54. City Urban Planning

theglobeandmail.com Opinion: Yes, in my backyard: How urban planning must shift to meet our postpandemic challenges Alex BozikovicArchitecture Critic 16-20 minutes Alex Bozikovic is The Globe and Mail’s architecture critic. He is the co-author of Toronto Architecture: A City Guide and the co-editor of the anthology House Divided: How the Missing Middle Can Solve Toronto’s Affordability Crisis. The neighbours are not happy. They have written letters to the city government to complain. “The proposal, if approved and implemented, will definitely contradict the very definition of ‘neighbourhood,’” reads one. This is Harbord Village in downtown Toronto, a place full of Victorian houses and university professors. And the “proposal” is not for a meat-processing plant or a skyscraper; it’s a plan to take a century-old office building on Brunswick Avenue, add a floor and convert it into seven apartments. This sounds simple, and it sounds like a good thing for society: More people will live here, in this pleasant place where everything they need is in walking distance. But it is not simple. Though Harbord Village was first built up in the 1880s, its buildings are governed by zoning regulations from the 1980s. These require parking spots and a smaller building than the one that currently stands on the Brunswick site. In order to add seven apartments, you have to ask permission from the city. A developer has been negotiating with city officials about this building since 2018. And the locals get a say; in this case, organizing via Facebook rants and open letters, they are not very welcoming. They are worried about parking, and about the windows of these new homes looking into theirs, and about the way the architecture looks. One neighbour puts it simply: “I don’t think that this will fit into our neighbourhood in any way.” Too often, this is the state of affairs in Canada’s urban and suburban neighbourhoods: They are closed off. Regressive planning policies keep the doors closed; in Toronto, the city’s official plan calls for “stable residential areas.” Homeowners now expect that nothing much will change in their backyards. And that is a serious social problem. We have a shortage of housing. Our population is growing and urbanizing. Cities are places of opportunity and cohesion, and people want to live there. Yet our city planning and urban politics make this far too difficult. The COVID-19 pandemic is the moment to change that. Last year, two narratives took hold: That the virus would empty out our cities, and that it would create an imperative for bold collective action. It’s now clear that the first idea is wrong. Offices won’t remain empty forever, and neither will downtown condos. As for the second idea, the urge to build back better: In the field of planning, that means something very clear. More of us need to live closer together, because our society works more efficiently and more equitably when we do that. But will we? A crane moves a garbage bin to the upper floors of a Vancouver condo tower under construction. Vancouver has made density and walkable neighbourhoods a key part of its urban development strategy. Consider the one shared experience of the pandemic: being confined to a small physical area. Most of us had the chance in 2020 to look closely at our own neighbourhoods and see what was actually close by. Frequently, the answer was: not enough. Parks were busier than they had ever been. And a robust public discussion began about the idea of the “15-minute city.” This is a new catchphrase for an old idea: In short, places where you don’t need a car. A 15- minute neighbourhood is relatively dense with people, and has a whole mix of uses – homes, retail, institutions, workplaces – together. This is how all cities operated before the invention of the car. But now, such richness is rare. A Globe and Mail analysis of census data found that only 23 per cent of Canada’s urban dwellers enjoy such privileges. That number should be much larger. People who live in walkable neighbourhoods don’t just enjoy a higher quality of life. They also enjoy a higher level of social mobility. They have much smaller carbon footprints, occupying less space and driving less. Creating walkable cities, as the City of Vancouver has acknowledged, is powerful climate policy. So how do we achieve it? The key is to let more people live in places where people already live, what’s known as “infill.” And this is where the current state of land-use planning frequently stands in the way. Major Street in Harbord Village. The neighbourhood lies west of the University of Toronto campus and south of Bloor Street, a major commercial and transit artery. Take Harbord Village. When you consider the numbers, the logic is very clear. This place borders the University of Toronto, and is walking distance from the country’s largest cluster of downtown jobs. It has transit and public services as good as any place in North America. And yet it it is not full. Back in 1972, the census here showed 9,215 people; today it’s down to about 6,522 and growing very slowly. The demographic story here is the same as in Kitsilano, or – once you lower the prices – neighbourhoods in central Edmonton and inner Halifax. Fifty years ago, the average family had less money and more people. Many homeowners had boarders living with them. Others had their houses divided into apartments. Today, we have the opposite: Fewer people, with more money, occupying more space. The population is aging. And many households are now childless, a phenomenon that was very rare 50 years ago. (In Toronto, where this is particularly acute, nearly two-thirds of the households moving into new dwellings are singles and couples.) Our demographics have changed. Our housing has not. Yet such a shift is impossible in many places, thanks to the idea of “neighbourhood character.” This idea is made explicit in Toronto’s planning policy, and similar ideas exist in most cities. The theme is that the physical character of a place where people live largely shouldn’t change. This idea of character is both toxic and vague. It was born a century ago out of naked prejudice against racialized people, renters and any household arrangement that didn’t include husband, wife and children. Somehow, this legacy is still with us. Brought along by the planning profession during the postwar era, it has shaped the attitudes and expectations of people – especially homeowners – for two generations now. The property at 225 Brunswick Ave. in Harbord Village, as it looks today and as it would look after a proposed redevelopment. Take the Harbord Village apartment project in Toronto, for instance, designed by Suulin Architects for a small developer. More than a dozen neighbours are opposing the building in public correspondence to the city. Almost all cite neighbourhood character or the idea that the development doesn’t fit in. But this depends on a very selective view of the neighbourhood. Six blocks away, on the intersecting side street, is an apartment building 5½ storeys tall. It fills its entire lot and towers over a house next door. It was built in 1903. And a stone’s throw away is Central Technical School. This high school’s building, dating to 1915, is at least 50 feet tall and extremely imposing. Somehow these very large facts on the ground, in the eyes of the neighbours, don’t form part of the neighbourhood character. What does planning policy say about all this? Here, as is often the case, there are complicated and highly specific policies that contradict each other. Toronto’s Official Plan, the vision document, allows apartment buildings up to four storeys tall within so-called house neighbourhoods. But those postwar zoning rules tack on all sorts of specific restrictions about how big the building can be and where it can sit, so a development has to ask for special permissions. Meanwhile that same Official Plan says that “neighbourhoods are considered physically stable areas.” The neighbours, with or without the agreement of today’s city planners, understand this to mean that neighbourhoods are houses, and they shouldn’t change. And a small apartment development such as this is a huge rarity. Almost everywhere else in the country, planning prohibits apartment buildings outright. In most of our house-centric neighbourhoods, which were constructed after 1950, multifamily buildings are excluded: They are allowed only on the boundaries, on major “arterial” roads, which are filled with noise and pollution. Even then it’s common to hear qualitative complaints if a tower is visible from the backyards of a house neighbourhood. Those buildings are too tall, faceless, soulless, inhuman. And planners routinely deploy an arsenal of measurements about density, “overlook” and shadow to rein in development, even in the places where it’s allowed. Thorncliffe is a Toronto neighbourhood home to many low-income and new Canadian families. It's also become a COVID-19 hot spot. All this social engineering has shaped our society in fundamental ways. From its earliest days, planning was meant to sort people out by income level, and it has. Canada’s major cities are clearly segregated by income. They are racially segregated, too, because high incomes and whiteness are closely aligned. The consequences of this sorting have been very clear during this pandemic. There’s close correlation between lower-income neighbourhoods, large numbers of racialized people and community transmission of COVID-19. In Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, the maps of those three data sets look the same.

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