make communities better and to do what we can do to improve the built environment and the experience that we have in the places where we live. So thanks for joining us at CityTalk. Ancestral territories of many First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples, and often people in the chat identify where they’re coming in from, and I can see them doing it now. Please feel free to do so if you want to acknowledge your ancestral territory, that would be great as well. We continue to always try to be as cognizant we can of the patterns of exclusion that have existed for hundreds of years and how we have to be always alive to how we do better at what what real truth and reconciliation looks like. With indigenous peoples, and also the other ways in which urbanism has colonial constructs and different kinds of things that we take for granted that end up excluding people. And in many ways, the session today, I think, is kind of about old rules. And I always joke that we try at CUI to make urbanism sexy, just saying. And we had our summit last fall, last winter, actually, in December, we made a joke that we were trying to make infrastructure sexy. And I think this week we’ve seen, you can make singles exit stairs and egress sexy, because we’ve had hundreds of people coming on to these CityTalks and I think part of it, maybe you can tell me in the chat why, but I’m guessing, a couple of weeks ago we had a session on placemaking, equally as popular, and I think some of it is people are clamoring for tangible solutions. What can we do? I had someone say to me the other day that Canadians are great, not just Canadians. We’re all great at admiring the problem. And we’ve been admiring the problem of missing middle housing for a long time. And now, thanks to the Canada Mortgage and Housing and the Supply Challenge and the various folks and teams that were assembled to kind of respond to the housing challenge, like the one we’re going to hear about today, and you’ve been hearing about all week, is that these are tangible ways that we can actually move things. We can actually do things differently. So I’m going to invite our co-panelists to come on, and we’re going to get a bit of a sense of what this is all about. There’s been tons of talk about missing middle, missing middle, missing middle. I think everybody instinctively, at CUI we focus on main streets as you know, and I like main streets because everybody gets what a main street is. Whether you’re in a small community or a big large Metropolitan Center you ask somebody where’s their main street they can pretty much tell you, and they’re different, but they pretty much know, and I feel the same about missing middle. I feel like it’s a concept that if you say “we’re focusing on the missing middle and housing”, people get it. And so that part has already become sexy, but you folks have been engaged in a very particular set of interventions that can unlock this potential for different kinds of housing choice. So I’m going to ask each of you to give us your own perspective on that, and then we’ll open up the chat as we always do. So people in the chat, feel free to throw in resources, questions, tell us what’s on your mind. What kind of models you’re aware of that are really effective? What else should we be looking at? What is the next stage of inquiry needing to look like? And then I wanna continue to hone in here on, as we always say, like, what is it that we, if we know what is to be done, how come we haven’t been doing it? How’s that for a very bad compound sentence? But I hope you followed it. So Alkarim, I’m going to start with you. You’re not a stranger to CityTalk, you’ve been on before, welcome. Nice to see you. I always ask people to tell us where you are and tell us what you see when you’re, what are you seeing when you look at your front door, and then give us your particular perspective on this whole piece about the missing middle and what we could, what can we be doing, is what I’m hoping we’re going to get to. So Alkarim, welcome back to CityTalk.

Alkarim Devani Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Mary. I’m super excited to be here. Obviously, CUI and yourself have been a huge inspiration to me on my journey and the pivot that we’ve made to kind of figure out how to bring middle housing across Canada. And so I’ve been working on that journey pretty actively for the last 12 months. Lucky to be part of the CMHC Housing Supply Challenge, which you mentioned that has been transformational to us to connect with folks like yourself in this entire ecosystem. The company is called MiddleMDDL.co. For those of you that don’t know, we’re growing one of the largest communities of folks who are actually trying to physically deliver middle housing. Looking outside my window, I’m looking at a laneway suite. So we built a duplex with two basements and a laneway. And so I live in the top part and we have someone in our basement suite and now a laneway as well. It’s funny when we talk about nomenclature and people understanding things. And I think that that’s the one thing that I’ve kind of had to step back, Mary, and recognize is, there’s a lot of people that are unconscious and incompetent when it comes to a lot of the nomenclature that we use, even folks that you would think understand what we’re talking about across Canada and what middle housing means and what the opportunity is. That’s been the biggest learning curve for us as we are working with seven municipalities across the country, helping deploy fast track pre-approved plans that could get to a building permit within 10 business days. I’ve learned that you have to start from the beginning, and you almost have to acknowledge the past in terms of where we came from in order to move forward. And so I think the challenge that we’ve seen is we always jump to outcome and solutions without acknowledging a process. And so with Middle, what we’ve been able to do is we’ve seen over 700 students spend full day intensives with us, understanding the middle housing journey, and it’s been remarkable. And we’re on pace for this year to see 1500 students, to really teach people what it takes to deliver on that middle housing spectrum. And the one thing I would acknowledge is the folks at LGA and the work that they’ve been doing is, we’re starting to blur the lines of what middle housing is because of all the innovation that we’re talking about. And so I think there’s this always constant need of “how do we bridge people from this unconsciousness to this consciousness?”. And I would say that’s the very first step. And so honoured to be a part of this conversation, big fan of the work that you folks do, and obviously inspired me to figure out how we create more knowledge and share more resources across the country to enable more Canadians to really take an active role in developing middle housing and using the single-family homes that they have to figure out what the future of that looks like. So, thank you for having me and yeah, super honored to be a part of this discussion.

Mary W. Rowe Delighted to have you and happy to see you and also for us to be able to watch a company like yours evolve and develop in different partnerships and let’s try this, and let’s try that. I always feel that we’re a bit, to use an overused term, we’re risk-averse in Canada and we’ve got to try to find ways to take more and more chances, and sometimes that’s more possible in a smaller community and at a smaller scale. And so, hats off to you, Alkarim. I know your work in the partnership thing and making sure that we just continue to identify all the solutions at the granular level. Blair, thank you. I think this is your first time on CityTalk, am I right?

Blair Scorgie That is correct. Yeah, thank you for having me.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah, well, delighted. We’re delighted to have you. Welcome. And tell us, as I say, tell us where you are. Tell us what do you look at when you go out your front door. And then give us a sense of where you’re coming from on this whole topic of Missing Middle.

Blair Scorgie Okay, I’ll try to keep this short. I guess when I look out my window I’m looking at a beautiful tree-lined street in Leslieville, Toronto, just east of downtown. It’s everything I hoped I would have in my urban lifestyle. It’s close to a streetcar stop around the corner on Queen. It’s a narrow road and it’s slow moving traffic so it’s safe for the kids to play. It’s got nice sidewalks on both sides of the street, on-street parking. It’s got beautiful trees. It’s a street line with Victorian semis, and many of which are duplexes, starting to see some triplexes crop up as well, actually. And if I look at the… and that’s that way. If I look out this way, I’m looking at it a laneway, which is actually where I seem to actually use as my front door. It’s taking the kids in the wagon to school every day through the laneway. But, and you know, I see the city skyline of Toronto in the distance and in the foreground. You know, I can see some infill projects and we actually have a couple laneway suites under construction nearby. So in terms of to answer sort of the broader question of I believe it was sort of who I am and what I’m sort of adding to this conversation?

Mary W. Rowe What your perspective is, yeah.

Blair Scorgie Sure, is it okay if I provide just a bit of background on?

Mary W. Rowe I’m not going to cut you off. You can tell you’re a first timer, you’re wondering if I’m going to leap in and breathe. No, just have a go Blair. Tell us what’s important.

Blair Scorgie So just by way of background, I’m a registered professional planner and urban designer. I’ve got a degree in planning and I’ve got another degree in architecture, and I’ve spent my career in consulting and in academia. So on the consulting side of things I’ve worked for large multidisciplinary firms that do planning, design, architecture, landscape for many years, growing an interest in the housing and sustainability space over the course of my career and finding it difficult and challenging to have the opportunities to work on missing middle type projects in a large firm, and just simply because it’s, you know, fragmenting people’s time working on smaller projects and makes a lot more sense to work on fewer larger projects. Eventually, I kind of decided to put my money where my mouth was and take the leap of faith and go in on my own and start my own consulting firm. So my consulting firm is Skorgie Planning. And I focus largely on missing middle housing. I’m doing some work in multi, like development approvals work on multiplexes. I’ve got, I think eight major streets, mid-rise buildings on the go in Toronto. And I’m working on a couple of large mid-rise buildings on avenues and other major streets. I balance that with work that I do with public sector clients. So I don’t just work with developers, I work with municipalities. I’m undertaking a couple of secondary plans at the moment. I’m part of the broader team that’s working on the North York Center secondary plan. I’m actually writing the non-residential land use policies, and I’m also working on a secondary plan for Guelph Street in Georgetown, working with some architects and some others on school renovations and additions in Toronto, working on some seniors housing projects.

Mary W. Rowe You’re busy, I’m already tired, Blair, just listening to how busy you are.

Blair Scorgie Yeah, and I’m doing some research with a philanthropic charitable organization, actually Jan is involved in that as well, looking at the viability of non-residential uses in laneways. And in an academic capacity I work at TMU, Toronto Metropolitan University School of Urban and Regional Planning, as well as the University of Waterloo where I teach primarily studio courses.

Mary W. Rowe So in terms of this particular topic of middle, it sounds to me like your practice has quite varied. I’m like you, I live on a lane. Well, I have a laneway on one side and a main street on the other side. I suspect if you went out your back lane and yelled, I’d hear you because I’m also in Leslieville today. And I’m interested, though, in terms of what you would see as the number one challenge to trying to make happen new housing at the scale that it sounds like you’re primarily working.

Blair Scorgie Well, the multiplex, I think it varies depending on the scale, the multiplex scale, I’d say right now, it’s the financial feasibility side of things, actually, I’d say, more than anything. It’s making the numbers pencil at four units plus a garden suite or laneway suite. Some people are able to do it, some are not. And we have some barriers and roadblocks in the way that are making life challenging for people who’d like to deliver these types of things. So one of the things that we have to resolve in the City of Toronto is our development charge bylaw, and the exemptions that are applied, and how development charges are applied above and beyond that exemption. So with the multiplex scale, I’d say above and beyond anything else, that’s that.

Mary W. Rowe So it’s costing, the penciling out part, yeah.

Blair Scorgie And so the D.C. bylaw reform is part of that, and I believe that’s ongoing, it’s going to go in stages. Another piece of that would be, and the city’s exploring this currently, and I’ve been advocating for this for a few years, is actually increasing permissions to offer up to six units as of city-wide.

Mary W. Rowe Increase it as of right, yeah.

Blair Scorgie I was involved in a pilot project in Ward 23 in Toronto with Councilor Jamal Myers introducing this idea as a pilot project in his ward specifically, but now the city is looking to leverage that success and apply that logic on a city-wide basis, first just permitting the number of uses and then sort of coming back and asking for, actually looking for, built for modifications beyond. You know, the…

Mary W. Rowe You know, the the title of today’s session was “What is what is the role of regulation”, like can regulation help or hinder? You’re identifying some of the things that have to tweak, and the pilots are sometimes a way to persuade policymakers that a regulation could actually be alleviated or change. Thanks for this. I’m going to keep going around the room …  Dan, welcome to CityTalk. Where are you? What what are you seeing when you look out your window and talk to us about your particular perspective on the missing middle challenge

Dan Winer Yeah, good morning. Thanks for having me, another rookie. So hopefully I’ll try and keep my thoughts and comments succinct. So my name is Dan Weiner. I’m coming from the unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan people, also known as Kelowna BC, and I work with Small Housing BC, based in Vancouver. Small Housing has been focused on gentle density since 2012 now, starting with laneway homes and ADUs, and has largely been the advocate and a driving force in allowing fourplexes as of right, through Bill 44 in British Columbia. I guess I’ll actually go back a little bit. Right now, outside my window, I see a single-story duplex. I live in a single-story duplex myself. But of course, living in Kelowna, if I go not too far from my community, I can see fourplexes everywhere. Love being a part of one of the community leaders across Canada as far as enabling gentle density. But as far as gentle density is concerned and a missing middle, we really feel that ground oriented homes, giving people a bit of a backyard, a bit of green space to be able to… And space to interact with their community and their neighbourhood, is absolutely paramount and super important. So to that end, we do advocacy work, we support municipalities, so we’re consulting with various municipalities across British Columbia, as well as through groups like Middle, and all the partnerships Al’s running across the country forming. So we’re in places like Saskatoon as well. We also do advising work for CMHC and now that the war, so to speak, has largely been won in British Columbia as far as gentle density as of right, we’ve moved into industry mobilization. So how do we educate smaller scale builders? We don’t really think that large developers are going to be the fourplex builders of tomorrow. We think it’s going to be those smaller two to four home builders, two to four homes a year builders. So getting them upscaled in doing site selection, and pro forma analysis, and all of these types of things. I think I’ll steal a little bit of Carolyn’s thunder. I know, Mary, you were asking, what are the policies standing in the way? And I could agree with Blair, definitely on DCCs, I could agree that, but in general, there’s no silver bullet. We need everything everywhere all at once. And I tried to keep reminding people that we are in a housing crisis first and foremost. I was on a radio interview yesterday talking about the standardized designs and people complaining that they may be a little Stepford-ish. And I had to remind the guests, we are not in a aesthetics crisis. We are in a housing crisis. And if you told someone in Gen Z or if you told a millennial, they could own a home. I bet you they don’t they wouldn’t care what the aesthetics look like too much.

Mary W. Rowe I just want to be clear. I just want to be clear. I don’t think the the millennials or the Gen Z know what Stepford means either. Just saying, but I did. But we should do another CityTalk on that question of whether or not that housing design book is actually going to be, I don’t know what it’s called, but you know what I mean, the putting out of those designs, maybe Carolyn, Carolyn, you’re going to, you do back clean up. I’m going to go to Janna next. And then, Carolyn, Carolyn, you can touch on all of this. Janna, what’s outside? Where do you fit?

Janna Levitt Okay, so what’s outside, interestingly is I can see some new three-story wood frame multiplexes. I can also see a coin laundry at the corner so it’s a converted house into a business at grade, and then probably four apartments, in addition to the business, right across the street in what was a single-family house that I think has maybe seven apartments in it. And up the street are two new additional multiplexes that have been built. So it’s pretty unusual for a street in the downtown of Toronto to already have so many multiplexes. And I think it shows the change that’s happening.

Mary W. Rowe You know, just before you finish, I just want to cite, though, that I think I’m going to… I don’t know, Carolyn, where you are today, but I think we’re all talking, I’m standing on the ground. I’m actually on the ground. And I think everybody here is probably close to the ground. And I heard what Dan was just saying about ground facing, what’s the right expression? Ground fronting ground?

Janna Levitt Ground-Related.

Mary W. Rowe Thank you. Ground related housing. But I just want to signal that I want all of you to think about the affordability piece of this because, you know, I don’t want us to move to a place of judging density too harshly because there are people that live on the 35th floor, or the 12th floor, or the 80th floor, and who really like that life. So I want to not lose that and I don’t want ever to be in a place where we say, well, that kind of housing isn’t acceptable, because I think that we have to have a range of choice. That’s what I just want to throw in my my own little concern about that. But back to you, Janna, looking at the coin-operated laundry opposite you. Okay.

Janna Levitt Well, and I’ll just pick up from where you left off, Mary. I would say, so just a little bit about my firm, LGA. We’ve been working in the public sector for, I would say our whole career and primarily in things like schools and a lot of multi-unit residential of all scales. And so, what we started to see as a challenge was that in the City of Toronto, and I would say it’s common in more of the larger municipalities across the country, is that there was either tall or sprawl and nothing in between. So we started to focus on a number of different scales of residential, all in either, I would say, affordable, and in the scale of gentle density, to the missing middle. And we have moved and done a lot more recently, I would say in the last five or six years, in a range of areas that talks about that. So where I’m sitting at Ulster and Lippincott is a project that my partner, Dean Goodman and I initiated and we were, I always  say, the reluctant developer, as well as the designer and partial end user, which is a five unit condo. And it’s on a single family site in downtown Toronto. And what we wanted to demonstrate with this is that adding density at this scale is not a neighborhood or a community death sentence. That you can actually, with good design, make a really good positive addition to neighborhoods where they’re not infrastructure killers. Like this, we started with a house that had two residents in it, and it now has eight or nine residents and it could actually have a couple more if you had families living here. And what that does is it helps keep businesses like the coin wash going, it helps schools stay robust and resilient. It doesn’t crush the TTC. It helps other businesses that are within walking distance stay viable. And so, that’s been a real interest and we decided to do with this project, not only would we do a multiplex to show that you can make that conversion, and make it into good quality housing that’s grade-related. So to Dan’s point, we wanted to demonstrate that there was another alternative. What we did in terms of trying to aim at end user cost was to say, what’s an average price of a condo now? So if you can afford a condo in the City of Toronto, you can afford something like this. So that was our kind of metric.

Mary W. Rowe Interesting and did you have to wait for that to happen, to make it become more online financially?

Janna Levitt No, we didn’t have to wait for it to happen, but what we found was that there were a lot of unanticipated costs that really pushed it to the upper end of that. I would also say that on this project, when we started it, that I would say this. The cards were stacked against us with respect to authorities having jurisdiction, like zoning, all of that. And as we started to move through it is when the City of Toronto started its liberalization of the zoning regulations. So just fortuitously, this five unit condo is the four plus one model that the City now allows throughout the City of Toronto.

Mary W. Rowe Mm-hmm.

Janna Levitt So it’s become a really good model for that. So in addition to that, I’ll just outline. So the other thing you were talking about was the housing catalog. So our firm was one of the leads. We ran, we were the architect for Ontario. We were also the project manager for six out of seven regions, working closely with the CMHC. On the CMHC, small infill housing catalog. the first part of which was just released about 10 days ago. And it’s been really interesting, and I think there’s a number of conversations to have about that and the role of catalog architecture in providing housing. We’re also, for the last four years, I’ve been part of a not-for-profit called Re-Housing, which is a collaboration between LGA, Tough Lab, and U of T Daniels School of Architecture, funded at first by NEPTIS, and then we received CMHC grants. Initially, we looked at a similar issue of Ulster, but instead of building new, we looked at how could you convert existing houses into multi-unit residential? And since then, we’ve been tracking and working with the EHON. So in fact, we worked with them on the Ward 23 sixplex, helping them, from a zoning perspective, identify as of right lots and what the conditions would be, and where you might have to move the zoning to. And as the city has started to look at other scales of housing, we’ve been working with them, small apartment buildings, sixplexes, fourplexes, the four in one model, helping them ideate and identify the challenges. And then on a slightly bigger scale, with Conrad and Kevin who’s also on this call in our office. We worked with the Environmental Defense and SVN on a missing middle manual. And that was a piece of advocacy, more than anything that identified, I hate this expression, poison pills, because it sounds like aggressive Trump talk, but we identified all of the issues that have to change in order to make this pencil in. So the missing middle is at the larger end of this gentle density to missing middle spectrum. And we’re now starting to identify a strategy to advocate for the relief from those poison pills. And then finally, of course, we’re working on the single stair initiative, which I just want to point out, started five years ago with Conrad’s thesis project at McGill University. So, quite special that someone was able to leverage their thesis project and passion for a subject into something that’s having a big effect across the country.

Mary W. Rowe I don’t know how many people who are on now, the hundreds that are on now, how many of you have been here earlier in the week to get the details on the single stair piece and the report, the document that the team at LGA led with a bunch of colleagues, and maybe somebody in the chat, one of our staff will put in the chat a link to that website so you can see it. But, you know, all these phrases that you and the design community pencil out, pencil in, egress, all this stuff, I’ve had to learn that over the years because I’m not a planner nor an architect. No, I’m a nothing. I am a common sense person, I hope, and part of why I’m going to come to Carolyn next is one of the things that I struggle with here, but maybe you’re telling me that’s fine, is that we seem to have known for some time what we should be doing. I feel like this around a number of the issues that CUI’s confronting, homelessness, mental health in downtowns, climate resilient communities, the use of public spaces. You know what I mean? And there’s a whole, there’s a handful of these things that we instinctively know what the right thing to do is. And we’ve got people on the call here from around the world. We’ve got somebody here from Qatar. We’ve got somebody here from Switzerland. We’ve got people here from the US. And my guess is that collectively, somewhere there is some solutioning that can be done. And I want to understand, Carolyn, why does it take us this long to start doing the right things? It appears to me like we’re doing a whole bunch of right things now. Alkarim said it off the top. It’s not just one thing. It’s a whole bunch of things. So is that the stage we’re in? The whole bunch of things stage?

Carolyn Whitzman I think we’re in the frog in water that’s pretty close to the boiling point.

Mary W. Rowe The crisis. The crisis.

Carolyn Whitzman Yeah, like, it’s become real to a majority of Canadians. So, loving the buzzing chat today, I’m going to drop in some links.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah, there’s a lot in the chat there. Yeah, yeah.

Carolyn Whitzman I’m going to beg your indulgence, because I want to talk about what I can see from my front desk. I’m going to bring in some income questions in there. I live about a block off of Main Street in Ottawa. I’m a housing and social policy researcher, BT-dubs, and I can see an office industrial use builder, who’s across the street from me. A new four-story building that’s great. Most of the apartments are one, two-bedroom. They’re affordable to moderate and middle-income people, and we’re six blocks away from, sorry, eight minutes away from a train station, about six blocks, we’re one block away from a pretty frequent bus downtown. What I can also see from my window and I’m very happy to see it, is a really great bit of social housing about 20 years old, non-profit that is a retrofit from an old biker bar, because Hintonburg, the neighborhood I live in in Ottawa, used to be kind of rough and the biker bar, for various reasons, ended up in city hands, and it’s owned by CCOC, one of the best non-profits in the city. Hintonburg used to be a rough working class area. And one of the things that always worries me is, where are the folks who used to live in Hintonburg going to go? So across the street from me, I have a house, which remarkably was for sale, and the for sale sign just got taken away after about eight months. It needs to be torn down. It’s in very, very bad shape. And, there’s two households who live there, a single older gentleman on well-day pension and a couple who are minimum wage. And where are they going to live when this house is torn down for townhouses? I also should mention that right across the street from me is a multi-generational family, three generations. The fastest growing household in Canada, by the way. So, one of the things that always concerns me when I’m looking at any form of zoning or building code change is there’s 3 million households in Canada that can’t afford, that are very low income or low income, can’t afford more than $1,050 a month, to use a Canadian figure. About half of them can afford to pay more than $420 a month. We have not, as a country, been addressing that since the 1990s. We have not, as a country, had a scaled-up public co-op, non-profit industry that we did in the 70s and 80s, where it was between 14 and 20 percent of all new home construction. It went down to less than one percent in 1992 in the federal government, downloaded to provinces, and provinces almost… They did a terrible job, and in many cases downloaded it to municipalities that just couldn’t handle that infrastructure issue. So to me, I want to see four to six story apartment buildings enabled in every single lot. I would like, across the street for me to have a four story apartment building And two of those apartments would be lived in by the two households I just mentioned. How are we going to get there? It’s a matter of construction, absolutely. And we have been zoning rental deserts, and that needs to be addressed. So it’s a matter of zoning. It’s a matter of building code. I think that we’re going to need a whole new generation, not just of four-story apartment buildings, but of four-story multi-tenant, a new generation of rooming houses, frankly, or co-living. A lot of middle-class or moderate-income young people in Europe are willing to trade off a certain amount of shared kitchen space or certainly shared laundry space, or shared outdoor space in return for affordability. How are we going to deal with the needs of three million households that need about a thousand dollars a month or less, and another million and a half households who are going to leave cities like Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, Calgary if they can’t get affordable homes? How are we going to find homes for the 81,515? There are more homeless people in Ontario, that’s the number according to a report that came out last month, that’s more than the population of Muskoka. How are we going to meet that challenge?

Mary W. Rowe Well, there you go. Little cheery intervention from Carolyn Whitzman. A couple of things on this. I mean, I do worry a little bit that the missing middle topic ends up only serving a certain income bracket. I think this is always the fear, that it’s sort of, you know, who can afford a laneway house? And so, I think this is always the dilemma and the old adage, perfect is the enemy of the good. I get that. And I also get where we started. I’m glad everybody’s turned their camera on. Everybody turn your mics on, open up your mics so that nobody is muted. And unless you have a crying baby, which I don’t think any of you have, that I’m aware of. Just everybody up. And, you know, how do we try to balance? We want to up-housing choice, obviously, for various incomes. And Carolyn’s just done a “cri de coeur” there, that if the market is operating on its own it tends to skew for people with means, and it doesn’t address the thousands or in the case of our case, three million households, that can only afford a thousand a month. So we need to basically unleash hell on this topic and build as much as we possibly can everywhere. Let’s zero in a bit on the sexy part of this, the regulatory regime. Are there other pieces of regulatory interventions that we should be insisting on? You’ll notice the chat is blowing up, which is great. Chat away, get it all in there. And can somebody please tell the brave Gen Z-er who said, I don’t know what Stepford Wives refers to, can somebody just put that in the chat so that they can read and see what Stepford Wives, what that meme is. Okay, give me something we could do immediately to change the regulatory impediments. Dan, and then Blair. 

Dan Winer Well, let’s enable single egress stairs across Canada.

Mary W. Rowe Okay then, let’s do that.

Dan Winer Let’s get back on the topic here, right? I mean, in Vancouver, you see that 2% of our rental stock is three-bedroom units for families. That’s absolutely abysmal for what we need. For anybody who wants to have kids, anybody who wants to grow the next generation, single egress stairs is important.

Mary W. Rowe Dan, let me ask you this, because there’s a question in the chat and lots of people have that fear. If we’re talking about taking down certain regulations to make it easier to build, do we run the risk that we are eliminating a regulation that might be connected to safety? So let’s talk about single stair and safety.

Dan Winer Sure, yeah. And I’ll try and go nice in case there’s any fire people in the chat or in the channel. But I think it’s important to highlight that Canada is the only country that does not allow single-stairs. At the level of two stories, that’s as far as we go. British Columbia started to become a leader, but Vancouver councilors are unsure if they want to push forward. But these are building types that we see across Europe, and we’re not hearing of tons of fires.

Mary W. Rowe Is that the fear? The fear is that it started off as a fire prevention requirement?

Dan Winer Yeah, it’s largely a fire prevention requirement, but in that time, mass timbers got more durable. We’ve added sprinklers, through legislation in Europe, you’re looking at countries that limit the number of units that you can put on each of those floors to deal with some of that fire mitigation. By having more windows, you do have the ability to respond with ladders outside of those windows as well. So there are lots of tools that can enable this and it’s long overdue.

Mary W. Rowe Are there any other impediments?

Janna Levitt Mary, I just want to go a little bit. I Know I don’t want to nerd out on this, but I think there is a genuine concern about the safety issue because it’s not what people are used to in North America. However, in all of the proposals for single stair allowances and the building code. It always is accompanied by both measures to augment the conditions for exiting and smoke and all the issues. So we’re not just saying take away one of the two stairs. We’re saying in the case of having a single stair here are a host of measures that you that you need to do to compensate to make it, not even as safe, but in many cases safer. And these are all devised by third party fire and life safety consultants who have done an extensive amount of research. So we’re not relying on anecdotally, it’s safe in Europe so it’s got to be safe here, we’re saying it’s a different context here with different requirements so let’s address that.

Carolyn Whitzman If I could jump in, Mary, and be a little bit of a word Nazi. I mean, you know, I did my PhD, I get to be a word Nazi. When we talk about single stair, what we actually mean is single egress or single access. Folks are coming in on the chat, quite rightly saying, what about accessibility? And the thing is, this is such a great measure for accessibility, because we have culture of building townhouses. And townhouses aren’t necessarily the greatest place for young kids, and they certainly aren’t the greatest place for an aging population. But with single egress, small apartment buildings, plus another reform that a lot of folks are talking about, which is less onerous elevator requirements. You don’t need to fit a full stretcher in an elevator. You can have small elevators, as is true across all of Europe, Asia, Africa, etc. You can have accessible units. You can have, instead of having a three-story townhouse, you can have a three-story or a four-story apartment building where people can get in with strollers, and shopping carts, and canes and all of those things. So it’s really important to, you know, people get hung up on the word stair. Yeah, there’s going to need to be a staircase, but there’s also, you know, if you think of any building in Europe, there’s a central elevator. Sometimes they’re pretty quaint, but they’re there. And that’s really important part of things.

Mary W. Rowe So quaint solutions is always good. I love quaint. Thanks for the quaint. Alkarim, are there practical regulatory changes, I mean the question, the title of the session was, “Can regulation drive Innovation?”. And this is an interesting moment, and I’m interested to hear from you. What we normally hear is that regulation is an impediment to innovation, but can you turn it on its ear and tell us how it can drive innovation?

Alkarim Devani Yeah, I do just want to touch on what Carolyn said, though, because I think this is like an absolute crux of something that most people miss is, the missing middle housing opportunity starts with a single family homeowner, and what Carolyn described, a home that was dilapidated, that was gone, it limited the ability of choice and awareness of what that homeowner could do for them and their family. And so what I think most people don’t understand is like, someone owns that home and there’s an opportunity to transform that, not only for them and their community, and figure out a way to make sure that the needs of that homeowner and what their expectations are in their family and their future is met. And so I think that goes missed, and oftentimes when we’ve heard that voice, we’ve kind of shrouded it as NIMBYs, or opposition, when really what I believe is those are our mobilizers. The boomers who own these homes that are mortgage free really possess the foundation and the opportunity to have an input in terms of what housing structures may look like in the future. And so if affordability, accessibility and all, and those things are important to us as Canadians, then we need to cultivate those voices and make sure that they show up in those housing forms within those communities in a meaningful way.

Mary W. Rowe It is interesting that what you’re suggesting is, why don’t we start, it’s a bit like the greenest building is the one that’s already built. Why don’t we start with the existing assets? You’re saying there are millions of homeowners in Canada and they all could be enabled to increase the density of their units, is that what you’re getting at? That’s a very… We never talk about that number. We talk about what we lack. We never talk about what we have.

Alkarim Devani And I would say it doesn’t mean retention of those existing structures is alone. It’s like some of those are too far gone, but there is people that live in those homes, those homes are no longer suitable for them. And then the regulatory question I think that you asked, that I think is so important for single-story egress and as we go across the country, I would say two things. There is inconsistency in code and interpretations, even within provinces, even within fire departments. And it’s not, we were told not to get upset.

Mary W. Rowe Do you want that? Do you want that?

Alkarim Devani I think it’s hard to follow rules when there’s a lack of consistency across the country, and then within the provincial side from one city to another. So how do we mobilize a housing forum that changes depending on where you show up, or what building codes or, a safety code officer comes out and has a different interpretation than the guy who is not in the field. And so consistency is going to be so important. I would say the second thing is we can’t have unit caps, like, whether or not 10 families live in a forum, or 50 families live in a forum, if we can fit them into a forum that is contextually sensitive to the community, that it’s safe, that is how we should be driving this. We should be saying, yeah.

Mary W. Rowe Stop there. Go ahead Janna.

Janna Levitt  Mary, to your point, there is a lot of research about how much you could increase the density of every yellow belt area by allowing the four plus one model. And so, those stats are actually out there.

Mary W. Rowe Somebody can put it into the chat. I’m sure there’s some data that my guys can quickly put into the chat to show that. We similarly at CUI, with CMHC, did a piece on housing on main streets and looking at how you could intensify and put affordable units along main street corridors, where there already are the services and the businesses, and they came up with like 3 million units. So again, I’m back to though, we know what some of these solutions are. What are the principal impediments that we need to move forward? Can regulation drive this? Blair, Let’s hear back from you.

Blair Scorgie Yeah, so I want to talk about a couple of scales if I can. So we’ve talked about the multiplex scale a little bit, and some of the things that I think need to be addressed there. You know, I think in that case, in the city of Toronto, anyway, it’s, you know, increasing the unit cap to six, well, you’re talking about affordability. If you actually want to see this kind of stuff scale, it needs to be a financially viable product, right?

Mary W. Rowe What do we have to do? What do we have to do to make that happen?

Blair Scorgie Well, I think increasing the unit cap in Toronto to 6, right sizing the DC exemption, and applying DCs on an incremental basis beyond that exemption, instead of having them, they currently apply to, say, you’re allowed a 4 plus 1 now. All right? And Jenna’s done some of these, right?

Mary W. Rowe But have you done the math, if you actually went to six? And also, what do you do about people, there are lots of them on the chat here, who are concerned  that you’re going to reach a threshold where you start to erode the character of the neighborhood?

Alkarim Devani Look, Edmonton is eight, and so Toronto should not be six, just to set the baseline.

Mary W. Rowe Okay.

Carolyn Whitzman And again, we don’t have a neighborhood character crisis in Canada. We have to recognize the fact that there is an entire generation, and Mary, you and I are roughly the same age, who are costed out of jobs and services in cities. And part of the problem of my generation, the first generation that talked about intensification, 1991 Toronto city plan, I was part of the city of Toronto then, is that we talked about main streets, and as much as I’m in favour of intensification along main streets Mary, we should not condemn single parents and older people, people with disabilities to traffic sewers. We could be thinking about 400 meters around public transit or 800 meters around train stations, the whole freaking area.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, we want complete neighborhoods and more of them, right? More of them. Go ahead, Janna.

Janna Levitt I think that there’s a role here for good design. So I think the issue of character is one about context. And so, the role of a good design is to identify what those contextual markers are, and add the density in a way that works with the neighbourhood. And I think that’s entirely possible. You know, in my neighborhood, like I’m looking across the street, There’s probably, I live in a fiveplex. In that converted house, that I suspect doesn’t have one building permit, there’s probably 12 people living there. So there’s densities already existing that are keeping neighbourhoods contextually sensitive, financially viable. So I think what we need is to identify what roles are people fulfilling in changing some of the texture of a neighbourhood. And that’s all we’re talking about. If by opening up the amount of density per, I don’t know, per hector, it’s not… Or along the street. Tomorrow, everybody’s not going to run out and get a building permit to put in a four plus one. It’s going to be gradual.

Mary W. Rowe Right, which is part of the dilemma we all have, is that we are in a housing crisis and none of these solutions is fast. We’re going to run out of time, obviously, because you guys have got so much to say. Just a couple of things for the people in the chat. Thank you, chatters, for never disappointing us. A gazillion things are going in the chat. Just to reassure people, all the sessions from this week, like every CityTalk, are posted within a few days. They go on to citytalkcanada.ca. The video goes on there and the chat goes on there. So all the links that people are posting are not lost forever, you can find them and read up on them and do all that kind of stuff. The conversation continues. Go ahead, Blair.

Blair Scorgie I was just going to try to speak to another scale, if we could. We’ve talked about the neighborhood, infill, et cetera. I was also involved in the work that Janna was sort of mentioning earlier about the mid-rise manual. And one of the sort of biggest impediments is just, you know, we’ve now, we’ve permitted townhouses and apartments on major streets in the city of Toronto. But we could, on a provincial, on a national basis, other major cities should be doing that. Other major cities should also be permitting multiplexes as of right in neighborhoods. So at a very high level, from a zoning perspective, regulatory perspective, increasing as-of-right permissions in neighborhoods, on major streets, to allow for those types of built form would go a long way. And I would say on top of that, at more of the mid-rise scale, and in major streets and on avenues, and, you know, where you see taller and denser buildings, there’s another impediment beyond zoning and it’s site plan control. And right now, the City of Toronto is actually in the early stages of reforming the site plan control process and I’m engaging with them in sort of a volunteer advisory capacity in that. I’m trying to work with the city to ensure that once the site plan bylaw is reformed, later this year, we actually have kind of a right sized approach that’s designed around different scales of development, different intensities development, so that that 10 unit building or 11 unit building that triggers site plan control, because it’s beyond 10 units, isn’t subject to the same material submission requirements, reporting submission requirements, fees, review and evaluation timelines as the 250 unit apartment building.

Mary W. Rowe I would have been heartbroken if we got through this session and somebody didn’t bleat out “site plan control”, because it’s on the top of everybody’s minds, let’s just say. I think the issue here is, I’m joking, I think the issue here is why do we have a rule that is somehow applied at every scale? How do we actually get more differentiated public policy? Carolyn, answer that for me, Carolyn, how can we stop trying to have one reg be clickable everywhere.

Carolyn Whitzman Oh, well, I was actually going to say things in favor of things being more standardized, because if we’re going to scale up factory-built housing, and I can give you 100 reasons why it’s a good idea, we’re going to need, you know, there are 730 municipalities in Canada above 10,000 population. Every single one of them has some, excuse me for using Yiddish, mishegaas about setbacks, front setbacks, side setbacks, oh, I’m sorry, three units, you need your own generator, all of that kind of nonsense gets in the way of the housing supply that we desperately need. Another thing that I’m just going to drop in, because it’s in our missing metal enablers report, and ties into what Dan was saying earlier, we’re going to see a lot more homeowner developers, I hope. We’re going to see a lot more small and medium enterprise developers, I hope. We’re going to end this sort of duopoly between tall and sprawl, I hope. In order to get that, we’re going to need a lot more guarantees of home building. I mean, we’re going to need quicker approvals. We’re going to need newer developer charges, et cetera. But we’re also going to need a new approach towards finance in order to…

Mary W. Rowe To get the smaller increments. Yeah, go ahead, Dan.

Carolyn Whitzman And if you want me to rant about children growing up in apartment buildings, I’m really happy to. I’m just putting that there. Next CityTalk … Dan.

Dan Winer  First, it feels incredibly validating for someone like Carolyn to say, I agree with Dan, I’m going to take that to my grave. Second, I totally agree on the finance. And when we talk about standardizing where I’m at in Kelowna, 40 minutes to Verna Vernon, 60 minutes to Penticton, all with different zoning regulation. So how is a builder supposed to operate in that type of an environment and scale up, especially when we add things like standardized designs? I’ve talked to some city staff off the record. I think a radical approach would be for a national zoning guide or national zoning code that then, municipalities can take those zones and apply them within their municipalities so that there’s a level of standardization.

Mary W. Rowe Just wondering how that would go over in Alberta, Alkarim, a national anything? You want a national zoning guide? Just wondering. I read the papers. Okay, go ahead, Dan. Finish and then I’m going to give last words to everybody.

Dan Winer Totally, last thought on that is I think our property taxes are hilariously low and those could also be increased to help encourage the redevelopment of properties a little bit faster to address our housing crisis.

Mary W. Rowe Okay, let’s do a little round robin here about last comments because we’re going to run out of time, and as I said to you, there’s tons of interesting stuff in the chat, thanks chatters for being part of that. Alkarim, to you … Something that people should be taking away here based on the role of regulation to drive innovation and particularly around housing supply.

Alkarim Devani Yeah, I would say three things. It’s like, we need to mobilize a new industry of developers, doers and home builders, and there’s no one better to do it than Canadians. So I’m very excited about the work that everyone on this call is doing. The second thing I would say is like, everyone wants to arrive at “this is a solution, it’s just this”, it’s never that. We have to continue iterating, chipping away and figuring out ways to make things better. And then the third thing that I’m very scared of, and I very appreciate the work that Janna and the team are doing, is, we solve something, but then we over-regulate the thing that we solved. And I’ll use sprinklers as one of those solutions. Like 80% of the apartments in the city of Calgary do not have sprinklers. And now they’re requesting for our laneway units to have sprinklers, which you could jump out of the one story and probably survive. And so, I’m very hesitant of what happens in that environment. And I think we have to think about people and innovation, and move forward and unite as a culture to say, we need more housing, let’s solve it together and not independently in silos.

Blair Scorgie Sorry, the sort of key takeaways or final thoughts?

Mary W. Rowe Yeah, key takeaways.

Blair Scorgie I mean, yeah, I echo a lot of what I’ve already heard here today. I don’t have a lot to add. I would just sort of say, I think there’s also, just to add this into the conversation because we haven’t talked about it, I think there’s still an untapped opportunity to sort of leverage, uh, municipally owned and publicly owned land.

Mary W. Rowe They’re trying, they’re trying.

Blair Scorgie They’re trying.

Mary W. Rowe But can we do it faster?

Blair Scorgie Can we do it faster?

Mary W. Rowe Can you do it faster!

Blair Scorgie I’d say as far as regulations are concerned, I think the biggest problem we have, just at a very high level, is just that, like, at least in Ontario, we’ve got frequent provincial policy shifts that municipalities have trouble keeping up with. There’s inconsistency in the way that those policies are interpreted on a municipal basis. It takes time to adjust to new bills that are released every week, right? And then we’ve got the lengthy approvals process. All these things discourage investment, right? So, what we really need is regulatory certainty, right, at a high level. We need streamlined approvals. We talked about pilot projects earlier, that can be, in Ward 23 in Toronto with the sixplex, things like that can really help de-risk new housing models and can build in the types of certainty that developers need to actually get shovels in the ground.

Mary W. Rowe Part of the way we de-risk it is we get more smaller developers where the risk is smaller. More smaller. Always need more smaller. Janna, Carolyn, last word to Dan. Janna.

Janna Levitt I think we would be remiss if we didn’t talk about the range of housing and who can access that range of housing. And so far we’ve talked more about, I know Carolyn talked about like the folks in the housing across the street from her, but we’ve talked more about market-driven housing and a range within the market-driven from affordable. And one thing I always say to people when they ask about a laneway house, the first I say is it’s not affordable. It adds more units, which has its place in the big scheme of things, but it’s not affordable. So, I think in terms of regulations, it would be very, very beneficial to keep bringing into the conversation the fact that the low cost or public sector housing requires a substantial investment by the federal, and provincial, and municipal governments in order for it to be, in order for it to pencil in. Like they’re… It just misses, there’s a delta between what the government gives and what it costs. So, it’s really important that all those levels of government, and traditionally the municipal government of the land that Blair was talking about. The municipal governments would give that to the not-for-profit, and that was worth a lot of money and brought them closer to an affordable project. So, I think the regulations have to take into consideration that kind of delta and the delivery system for housing for that group of people, and for, you know, as Carolyn said, that like 80,000 people are homeless, that’s pathetic. I mean that is absolutely… And that doesn’t even talk about the underhoused people, and the couch surfers.

Mary W. Rowe And that’s only in Toronto, the 80,000 number.

Carolyn Whitzman It’s Ontario.

Mary W. Rowe Ontario, sorry. Okay.

Janna Levitt That’s just pathetic, so I think we just need that in the conversation.

Mary W. Rowe And we need this kind of innovation and this kind of pushing in every sector. 30 seconds to Carolyn and Dan each, go.

Carolyn Whitzman Just to follow on from Janna, I’d like to see regulation to end homelessness in my lifetime at the national, provincial, and municipal level. And that’s going to take getting away from unit limits, frankly, and it’s going to take, as Janna said, 20% targets for non-market housing, definitely, because the private sector isn’t in the business of low income housing, you know, and I say that with all admiration for the private sector.

Mary W. Rowe You know, you may have broke the CityTalk today, Carolyn with the “We’re not in a neighborhood character crisis”. Dan last word to you.

Dan Winer Amazing. Lower the DCCs and charge them at per linear foot, rather than by per door or by building envelope size. That makes the most sense to me. Invest in modular and off-site construction so that we can rapidly scale. We used to build homes in a 1950 Sears catalog and we’ve kind of got to return back to that if we’re going to make an impact.

Mary W. Rowe Thanks gang. You know, just to say again, we’ll save the chat, it’ll all be in there and thanks this week to have so much of your expertise and the different voices that came in from the profession, from design, from planning, from engineering, from dare I say, fire, that we had all the professions over the last three days weighing in on how this can be a solution. So, thanks to the single stair people, the single egress people, for the work that you’ve done and for CMHC supporting it and for us to be able to come and have the CityTalk audience be on it. I just want to flag for people that we do CityTalks pretty much every week, and we’re open to whatever topics you want to tackle and whoever you want to involve. We are particularly, as you can imagine, pretty focused on the impacts on local economies and local communities of the current economic environment. So, we hope we won’t bore you with that, but we want to continue to show examples of how businesses, communities, agencies, organizations are responding to this new economic climate that were in, and watch our newsletter because we’re going to be announcing a new initiative about that, about how we can track the impacts of what this economic uncertainty is doing and how we all need to engage. So thank you for joining us on CityTalk. Dan, great to see you. Carolyn, always lovely. Janna, I think you were on one of the first CityTalks.

Janna Levitt I was.

Mary W. Rowe And so how nice, four years ago. We’ve had 275 or 300 since. So glad to have you back. Blair, great to have you as the first timer. And Alkarim, always wonderful to talk with you. And great to have all of you together on this conversation. Thanks everybody for being part of CityTalk and we’ll see you next week. Thank you.

Blair Scorgie Thank you for having us.