Toronto’s chief planner is hoping to crack open the city’s long-impermeable “yellowbelt,” adding extra housing supply to neighbourhoods currently dominated by single-family homes.
In a new report headed to a city hall planning and housing committee this week, planning boss Gregg Lintern and his team suggest denser housing supply — duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and, in some cases, walk-up apartments — can fit into lowrise neighbourhoods across the city.
The idea is a marked shift from the current rules, where roughly 70 per cent of Toronto neighbourhoods — the “yellowbelt” — only allow detached and semi-detached houses.
It’s an approach a variety of housing advocates, planners and experts have been
calling on the city to take for years, and it’s still at the starting line, with consultations on multiplexes expected to run through 2022, and the final decision in the hands of elected officials.
But of more than 2,100 respondents so far to a city survey on the issue, 88 per cent back multiplexes citywide, and the new report signals support within city hall.
In advance of Thursday’s meeting, the Star spoke with Lintern, who stressed the issue wasn’t about changing the scale of neighbourhoods, but working within the lot and height sizes that already exist in those areas — trying to boost housing, as he put in, “inside the box.”
“People are probably familiar with monster houses ... maybe it’s six, seven thousand square feet,” he said. “We think, inside that box, you could have three or four units as an alternative ... You would carve it up differently, and actually be able to house a greater diversity of people.”
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