Recent Toronto planning report echoes the mid-twentieth century craze for affordable multi-unit housing
Ryan Kirkby | Archives Associate
We’ve all read the headlines: affordable housing in big cities like Vancouver and Toronto is a thing of the past. Millennials and Generation Z are the chief casualties of this crisis—most of whom will likely need to look to the suburbs, exurbs, or small communities for their first house.
This is bad news for young adults, but also for the country. As the Toronto Star reported, unaffordable housing costs Canadians approximately $6 billion to $8 billion annually, squeezing middle-class and low-wage workers out of markets close to where they work and sending them to smaller cities.
In addition to forcing more workers into becoming commuters, and discouraging people from moving to city centres, this trend has produced a domino effect causing real estate prices in small cities to skyrocket.
Demands for the government to mitigate the rising costs of home ownership have grown in recent years. One sign of encouragement is the recently tabled Toronto planning report requesting that the city allow for the construction of low-rise apartment buildings in residential areas as a way of creating more housing options for more people, theoretically making city living affordable once again to middle-income earners.
Commenting on the report, Globe and Mail architecture critic Alex Bozikovic called it “the boldest and most progressive planning policy to emerge from City Hall since the amalgamation of Toronto in 1998.” Although not as ambitious, it also echoes an earlier era of urban planning in which apartment living was considered the apex of the modern city, not its nadir.
One example of this verve for multi-unit residential buildings is Flemingdon Park in Toronto’s North York district. Modelled after similar developments in London and Sweden, Flemingdon Park master planner Macklin Hancock conceived this late 1950s project as an integrated urban community capable of housing 15,000 people.
He detailed the specifics of his vision in “Flemingdon Park, New Urban Community,” an article published in the early 1960s for PLAN, Canada, the journal of the Town Planning Institute of Canada. Grand in scope, the master plan was nothing short of ambitious with specific provisions made for different dwelling types, education, recreation, shopping, and community services like a medical centre and library.
Hancock was an early supporter of multi-unit housing. Following his service in the air force during World War II, Hancock graduated from the Ontario Agricultural College (OAC) and attended Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Leveraging the training he received in urban planning and landscape architecture, he oversaw the development of Don Mills, an intricately designed postwar community that, in addition to offering detached houses, also included ample row housing and walk-up apartments to accommodate different income levels.
With Flemingdon Park, Hancock and his architects took this concept a step further by proposing a community composed entirely of high-rise apartment buildings and townhouses. By 1961, the first phase of the development’s housing plan was complete, and residents started moving in. Flemingdon quickly gained international recognition for the modern flair of its tower apartments. Hancock hoped it would entice more people to return to the city instead of retreating to the suburbs.
According to Richard White, author of Planning Toronto: The Planners, The Plans, Their Legacies, 1940-80 (2016), high-density housing, such as apartment buildings, has long been a part of Toronto’s urban landscape, despite the many zoning bylaws passed by city council banning them in residential neighbourhoods. For a brief period following World War II, however, city officials and urban planners fell in line with their support for apartment buildings, which by 1965 accounted for 26 per cent of Metropolitan Toronto’s dwelling units. Population growth was a big reason for this shift, but so was the desire to offer affordable housing to middle and low-income families.
Work on Flemingdon Park wrapped up in the early 1970s at the very moment the political winds in the city started to shift again. Bold mass housing projects were falling out of favour among Torontonians, many of whom bristled at the top-down decision making of the mid-century planners and their proposals to expropriate old neighbourhoods and replace them with modern apartment towers without consulting the affected communities. What followed was decades of disinvestment and neglect of some of the city’s largest housing structures.
As policymakers continue to search for ways to create affordable housing, they might find inspiration in high-density housing projects like Flemingdon Park as examples not only of Canada’s architectural history, but of innovative experiments in residential planning as well.
Images courtesy of Macklin Hancock, “Flemingdon Park, New Urban Community,” PLAN, Canada, p. 11, 13 and 17, n.d. [ca. 1960], XL1 MS A021060, Macklin L. Hancock/ Project Planning Associates Ltd. Collection, University of Guelph Archival & Special Collections, Guelph, ON. Readers interested in learning more about Macklin Hancock and Flemingdon Park can do so by booking an appointment to visit the Archival & Special Collections Reading Room in McLaughlin Library.
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