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Throughout October UrbanToronto is featuring a special State of Housing 2026 editorial series to examine the pressing housing challenges facing Toronto and the Greater Golden Horseshoe.
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North York Centre showcases a number of traits that are uniquely 'Toronto.' From the cultural diversity present in its shops and restaurants to rows of new condo towers built as part of the housing boom, aspects of its urban landscape are emblematic of numerous parts of Toronto’s history and current identity. In terms of the former, however, the area also puts on display an element of Toronto’s urban form that has been in many ways detrimental to the city’s growth — especially in the past couple decades.
When one walks along the Yonge Street corridor from Sheppard to Finch, the density of the residential and commercial high-rises create the feeling of being in a canyon. Yet as quickly as one block off of Yonge, this high-density environment abruptly becomes a sea of detached single-family homes. This phenomenon is one of the best examples of Toronto’s lack of what is known as missing middle housing. Loosely defined as filling the gap between single-family homes and large apartment towers with unit types like townhomes, multiplexes and mid-rise apartment buildings, missing middle housing is a common feature in older North American cities - and is also something that is largely absent from Toronto. This absence has implications not only for the supply of housing, but also for the future of the vibrant commercial streetscapes that are a vital part of the city’s identity.
While individual buildings and small clusters throughout Old Toronto fit the criteria for being missing middle housing, the city’s restrictive zoning policies made it difficult to build anything but detached homes in large swathes of its urban landscape. While the City Council has begun taking steps to loosen such restrictions (most notably in the 2023 policy changes that made it easier to build multiplexes), the effect of decades of exclusionary zoning policies has left an indelible mark on Toronto’s cityscape. This downsides of this focus on single-family homes — and the lack of missing middle housing that resulted from it — has become particularly acute following over a decade of population growth and a booming condo market. With little to no possibility for upzoning in residential areas, the bulk of the city’s new housing became concentrated in a series of nodes either along major transit corridors (such as at Yonge & Eglinton or the aforementioned North York Centre) or in former industrial areas ripe for redevelopment (Liberty Village or Queens Quay East, for example). Such development trends have led to a city dominated by high-rises and detached homes, with these often sitting directly next to one another.
The constraints imposed by zoning laws and the focus on high-rise condominiums has had the unfortunate consequence of pushing large portions of development activity onto major thoroughfares. While this allows for the creation of dense clusters of high-rises around transit hubs and major intersections, it also has the unfortunate consequence of threatening with redevelopment the shops, restaurants and other popular businesses that made those thoroughfares so desirable in the first place. As evidenced by the outcry that erupts every time a development application comes in for the site of a popular local institution (with the one for Sneaky Dee’s earlier this year being a prime example), a major part of the backlash to the city’s development boom is rooted in the perception that the cultural dynamism that has made Toronto special is being destroyed in the name of creating condos. This perception is not helped by the fact that so many of these new buildings are tenanted on the ground floor by chain establishments or other businesses that do not create the same atmosphere that they replaced.
Although a clear line can be drawn from a history of restrictive zoning and a lack of missing middle housing to the perceived loss of the city’s cultural identity via predevelopment, the solutions have not been as straightforward. As the City has become less restrictive of multiplexes and other accessory dwellings they have begun to sprout up more frequently. At the same time, efforts to create more vibrancy at street level in new condo buildings has been showcased in places like the Honest Ed’s redevelopment in Mirvish Village. While both of these efforts have not gone perfectly (for example, larger multiplex designs are still only allowed in less than half the city’s 25 wards), given the hole that restrictive zoning and the lack of missing middle housing has dug in terms of the city’s urban development they still represent positive steps in the right direction as Toronto plans for future growth.
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Thomas Bamonte is an urban planner with extensive experience in the real estate industry. He is based in Toronto and blogs at https://theurbanistfoodie.substack.com/
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UrbanToronto's research and data service, UTPro, provides comprehensive data on construction projects in the Greater Golden Horseshoe—from proposal through to completion. Other services include Instant Reports, downloadable snapshots based on location, and a daily subscription newsletter, New Development Insider, that tracks projects from initial application.
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Thank you to the companies joining UrbanToronto to celebrate State of Housing Month 2026.
