Toronto's unusual suburban form

[AlchemisTO]

I have always wondered why:

a) Toronto built hundreds of suburban towers in the park from the early 1950s until the mid-1970s. This is unusual in North America outside of Toronto and, to a lesser extent, Ottawa. Maybe it's an Ontario thing. Sometimes these slabs were built at the very fringes of the city itself. There is a neat aerial picture at Metro Hall of the slabs of Bathurst and Steeles being constructed in the mid-1960s with nothing but cornfields and pasture beyond them.

b) Toronto's post-1980 suburban subdivisions were built to a Southern California level of density, where the house occupies a very narrow lot with no tree cover and all the utilities are buried. Curiously, this coincides with the general demise of the suburban apartment slab phenomenon during the late 1970s.

What's the history behind these?

 

[building babel]

I would imagine that the former example is a result of the boundless optimism of post WW2 Toronto. It was sprawling like crazy, the future was bright and assured, land was cheap, suburban living was fashionable, and speculative developers bought up land on the outskirts and built towers in the sure knowledge that the expanding population would soon catch up with them.

As a result: a legacy of Toronto Style suburban towers of that era ... which was quite different from Toronto Style from the late 1960's and 1970's Trefan Court/Crombie/Sewell era ( a response to blockbusting and out of control development of the kind that saw demolishing Old City Hall as a good thing ) which gave us Market Square and the St.Lawrence Neighbourhood as defining examples. Each generation of our city builders have produced forms that represent our culture at each unique point in history.

 

[building babel]

The Yolles book gives a good example: Somerset Apartments on Finch Avenue, built as a speculative development in 1963 by Morden Yolles and his brother Burle and designed by Irving Grossman. 244 units of two storey maisonette style apartments. An 18 storey tower.

 

[interchange42]

Is it also possible that these slabs started mostly near subway stations first, and because they proved popular in those locations, developers that wanted to keep putting them up starting planting them wherever they could find land? Because transit has always been popular here, most ended up along bus lines that feed the subway.

In regards to the speculation about cheap land...

sure it was cheap compared to what it costs now, but I don't think land in Toronto has been cheap for decades now when you compare it to land prices in all but a select few American cities. I think the lack of this type of development in the Chicago area for example, indicates a lack of concern that land for suburban expansion there could ever run out - the midwest has sooooo much farmland, that no farmer could charge so much for their land that suddenly high-rise densities were required to make it economical for the developer. Other than along the lakeshore, (where you can charge so much more for the views) you just don't get highrise in Chicago. In Ontario, I think we have much more awareness that the amount of good arable land here is finite, so it costs more, so we build to much greater densities than in Chicagoland.

land speculator 42

 

[building babel]

The Yonge line only went to Eglinton when I arrived here in 1970, whereas many of these buildings are considerably to the north of that. The Leslie / York Mills area, for instance, still had fields that were only just being developed when I was at highschool that year, so Finch must've been semi-rural when buildings like the Somerset went up in the '60's.

 

[Mike in TO]

I believe there were some incentives in place from the government and when those dried up in the late 70s all the multi-residential development pretty well dried up - it was going at an explosive pace for a number of years.

Land-use policies and some general cultural differences between Canadians and Americans have been the driving force between our suburbs being built at much much higher densities then in the states. I've heard of some U.S. builders being at a complete loss for words about how small our lots are in the 'burbs claiming that it would be completely impossible to market our small lots in most areas of the U.S. Here most home buyers will accept a 40x100 lot as being spacious, but in many American cities that kind of development wouldn't fly at all. So our lots are smaller, homes are built much closer together and the density of areas covered by single family homes throughout the GTA and Toronto are far far higher when compared to most American cities. Toss in the higher densities due to the 70s slabs and the urban form in the GTA isn't really comparable to any U.S. cities.

 

[adma]

Other than along the lakeshore, (where you can charge so much more for the views) you just don't get highrise in Chicago.

Well, you do--but it tends to be "the projects". Which is why "do" is increasingly becoming "did".
Keep that in mind: in the States, such high-rise became (and continues to be) stigmatized by its association w/low-income slums. In Toronto, any such slumminess didn't really take root in the public imagination until c1980, or whenever "Jane-Finch" first became a byword for suburban decay...

 

[Observer Walt]

As Mike in TO points out, govt. incentives during the 70s were a significant influence. A lot of multi-unit housing got built under the "Home Ownership Made Easy" program. This program came to an end (I think I read somewhere) about 1976 or 77. This was also the same time frame as rumblings about rent controls became evident, and construction of highrise rental buildings started to slow down considerably (and eventually stopped).

 

[scarberiankhatru]

They are absolutely everywhere and their distribution pattern suggests either replication of planning models that incorporated towers in the park (Don Mills comes to mind with its low-rise rental towers) or direct government involvement...I wonder to what degree each neighbourhood was "forced" to take its share of slabs.

As for point b), phasing from bungalows with side garages to 2-storeys with garages out front explains some of it. I've always been intrigued by how spacious the lots are in housing built between roughly the 50s and the 70s. Sometimes the preexisting land surveys dictate road placement and, therefore, lot size, but I guess people loved cutting grass back then. Very quickly, house lots wildly shrank in size even as house size grew, to the point that many suburban neighbourhoods have comically dense detached houses...like, if you're going to squish them in to the point of ridiculousness where roofs cover a majority of the land, why not just build townhouses? Some people *hate* sharing walls.

 

[AlchemisTO]

^tell me about it, even though there are increasingly more and more semis popping up in new subdivisions, as well as townhomes.

While lot sizes seem to shrink every year, the width of the roads in suburban subdivisions are as large as ever.

 

[Mike in TO]

While lot sizes seem to shrink every year, the width of the roads in suburban subdivisions are as large as ever.

It is ironic that while some levels of government are promoting intensification, that land takings from various governments and their agencies continue to increase, thus resulting in less land to actually develop and place people or jobs.

The municipal engineering departments require all residential streets to allow easy turning radiuses for the largest fire trucks in their fleets - resulting in massive road allowances in all new development.

Plus there is a huge assortment of other public land takings for public schools, seperate schools, other land requirements for various public facilities, various easements, parkland dedication, growing setback requirments from any natural or water feature or bankment, additional land requirements for trail systems adjacent to those features, conservation authority setbacks and land requirements, wide utility corridors, huge SWM ponds that then have trails and additional buffers next to them etc.

All these requirements make it very difficult to actually achieve higher rates of intensification resulting in transit supportive densities. The super wide residential streets being the most obvious and ridiculous of the bunch - some of these quiet residential streets are nearly as wide as Yonge is downtown.

 

[spmarshall]

The wide streets are also a safety concern, as they permit traffic to go fast on these quiet, residental streets.

Though I do notice that in Mississauga and Brampton, the newest subdivisions have many really narrow streets compared to 1980s subdivisions - that if cars are parked on both sides of the street, it is difficult to drive through. On my old street (laid out in 1978) , it is easier. Though two-lane collector streets seem to be wider than before.

Considering the vast majority of fire department calls are not fires (medical or false alarms) we should really consider the waste in having supersized trucks.

 

[Observer Walt]

Rear lanes are being seen in some new neighbourhoods. These are widespread in western Canada, too bad they went out of fashion for so many years in Toronto and only now seem to be making a little bit of a resurgence.

Sidewalks are typically only on one side of the street now in new residential areas. This saves some space. However sp's comment about street width is certainly correct. Smaller fire trucks would be appropriate, and street allowances could be narrowed from 66 feet which is the current standard. Huge turning circles at the end of cul-de-sacs could be shrunk down as well, although admittedly we are now designing street patterns with fewer cul-de-sacs.