EHON and beyond — what's next for Toronto housing policy

City Hall Watcher #283: Guest Damien Moule on what's left on the housing reform to-do list at Toronto City Hall, and what it would take to finally end exclusionary zoning

Hey there! Welcome to all the celebrity gossip hounds who signed up to get the scoop on Virtue and Rielly last week. In addition to celeb news, I hope you also like housing policy analysis because I’m taking a step back this week to bring you an article from regular guest contributor Damien Moule.

Toronto City Hall’s Expanding Housing Options in Neighbourhoods (EHON) program is wrapping up, but there’s still work to do to end exclusionary zoning. Damien looks at the remaining barriers to building more housing in Toronto.

There are fourteen footnotes, so you know it’s good!

And speaking of good things.

📢 CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS: City Hall Watcher is looking for pitches for publication dates in July, August and beyond. If you are a writer with an idea for an article about municipal policy and politics, you can send a pitch to graphicmatt@gmail.com.

We are looking for nerdy, policy- or process-oriented pieces that shed light on under-explored corners of City Hall. Analysis is encouraged. Explainers too. And CHW has a particular interest in FOI-based stories and can cover your expenses.

If your pitch is selected, you will — of course! — get paid. The scale starts at $150. Extensive experience is not necessary. If you’re a new journalist interested in municipal affairs, this could be a really good gig for you. Get in touch.

✨ This issue runs a little long. If it gets cut off in your Google-branded email web client, read it on the web.

— Matt Elliott

graphicmatt@gmail.com / CityHallWatcher.com

Read on the web / Archives / Subscribe

---

EHON’s ending, but exclusionary zoning lives on in Toronto

By Damien Moule

With City Council approving the Major Streets Study at its May 23 meeting, the Expanding Housing Options in Neighbourhoods (EHON) initiative has largely¹ drawn to a close.

For those who hadn’t heard of EHON before, it was a housing initiative first requested by former mayor John Tory in 2019. The focus of EHON was on allowing more options between low-rise houses and mid or high-rise apartment buildings, such as garden suites, laneway houses, multiplexes, and small apartment buildings. I am legally obligated to inform you that this type of housing is called “the missing middle.”

But the EHON projects—and especially the Multiplex Study passed a year ago—were also sometimes described as efforts to eliminate exclusionary zoning in the City. So, with EHON in the rearview mirror, I thought it would be a good time to explore Toronto’s Zoning By-law and assess how well the City did at removing exclusionary zoning. 

First, though, discussions around housing and zoning are too often full of jargon and technical terms, which I want to avoid or at least explain. What I mean by exclusionary zoning is using zoning by-laws to stop lower-income people from living in higher-income neighbourhoods. Note that I said lower and higher income, not low and high. We’ll come back to that.  

A trip up Yonge Street

I want to use an example to clearly show the concept in action. But it would be cruel to start with an example from Toronto. Toronto’s zoning is, uh… special? Sure, let’s go with special. I want to begin with something easier.

Instead, we’ll start with an example from a little north of Toronto, the suburb of Aurora. The town has 11 residential zones. The requirements for the six zones that allow only single-detached homes are shown in the table below². 

You can see that as we go from right to left in the table, the minimum required lot sizes, widths, depths, and side yards all increase. The maximum allowable lot coverage also goes down, though not proportionally with the lot size. 

The combined effect is that the required amount of land for each dwelling goes up as we move from right to left, as does the house size allowed. So the number of people who could afford to live in the zone goes down too. This culminates in the landed gentry cosplay “Estate Residential” zone, which requires a lot size of 8000 m² (2 acres) and allows a house of around 25,000 ft² to be built.

Town of Aurora detached residential zoning. Via Town of Aurora.

Part of what makes the zoning exclusionary is that it works like a ratchet. The lot size requirements are minimums. You are allowed to build a mansion on a large lot in R5³. You aren’t allowed to subdivide a large Estate Residential lot and build more modest homes without Aurora first changing the Zoning By-law. 

The second half of the exclusion is how the zones are applied. If a block had multiple zones intermixed, then the zoning would just be a fairly convoluted micro-management of lot sizes. But the zones are typically separated. 

You can see the zoning map for the southwest corner of Aurora in the image below, with the residential zones in tan. Each block is typically one zone. The more restrictive zones often don’t even share the same street as another zone. The combination of the different zones and physical separation of the zones is what results in exclusion. 

Southwest Aurora zoning map. Via Town of Aurora.

I particularly like the Aurora example for two reasons. First, it shows how zoning can be exclusionary even within zones that allow the same building type. The most common way people have thought about exclusionary zoning is by separating different housing types — detached house neighbourhoods in one place and apartments in another. Aurora shows that you can exclude even within detached house zones⁴. 

Second, it shows that exclusionary zoning applies up and down the income spectrum. The zoning categories keep the upper-middle class out of the mansion neighbourhoods, the lower-middle class out of the upper-middle class neighbourhoods, etc. This isn’t something that’s only applied to exclude certain people from certain neighbourhoods. It applies to everyone, including you, dear reader.

Exclusionary zoning keeps you — almost too literally — in your place.

The amalgamation situation

When Toronto was amalgamated, the Zoning By-laws of the previous six⁵ municipalities were combined. They called this process harmonization. I will not. 

The various residential zones were simplified to correspond to the building types allowed. All the previous detached house zones with different requirements, like R1, R2, etc., were combined into residential detached (RD). The same thing was done for the remaining zones to create residential semi-detached (RS), townhouse (RT), multiple (i.e. multiplexes, RM), and the anything goes “R” zone.⁶ You can see these residential zones in the map below.

Toronto then needed to decide which of the myriad zoning tools used by the former municipalities should be applied to its new residential zones. The City opted to not make a choice and selected all-of-the-above. Any zoning tool applied by one of the former boroughs was kept in the combined By-law. Then, rather than applying broad standards to each zone, requirements were added lot-by-lot⁷ to apply what was previously allowed under the old municipalities.

Below, I’ve mapped how Toronto currently uses four of its zoning tools: frontage, lot area, floor space index⁸, and lot coverage. I left out height limits and unit limits, since some people might debate their inclusion in an article about exclusionary zoning⁹. I also left out setback rules since they are so complicated that they can’t easily be mapped. But just know that they exist and that I don’t like them.

You can see which tools were used by each former municipality. The Old City of Toronto used floor space index but not lot area. North York and Scarborough did the opposite. Etobicoke used everything it could get its hands on. Our Zoning By-law is haunted by the ghost of boroughs past.

The maps also show that when Toronto’s By-laws merged, it kept all the exclusionary zoning of its predecessors. The most obvious example is the Bridle Path. With a minimum lot size of 8,000 m² and a minimum frontage of 60 m, it is ever so slightly more restrictive than Aurora’s Estate Residential zone. The requirements in the Bridle Path are such extreme outliers that they are actually well off-scale for both charts. If I had let the scales extend to cover them, both maps would have basically just shown dark spots for the Bridle Path and then nothing anywhere else.

That isn’t to say that Bridle Path is the only place where exclusionary zoning is used. Far from it. There are neighbourhoods all over the City that stand out on the maps for having higher restrictions. If you know of a rich neighbourhood in your part of Toronto, you can look at the maps above to win a game of Where’s Waldo.

The pattern I pointed out in Aurora is also true here: exclusion doesn’t just apply to the wealthiest areas. Throughout the residential zones, there are gradients of restrictions¹⁰. Toronto’s zoning maintains a hierarchy even among detached homes with an average city-wide price of over $1.8 million.

What EHON did — and didn’t do

Okay, we’ve looked at what exclusionary zoning means, and how it applies in Toronto. We’re finally ready to answer what EHON did to reduce exclusionary zoning. 

Mostly what it did was tackle exclusion by building type. After EHON, garden suites, laneway houses, and multiplexes are now allowed in all residential zoning categories. And small apartment buildings up to six storeys are now allowed in all residential zones along major streets, as are townhouses.  

EHON also reduced some of the other types of exclusionary zoning requirements. In all residential zones, multiplexes and apartments along major streets are allowed to exceed lot-specific height restrictions¹¹. Floor space index requirements were removed for multiplexes in all zones. And lot coverage for apartments along major streets was set at 50%, which is higher than what’s typically allowed on lots with lot coverage limits. 

Combined, the various EHON projects have produced the largest conceptual change¹² to Toronto’s housing policy in a generation. But EHON didn’t tackle exclusionary requirements related to lot size, coverage, and floor space index for most buildings. Or restrictions on semi-detached houses. So neighbourhoods with the worst zoning will likely be untouched by EHON.

I would describe EHON’s overall impact as smoothing down some of the hard edges of exclusionary zoning, while leaving it mostly intact.

Multiplexes and apartment buildings on major streets should expand the range of people who can afford to live in the RD neighbourhoods, even if they are built in small numbers. But a triplex built on a 1000 m² minimum lot in North York would have units where the rent would likely be above the median income in Toronto. And I can pretty much guarantee that no multiplexes will be built in the Bridle Path.

Out of focus

This brings me to the reason I decided to write about EHON’s impact on exclusionary zoning, rather than its main stated goals. Looking at increasing housing supply or the missing middle would have put the focus on what will change in our city, instead of what exists. 

Our entire planning system is already based around change. City Planning doesn’t spend most of its effort on planning. It spends it on evaluating change. Answering questions like, what will change, and how much? And is the change consistent with a long list of policies from shadows to heritage to electromagnetic fields? And most importantly, who will be affected by the change, and can they stop it? 

I think it’s weird that we never take a step back to look at the whole picture and ask whether it’s fair. We treat our zoning as if it’s natural. As if it’s the way it’s always been done. But floor space index is not wisdom passed down to us from the ancients. Zoning in Toronto only dates to 1952¹³, and it didn’t achieve its modern form until decades later. 

I’ve written this article up to this point taking for granted that exclusionary zoning is bad, but I am fairly certain that’s an unpopular belief. Every municipality in Ontario that I have ever looked at uses exclusionary zoning. And polling from the United States suggests that comfortable majorities of the population want their local governments to keep certain groups of people out of their neighbourhoods.

So I want to end by making the case that exclusionary zoning can’t be justified. If I asked you in the abstract whether the government should make laws to ban everyone except the rich from living in a neighbourhood, you would say no, it shouldn’t. 

And I think if I asked you whether the government should ensure that people from different classes don’t live in the same neighbourhoods, you would also say no. But that response might flip if I ask whether townhouses should be allowed in detached house neighbourhoods. Isn’t that strange?

After all, much of the world has spent the last 200 years tearing down laws which enforce rigid hierarchies and aristocratic privileges. We rightly think everyone deserves equality under the law, regardless of class. We rightly think voting restrictions based on property, religion, gender, or race are unjust. Laws which banned commoners from wearing velvet are downright comical.

So, how can Toronto justify laws preserving mansion-only neighbourhoods? How can it justify banning semi-detached houses and townhouses from most of its residential land? How can it justify using lot size and floor space index requirements to create fine-grained residential segregation by income¹⁴? In a democratic society, I don’t think it can. 

In the fall, City Planning will propose Phase II of its Zoning By-law Simplification and Modernization for Low-rise Residential Zones. Phase I did very little. It made tiny tweaks around the edges to make multiplexes more likely to be built. My hope is that for Phase II, they take a hard look at the Zoning By-law and ask themselves if it’s fair. 

Damien Moule is an engineer, municipal policy nerd, Ward 10 resident, father, and occasional volunteer with More Neighbours Toronto. You can find him on Twitter (or X or something): @damienmoule

---