Can the Missing Middle Actually Solve Toronto's Housing Crisis?
Over a century ago, Toronto banned apartment buildings from most residential streets — while European cities like Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam were building them as the default fabric of urban life. That decision shaped the city we live in today: a landscape of single-family houses and condo towers with almost nothing in between. In 2019, Globe and Mail architecture critic Alex Bozikovic co-edited House Divided, a book that former Chief Planner Gregg Lintern has credited with kick-starting Toronto's missing middle conversation. Seven years later, multiplexes and sixplexes are now permitted across the city, but the gap between zoning reform and actual construction remains wide — and the affordability crisis has only deepened. In this episode, John and Alex explore the history behind Toronto's housing divide, what's changed since the book was published, and some of the harder questions the missing middle movement still needs to answer — including whether the math can work at four to six units at a time, the challenge of retrofitting a city that was physically built for something else, and a striking paradox: the European cities we look to for inspiration are built almost entirely of the housing types being advocated for here, and they're deep in their own affordability crises.
