At the beginning of the year, I wrote this:

The desire to add more housing to single-family neighborhoods will continue to pick up steam across North America. How exactly this plays out will be market specific, but in Toronto I expect to see new planning policies put in place, as well as supportive building code changes.

And this continues to happen. Right now, the City of Toronto is working on making fourplexes permissible in all low-rise neighborhoods across the city.

This is exciting. But it’s not done yet. And it’s not perfect.

The biggest change that I think still needs to happen is around maximum densities. If we actually want to encourage more missing middle housing, we need to increase the permitted FSIs or, better yet, remove them all together.

Urban planner Sean Galbraith does a good job of explaining this in NRU:

I responded to the city’s multiplex survey last night and this was one of my main comments. If you’d also like to voice your opinion, you have until March 10, 2023. Here’s the link.