Stefan Novakovic
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The Quiet Revolution: Can ReHousing Transform Toronto?
An elegant — if sometimes perilous — course for a sensitive new model of urban densification is shaping the city, starting with a handsome Harbord Village home.
Once in a while, a house breaks the mould. On downtown Toronto’s residential streets, tight rows of century-old dwellings are occasionally interrupted by something newer, taller, bigger. But that’s usually another single-family home, its footprint seemingly swelling in proportion to the levels of wealth necessary to enter a prohibitive market. As the houses get larger and young families are increasingly priced out of the urban core altogether, their communities are contracting. Many of the city’s neighbourhoods — and the majority of Toronto’s forbiddingly zoned land area — quietly face the problem of declining population.
At first glance, the building on the northeast corner of Ulster and Lippincott Streets in Harbord Village might appear to fit the pattern. Handsomely clad in an array of clay tiles, the three-storey form — contoured and articulated to preserve the site’s majestic Blue Spruce and to meet the rhythm of the angular roofscape — is at once understated and eye-catching. Rising a storey above its older neighbours, the 308-square-metre structure embodies the clean lines and simple geometry that make for a decidedly contemporary presence, yet with a scale and materiality that speaks to its intimate residential context. A pair of urbane entrances, one on either street, hint at an infusion of density.
The real surprise is inside. The building was designed by Janna Levitt and Dean Goodman, partners in life and work; their firm, LGA Architectural Partners, is acclaimed for its sensitive modernist ethos, its dedication to sustainable architecture and its civic leadership. They have organized the building into four spacious apartments, including a small laneway suite. Two dual-level units (with bedrooms and living areas on separate tiers) occupy the upper floors, where they have access to ample natural light and recessed terraces. A definite step up from a typical Toronto basement suite, the building’s lowest level features a reasonably light-filled and airy one-bedroom apartment.
The most unusual home is in the middle: Levitt and Goodman’s own abode encompasses both the ground floor and the laneway house, the two zones linked by a trellis-covered walkway and patio. “We were very careful to design the two to enhance the feeling of being removed, intimate and in nature (with the laneway house) and open, more buttoned-down and urban (in the street floor), and we programmed the courtyard to be the joint,” says Levitt. In the main volume, the showpiece kitchen features a stainless steel-encased cooking alcove and a long dining table set against the generous glazing that faces a vibrant garden landscape (around the spruce) by Lorraine Johnson. Throughout, the handsomely crafted interiors are warm and inviting, an effect amplified by the pleasantly tactile oak veneer finishes that wrap them.
The home’s separation of private and social zones means that to get to the bedroom, situated in the skylit laneway unit, you need to step outside — even into the brisk air of a November day. But Levitt and Goodman, who downsized from their previous home, embrace the outdoors year-round; Goodman built a sauna in the backyard, and the duo makes the balance of hot and cold an intentional part of daily life. “Walking to the laneway house late at night, under the canopy, offers a different experience in every season, and the changes in weather and temperature are part of that,” says Levitt. “The sauna is the all-season anchor. Many nights, we sit outside, after a long sauna session, in housecoats and slippers, really feeling warm in the cold — and feeling great being able to be outside in a wild garden in the middle of winter.”
It’s not for everybody. Yet the duo’s Ulster House is both a unique home and a proof of concept for something much bigger: Together with University of Toronto professor Michael Piper (who runs the school’s Tuf Lab) and housing researcher Samantha Eby, Levitt is a co-founder of ReHousing. Supported by the Neptis Foundation, the non-profit offers a comprehensive design and construction catalogue of potential renovations, additions and redevelopments for the 13 most common housing types across the single-family “yellow belt” zoning boundaries that span most of the City of Toronto and its immediate suburbs. Ulster House, then, represents an incremental step toward weaving much-needed housing deep into the fibre of the urban fabric. It might boast a site-specific architectural élan, but its key ideas are designed to be replicated. For instance, the main volume’s ground floor and the laneway house can be reconfigured as stand-alone one-bedroom suites without making changes to the building envelope — resulting in a total of five units.
On a systemic level, ReHousing is aimed at diversifying a city defined by stark “tall and sprawl” dichotomies of density and a development industry dominated by economies of scale. And it does so by “empowering citizen developers in converting single-family homes into multi-unit housing” — a pattern that, while often overlooked, actually shaped much of our urban history, as Levitt explains. “You’d carve up apartments out of houses, maybe you’d rent them out to family or relatives, and you’d make a multi-family home out of a single-family home,” she says. “This is where the idea of the ‘citizen developer’ came from: It’s a bottom-up response to creating more housing.”
ReHousing arrives at a moment when the increasing severity of the housing crisis has spurred a gradual — albeit halting — easing of the 20th century’s draconian zoning and code restrictions. Toronto is joining cities across North America allowing densification in single-family communities. This has resulted in new laneway house and garden suite regulations (in 2018 and 2022 respectively) and revisions to zoning and planning that permit city-wide multiplex housing — as part of the Expanding Housing Options in Neighbourhoods (EHON) program initiated in 2023. But legality is one thing; making the leap from citizen to citizen developer is another story.
As Tuf Lab’s Michael Piper puts it, ReHousing intends to bridge the gap. “I remember I was looking to buy a home and create a unit for my in-laws,” he says. “And as an architect, it’s pretty easy to look at a building or a layout and think, ‘I know exactly what I want to do.’ But most of us aren’t architects — and folks don’t necessarily know where to start. So the idea with the ReHousing tool kit is that it’s almost like having an architect in your pocket.” It starts with simple principles, says Samantha Eby. “It’s about imparting our design skills, and our experience in thinking about things like phasing a project, to a wider public,” she explains. “So if you’re installing a new kitchen, for example, it’s worthwhile knowing that you shouldn’t place it along an exterior wall. But if you really have to, then make sure that you insulate the pipes.” The ReHousing design catalogue applies to projects of a variety of sizes, from simple renovations and small additions to lot splits and laneway suites.
As a new-build multiplex, Ulster House sits at the most ambitious end of the scale. Having broken ground well before the EHON program ostensibly paved the way for new multiplexes across Toronto, it faced a bevy of hurdles. For starters, the laneway unit’s form reflects the City of Toronto’s dogmatic commitment to maintaining an angular plane in secondary suites. In lieu of a simple and efficient rectilinear box, the second floor of the smaller volume is reduced in size, decreasing floor area and increasing construction cost, in order to mitigate its visual prominence. More fundamentally, the larger three-storey volume necessitated two exit stairs, reducing usable floor area in a project where spatial efficiency was paramount. While seemingly minor, such regulatory mandates complicate the logistical — and financial — feasibility of multiplex development.
These challenges were expected — and deftly resolved. But an unanticipated and costly roadblock emerged once Ulster House was all but complete: It took months for Toronto Hydro to supply the number of breaker panels required and then hook them up to power (the home’s HVAC is all-electric, in line with Levitt and Goodman’s desire for a zero-carbon operating project). Why the delay? The request was “non-standard” and precipitated an indefinitely long process. And so, although the municipality is actively encouraging the development of new multiplex housing, there was a lack of policy cohesion at the public utility level. On top of the months of lost rent, the cost to Levitt and Goodman came in at $75,000. “Why would the City encourage us to build all of this stuff and not have it aligned with Hydro so they’re actually ready to roll it out?” asks Goodman.
As multiplexes are being built in modest numbers, a handful of similar developments have faced their own obstacles. On nearby Shaw Street, for example, fellow citizen developer Nigel Churcher came up against “a long list of minor variances” (according to the Globe and Mail), and each of his four units required its own gas, electricity and water connections, along with a specialized ventilation system for the property. Even the City of Toronto’s own definition of a multiplex remains dodgy; municipal guidelines allow for fourplexes in semi-detached buildings, yet in upscale Bedford Park, a proposal to split a pair of neighbouring semi-detached homes into multiple suites was met with surprising resistance by planning staff. According to a 2024 staff report, the fact that the two properties share a wall means they amount to a single apartment building, which is not permitted under zoning rules. Taken together, such regulatory uncertainties invite a reconsideration of just how “legal” multiplexes really are.
This bureaucratic resistance to change has deeper socio-economic roots. As North American governments divested from building and managing public housing in the late 20th century, an increasingly complex apparatus emerged to govern — and constrain — multi-family development. Restrictive zoning, outdated building codes, empirically dubious fire safety rules and other impediments added up to a recipe for languishing housing supply and skyrocketing prices. Across Toronto and most of the continent, it remains far easier to build a colossal single-family mansion than a multi-unit property of the same scale.
On a cultural level, this state of affairs changed how we think about our cities and our homes. “As soon as housing became an investment tool, the ability to do an informal transformation of a single-family home into a multi-unit dwelling became restrictive,” says Levitt. “With so much wealth and net worth now tied up in real estate, there’s been a flip from neighbours offering to help you renovate your garage to them calling the municipality to report that you’re working without a permit. One of the reasons that’s happening is because so much of their own money is invested in the property — they’re afraid of incurring any kind of risk.”
In an era of concentrated real estate wealth, a prevalent trend sees multi-unit buildings across North American cities — many of which were originally built as stately houses — converted back into luxury single-family homes. While such transformations are generally accepted and even rewarded, tenants and landlords undertaking the opposite project of informally converting houses into multi-unit dwellings stand to face municipal reprisal, and this in turn creates a grey market housing landscape that’s all but invisible to the public and political consciousness. In its own small way, the ReHousing project is bringing such typologies and living arrangements into the civic spotlight — and into the language of civic bureaucracy. “One of the really interesting things that I hope can emerge from this whole conversation is if, for example, the City could consider another amnesty (like it did 15 years ago), and offer landlords the opportunity to come forward and work together with them to safely and affordably convert illegal rooming houses into multiplexes,” says Levitt. “ReHousing can offer a tool kit to do so with a variety of options.”
Renovations, additions and new multiplexes can gradually reintroduce necessary density into residential neighbourhoods, whether for private profit or social good. “These typologies are all basically ownership-agnostic,” Levitt says. Already, ReHousing’s tool kit and Levitt and Goodman’s project have elicited interest, including from private homeowners looking for rental income and community land trusts searching for affordable entry points into the property market. Given the scale of the housing crisis, however, it’ll probably never add up to enough on its own; even 5,000 Ulster Houses would only deliver a maximum of 25,000 new homes. Yet these new buildings can change how we think about Toronto’s neighbourhoods, their heritage and their future. There has always been another city here. We just have to look carefully to see it.
Original Link (Azure Magazine)