Many people are taking issue with our definition of the missing middle (housing denser than detached homes but shorter than mid-rise apartments) but it's the original definition from Dan Parolek who coined the term in 2010: www.planetizen.com/definition/missing-middle-housing Other people have been suggesting that the missing middle refers to medium-sized units (2 to 3 bedrooms) or to the middle class or moderately-priced homes. It's possible other people have used the term in those ways, but that's not the norm in urban planning or housing policy circles from everything we've seen.
There's some research and info about the u.s. that's available. You could've done more on the U.S. housing crisis and we don't have any near the type of housing options you all have in Canada, especially in the southern U.S.
I think the video made it pretty clear that it's not the "missing middle" people should look at, it's _density._ Density, for example, is what makes public transport feasible, not any particular style of housing. Density, and maybe pricing and amount of green space.
@@railroadforest30 Absolutely not, it's in the name, middle, or the in-between of single family detached homes and high rise buildings. 5+ stories are high rise towers, which are not undesirable but the argument for missing middle is that this type replaces single family homes because building high rise towers everywhere is not desirable.
@@hotswap6894 building 5 story towers should be desirable everywhere. The only way to solve the housing shortage in cities is to build taller. 3 stories is suburban density
Another type of ' missing middle ' is the first 1-2 floors goes to commercial space like shops and restaurants while the floors above goes to residential. NYC has this in abundance.
On the other hand, “5-over-1” buildings (buildings with a concrete ground floor that is often, but not always, used for commercial/retail and five wood-framed stories of apartments on top) are being built nowadays in cities across North America.
While it might be prevalent in Canada, in the US many neighborhoods have zoning rules that strictly prohibit these types of buildings. In Atlanta, where I live, you can see older brick 3 story 6 unit apartments, but these are only in the older sections that are a bit more dense and relatively close in. The further out you go, the more restrictive the zoning gets.
We definitely have restrictive zoning here too, including single-family zoning. It's just that semi-detached homes and townhouses aren't uncommon, even in newer suburbs.
I love the areas of Atlanta like Midtown historic district and Virginia Higland where apartments and single homes are mixed with schools, shops, etc! One specific type of housing I’d like to see promoted is low rise apts situated on plots normally used for single homes. I feel these neighborhoods promote density but keep a coziness that’s lost in big apartment block developments.
I live in a 'missing middle' apartment building with 12 units, but its still hopelessly car dependent and the closest two grocery stores are both Walmarts, both 1.5 miles away with no sidewalk no bike lane and a bus that comes once an hour which I've never taken because the schedule in the bus stop is way too confusing.
@crowmob-yo6ry the Arizona house has just introduced a law to legalize missing middle in the state. I would street view riverside Tempe to get a idea of what this could mean for phoenix and Tuscan!
It's not just number of housing units per building or number of stories, it's also population density and other things that make the neighborhood not car dependent, like nearby stores, walkability, bikeability, and access to public transit.
That was my thought. Having an entire neighbourhood consisting of nothing but 5-story apartment buildings is always going to be better for density than detached single-family homes, but a lot of the potential benefit is lost if it's a car-dependent exurb. Some of those flyovers of Richmond seemed to illustrate that: There were plenty of medium-density properties, but every single building in the area looked residential and I'd be surprised if it's possible to live there without a car. A lot of Montreal's examples do it right in that many of the medium-density neighbourhoods include plenty of commercial space and access to transportation infrastructure that mean they don't need to allocate tons of land to parking and access roads to accommodate every resident's need for a car. The middle might not be *missing*, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's being designed correctly. Sustainably designing neighbourhoods has to include both medium density and mixed-use zoning.
This is one of the reasons why Doug Ford's idea of the greenbelt was so bad. Nothing was to be put in place to support the new housing developments. It was somehow supposed to magically appear.
Lately though the cost of housing in walkable areas has served to negate the costs saved by not needing a car. Many of these areas used to be occupied by many too poor or infirm to own a car.
The BC government just had a huge string of announcements from a broad legalization of the light density missing middle (4-6 plex) to development fee reforms, to the absolutely massive apartment allowance around transit infrastructure. Going to be an interesting decade coming up if this all goes through.
RM Transit recently made a video that goes into more detail on this. It's a good watch if you want to learn more about the goals of the plan and in Vancouver's case how Translink will take charge of building more dense housing a la the Hong Kong MTR.
You probably want your government actively buying back housing for new subway stations or even entire above ground ROW. If too much density is dumped down without planning for the PT infrastructure that'll make accommodating that density more expensive and time consuming in the long run.
We need to discuss 'missing middle' in smaller towns too (like, under 50,000). Particularly winter/summer vacation spots and boom towns. It keeps them very car-dependent. Seems like things are changing in cities + suburbs but not further out.
Yeah it would be nice to get to ski hills, beaches, etc and be able to have shuttles/transit/walkable areas. Enjoy a nice dinner at the end of the day, have a few drinks and not have to worry about driving back to where you're staying.
The small, geographically isolated town of Kimberley, BC (pop. 8100) has a couple fully pedestrianized, car-free commercial streets in the town center. They were implemented about 50 years ago and have been quite successful. It's a very tourism-centric town but still a proof of concept that urbanist ideas can succeed in much smaller cities. BC's recent multiplex legislation will allow 3-4 units on a single lot in Kimberley, with up to 6 units permitted close to frequent transit, which is a good start for a small town.
Yeah, I was thinking of many small towns where even though there's stress on housing there's little impetus to build anything but new subdivisions of 3 or 4+ detached homes. That leaves renters/young people/empty nester/retirees/those on a tight budget with way less choice of 1/2 bed places, places near amenities in centre, etc. I grew up in a rural town of 7000 and the centre was filled with underused parking lots but no townhomes/apartments even though the rental market was super squeezed. Seems like if it'd been a suburb of a larger urban area it'd have been redeveloped.
I live in a lake town with a population of about 2,500 year-round plus about 4,000 cottagers. There are three issues that keep multi-family housing away, first and foremost is NIMBYism. Our council almost rejected four new fourplexes (the attached-garage kind, mind you) because the 6 wealthy property owners across the street thought it would hurt their property values. Second, we made permanent infrastructure mistakes in the name of the car. Residents of a 1980s subdivision petitioned for a sidewalk, but putting a proper one in would block access to utilities. In the end, they got a painted gutter instead. The last issue is short-term rentals. An 8-unit apartment that was finished last year is asking a ridiculous price for long-term rent, while using the waterfront units as unlicensed hotel rooms. Building the missing middle is one thing; providing affordable, long-term housing that stays affordable is another.
It’s a catch phrase in urban planning schools. But when looking back 5-10 years ago, these ‘Missing Middle’ are already existed or have been built more than we think, even in Midwestern US cities. You guys said it really well, the term is too broad. But if planners want to advocate for more low-rise/mid-rise apartment blocks, then they need to come up with better/more specific terms when communicating to the public.
I if you include the whole metropolitan are, single family use goes up. But one thing to note is that in my suburb of a midwestern city famous for unique types of multifamily housing, single family homes make up 50% of the housing stock in this suburb but take up 8 times as much land area as multifamily residential.
The term missing middle may be more popular because it still allows one to essentially talk about owner-occupied housing on separate plots of land. This is a feature rowhouses and cottage courts share with detached SFHs. Planners might not want to explicitly advocate any building form that's about accommodating apartments stacked on top of one another, because anything to do with apartments or rental housing unfortunately rings alarm bells in many peoples minds.
The biggest realization I've had from this video is that when people speak of the missing middle they usually mean low-density housing options like plex housing and rowhouses. Until now, I have always (falsely) assumed that it refers to the 5-story residential units (whether it's wall-to-wall, separated or in files) that make up a very large part of urban housing in some countries. Something like the standard 60s khrushchevka. This is what I usually associate with the terms "mid", "medium" or "middle". Seeing rowhouses and highrise apartments next to each other is the image the term "missing middle" evokes for me - but apparently that really isn't it. I guess this kinda shows how bad the term is at communicating what it actually wants to.
Yeah, good point. Some people use the term to refer to European mid-rises (5 to 10 storeys) but originally/technically/mainly it refers to anything below mid-rise but above a detached home: missingmiddlehousing.com
Yeah, I once related "missing middle" to "mid-rise" and got a lot less interested in it when I realised it counted semi-detached homes. I guess the "missing middle" stuff is the kind of housing that I'd intuitively think cities and suburbs should immediately allow into all SFH-zoned areas, whereas building more mid-rises feels more like actually rezoning residential areas with density as an explicit goal. So they both have a place, but they're answers to somewhat different questions.
@@noblegeas Yea, rowhomes aren't BAD, but anything big projects right now, especially remotely transit-adjacent, needs to be proper density of some type.
I think the distribution is also important. Vancouver's westside was significantly down-zoned in the 70s (IIRC), so duplexes, townhomes, and small apartments are relatively missing there outside of where they had already been built at the time. E.g. there's a zig-zig line through Kitsilano that separates where 3-4 story apartments can be built from where only houses are allowed. Unless a SFH home was divided into multiple rental units years ago, usually at best some of the older homes are being replaced with a duplex (now costing $2-3M), and 6 story midrises are only (slowly) being allowed on arterial streets despite demand for 10-story apartments decades ago before they were banned. There's even a 10 unit small apartment in Kits Point that's being torn down and replaced with 3 SFHs because the zoning doesn't allow it to be replaced with a similar density. Conversely, East Van has been seeing more "middle" development of low/mid rise apartments for a while, because it's been politically easier to accomplish. I'm less concerned about the specific form of missing middle, but about the ability of neighbourhoods to incrementally build up the next level of density as older buildings are replaced. The westside should have been able to build way more townhomes, small multi-unit, and low rise apartments over the last few decades so that people weren't so polarized about the possibility of a 4 to 6 unit multiplex being built in their neighbourhood (such that the city kneecapped the zoning change to produce an expected 200 developments per year, and be non-viable in the cities most expensive SFH neighbourhoods)
@@Joesolo13 Agreed, though missing middle housing isn't meant to need a big project in the first place. The idea behind missing middle housing is that if you just allow it, then it could build up density naturally in current SFH-zoned areas according to demand. Plus it allows low-rise areas to build up density without dramatically "changing the character" of the area. That plus local retail and walkability gives you a pleasant, human-scale type of neighbourhood that lots of people would love to live and raise families in. And with relatively low costs per building, units could be built and become homes relatively quickly, instead of spending years under construction and opening up hundreds at once. Missing middle housing is more like a path toward organic growth and infill. ...which is great, and is something we should have started decades ago (and, going by the video, did in some places), but organic growth is slow, so it doesn't seem quite adequate for playing catch-up with housing demand. After all, it still prioritises the ideas of "neighbourhood character" and "human-scale" development over housing as many people as need to be housed In contrast, the higher-density big projects feel more like an attempt at solving an urgent problem. And the big projects have to overcome the "neighbourhood character" and "human-scale" concerns rather than catering to them. The both have a place though. As a supporter of high-density TOD, the best I can say to people who don't want to live in one is... they don't have to, they can live somewhere else. So let that somewhere else include walkable neighbourhoods and missing middle - or should we now just call it gentle density? - housing.
I can't speak for Canada (I live in Southern California), but a lot of cracker-box 2-3 story apartment complexes were put up in the late 70s through mid 90s. These usually were clusters of buildings that would contain 6-8 units each in a large block with a pool and a few other amenities. That would be classified as "missing middle" under a loose definition, but is still not considered "urban" as these were usually tucked in R-1 neighborhoods and not close enough to enough amenities like grocery stores, theaters, and restaurants. In my neck of the woods, they started to turn it around a bit with the construction of 5-over-1 construction that usually had commercial/retail/restaurant on the 1st floor and housing on the upper floors. These were usually built in areas to revitalize downtown city cores. The latter construction would be the "missing middle" style of construction that urbanizes a place as opposed to the apartment complexes I first described. One creates a neighborhood, while the other is where you go to sleep and watch TV
a) You'd probably find less "missing middle" in the US, especially in newer suburbs, and I think the term comes from the US. It's said that 75% of US urban land is zones for detached SFH only. b) What matters most is not what the housing stock is but how it _changes_ (or is allowed to change) in response to changing demand. Where missing middle is legal, SFH can turn naturally into somewhat higher denser forms of housing. Instead we get swaths of fossilized SF housing, and a limited number of inherently expensive high rises trying to pick up the slack. (Also, to be fair, a limited amount of "5 over 1" buildings; not sure where they'd fall.)
Missing middle isn't just about the number of floors in a building, it's about the size and form of the actual units. 4 story studio apartments are still studio apartments. What people really mean by missing middle is pretty much just units with 3 or more bedrooms in anything but a detached house. The missing middle also isn't just missing because it's low in total supply, but because there is a major shortage of it in the current market. Even cities with abundant missing middle housing tend to have far less than people want of this housing type and the lack of land allocated to this housing type in land use bylaws and OCPs creates a very justified fear that it will get increasingly out of reach. Furthermore, the less urban you get, the more missing the missing middle tends to be. Even though Canada's major metro areas account for a huge portion of the housing supply, it's important to consider the impact of shortages in small and medium sized cities on trends in regional and national housing markets, where the missing middle is even more missing. Edit: Overall, I think this particular video isn't one of your best. You basically choose a bad definition of missing middle and then criticize the concept based on that bad definition. If you actually look at real cities on the scale of neighbourhoods, middle-density housing types and siteplans are conspicuously absent from many areas where they make obvious sense, mostly due to land use restrictions.
We used the standard definition of missing middle: "Dan Parolek of Opticos invented the term Missing Middle Housing in 2010 to describe the long-neglected middle of the housing spectrum, buildings ranging in size and density between a single-family detached home and a mid-rise apartment building." www.planetizen.com/definition/missing-middle-housing
I live on the Plateau in Montreal which is probably the missing middle paradise. Sadly as soon as you get out of Montreal the missing middle is missing again except for some nearby suburbs.
I cannot tell you how much I appreciate this data-driven approach to understanding the problems in our housing market. I'd love to see more videos like this!
Thanks for the nuance. One factor to consider is the impact of different building types beyond just density. There are also environmental impacts, construction costs, maintenance costs, etc. Those impacts per person are also important.
Which is one reason I really like tight terrace houses and mid rise buildings. Cheaper maintenance, and the cost per interior square meter if often lower.
Great video! I grew up in one of the older suburbs of Montreal, and assumed that most people lived in single detached homes, until I looked at the census data and learned that almost 2/3 live in either apartment towers or so-called "missing middle" housing. The reason why I had the wrong impression is that the majority of residential sectors are single-detached homes, but even in those sectors there are attached homes, townhouses and duplexes sprinkled among the detached homes, so you do not really notice them. If 20% of the buildings in those areas are attached homes, townhouses or small duplexes with front and back yards, they may account for a third of the households even in predominantly single-detached areas.
I live in a "missing middle" house in Toronto and it makes everything much more accessible with walking and we have enough space for a family, without being in a cramped tower. Because in so many places the "middle housing" is truly missing, people think that it's either a suburban single family house or a cramped tower. They don't realize medium density even exists. After growing up in a suburb and then moving to a medium density home, I could NEVER think of moving back to the suburbs to raise my family.
At least where i live (a suburb near denver colorado) 78% of our homes are detahced single family. Townhouses and apartments are an extremely small percent. Not to mention all the missing middle housing is stuck next to loud traffic corridors
5:06 - The row housing in Kanata is not walkable. Two decades ago, these were the only properties blue collar could afford due to the garbage zoning and density regulations in the city center. This isn't a case of effective policy.
Small scale density is the most powerful tool for maximizing the amount of housing per unit of money. It's in a sweet spot of low land use and low construction and maintenance costs, and by abandoning toxic residential-only zoning laws, they also minimize the need for transportation (both public transit and car-centric road networks). Mixed use zoning with low-rise apartment blocks is basically a magic bullet for affordable living, or at least close to it.
You don't even need mixed use zoning in the same parcel, you just need to zone a small part of your neighborhoods for commercial use, but with small buildings rather than the huge sprawling ones yanks usually build. The main strip near me has a bunch of shops that front onto the footpath, have a tiny shared rear car park, are 6m - 14m wide and ~30m deep. They're mostly double story. I kinda prefer this because it keeps the commercial noise a little separated from the residential properties right behind them.
@@shraka Mixed use zoning allows for shops on the bottom floor with apartments above. Very convenient and cozy. It may not be strictly necessary, but it's superior to segregated zoning.
@@theuncalledfor I know how it works. My gym is in one and I used to live near a heap. It can be done extremely badly so I don't think it's a silver bullet. I think urbanists - especially American urbanists - get hyper focused on a single solution which can deter people who see bad examples of it - of which there are many. Mixed use is good for cities but like I said you don't need it for suburbs. A few clusters of nice little terrace style shops scattered around a walkable terrace neighborhood is lovely and provides enough density to allow viable rail PT. Of course this can be done badly too, but that's sort of my point.
That's a great explanation of the category, I didn't know it encompassed such a broad range of housing. How can we better promote a hybrid development of low-rise apartments and a structuring transit network for cities? Our current Quebec provincial politicians, probably not the only ones, seem to have no inclination to build transit for future generations. Why can't they understand that the era of car dependency was a mistake and that dragging our feet on the issue will only make things worse? Thanks for making videos like these, it's one of the best ways to change old mentalities.
Last week you commented that Canadian suburbs are generally denser than U.S. suburbs. That strongly suggests to me that Canadian suburbs have more “missing middle” housing than Canadian ones. Some American suburbs have low rise apartments and townhouses, but many do not. You could get a sort of proxy for missing middle housing in the U.S. by adding up the statistics for single family attached units up through apartment buildings with 10-19 units. Few of those are taller than four stories. Your critique of the term missing middle conflating many different types of housing is valid.
In Vancouver at least, it feels like what a lot of people mean when they say "missing middle" is not necessarily just anything in between SFHs and above 6 stories... they seem to mean mid-rise apartments, like anything from 6-20 stories or so. "Dense housing" that isn't tall towers, but also isn't just a 5-over-1 at highest that wastes potential density (seriously, seeing some 3-4 storey developments going up in prime locations these days, it feels like they'll have to be torn down within a decade or two to increase density... they're just too small for what we should be doing right now). We have a lot of low-rise apartment buildings that are 3-6 stories, and then we have a lot of tall towers going up that are 30 stories or more. But not a whole lot in the middle. This is our "missing middle". But it looks like the new provincial TOD requirements for MetroVan around rapid transit stations is gonna start adding some more 8-20 story developments, so we might start filling in some of that middle soon.
Cities need to be walkable or a short ride by bicycle to stores, supermarkets, restaurants and jobs. Walking, running, bicycles, escooters, green open spaces, electric buses, electric commuter trains and trams are all parts of a good transportation system. Speak up for improved transportation options in your city. Every train station needs safe, protected places to park and lock bicycles. Children and older adults should be able to ride bicycles to work, school or for fun safely.
One of the things that I noticed when moving to Vancouver, BC from the USA was how basement suites and laneway houses are permitted in basically all so-called “single family” zones. Some US cities are only now belatedly playing catch-up in this regard. This is one of those areas where the difference between US and Canadian urbanism really manifests.
An incredibly valid point I hadn't really considered. If more high-density missing middle housing is built but it needs excessive Green Space and parking spaces that seriously cripples how much of it affect it can have.
It's very much missing in most of US. However the wide adoption of 5-over-1s are slowly changing that. Unfortunately a lot of these are constructed cheaply/poorly, with minimum sound/vibration insulation between floors. It's literally worse than 100-yr old buildings in NYC. Concrete towers are better, of course.
I think it would have been helpful to compare this data against cities of similar population size in countries that get it right. That share of missing middle may seem high, but ideally detached homes should be the rare exception in a city, not the rule.
Agree, even to US cities like Boston, NYC, Philly that are pretty good with missing middle then some European or Asian countries would have been good. Showing the numbers from a single country is not too useful
I think a big component of what is meant by missing middle is that we don’t have affordable housing in places like Vancouver for many families or people who want to wish to begin families. A 2 bedroom 2 bathroom condo in Vancouver is prohibitively expensive for most people and doesn’t offer a lot of room for a family of 4, for example. Space also becomes even more of an issue when people work from home. And I wouldn’t be surprised if this is part of the reason our birth rate is declining. Apartments are not really stable places you can start a family with all the renovictions going on in BC.
A very well made and informative video! I will continue to hold out hope that zoning and public perception will eventually converge and start returning to these denser styles of building(I am quite sick of seeing McCuldesac suburban sprawl myself). Cheers from Philly
Land is the main culprit here in Canada. In Vancouver land is responsible for 90% of total property value. So the land area dedicated to each housing type (zoning) is the key. Most of “Missing middle” you showed is not new. In Vancouver most of law-rise condo buildings were built before year 2000. Yes, there are some newer ones, but the share of units is small. Townhomes and duplexes are common in Vancouver, but out of reach for the majority of residents. Even with all recent changes in regulation, law-rise (4-6 story) condo buildings are not allowed “as of right” on a majority (>80%) of Vancouver’s lots. Mixed-use buildings - not even in a policy pipeline.
isn't the low rise cut off used here rather low as well? I have a vague recollection that apartment buildings in places like Paris, Barcelona etc are often (usually?) 5-7 stories high, rather than 4, and they still don't seem anything like 'towers'
Buildings in those cities are typically mid-rise (5 to 10 storeys), which is actually still above the range for what's considered missing middle in North America. See for example: missingmiddlehousing.com
north america can learn from the suburbs of great britain, single family row houses that are not too sprawling nor too dense as high rises and just enough for optimal public transport
I keep saying you can have lovely walkable suburbs with mostly fully detached family homes if you're happy to have double or triple story houses on 7m / 23ft wide by 28-35m / 92-115ft deep lots, with mostly narrow ~10-12m / 33-40ft wide 30kph / 20mph shared streets. I don't even think you need any high-rises if you don't want them - but tight dense planning with a minimum of 2 stories is really a requirement within 10 minutes walk of PT hubs, and you gotta heavily de-prioritize car space. SO much room is taken up by roads and parking that could be another house within walking distance of PT.
My town was a mix of row houses and smaller homes, now it’s just suburb after suburb of homes almost no one can actually afford because it has 3 stories, a basement and mid-size backyard
Love this video! Catchphrases are great so long as we remember they are just that and don’t forget to have a more detailed conversation about what we actually want.
Ultimately I think the 'missing middle' is borderline useless as a discreet policy goal. It'd be like specifically targeting 7 story apartment buildings as something we needed more of in a way that's somehow unique compared to 6 or 8 stories. I think the main driver here is the perception issues brought up in the video and a sense of impatience with how slow things are changing in aggregate set against the visual changes of things like Brentwood sprouting up so quickly. The form of the 'missing middle' is entirely replicable in the shape of a podium on which you also locate a tower allowing for the ground-level to fill out the lots to whatever minimum setback is allowed and make townhomes or the like with individual entrances while the 'roof' of those townhomes can provide a raised outdoor amenity space for the tower. Targeting any less density then the maximum achievable is crippling our ability to achieve the actual important goals ( bringing prices down and ameliorating homelessness ) in favor of what those who dwell in SFDs might find more familiar and comfortable and what others hope to be some weird silver bullet to solve all our problems.
Yes, our point at the end of the video is that there's no one type of housing that solves affordability. Affordability comes from whatever density/amount of housing allows supply to meet demand.
Segregation of uses so that the missing middle types are all together and separated from the single family subdivisions and high rise districts is part of the misperception. When we allow single family to be next to and integrated with small scale multi family with some larger true mixed use at corners and intersections to provide some of the needs of the nearby residents, then the missing middle will be closer to satisfying it’s purpose. One aspect of the missing middle is to be able to shift housing types without having to leave your neighborhood as your needs change. The place we grow up in as children (often SF) will not work for early stage singles or childless couples, nor necessarily families with young children (who may do best in a townhouse style row home with a small yard). The SF house we grew up in is often too big and expensive for the single person or DINK (or aging retiree) who would do best in a flat or possibly a small duplex unit, without having to leave the neighborhood they grew up in. Having that support network from their parents, neighbors, and friends they have relationships with already as young parents into the growing-family stage is irreplaceable by government programs and corporate services-too expensive, ineffective and doesn’t allow for the organic development of social ties and relationships.
Speaking from a US perspective, not Canadian... Let's say the zoning laws were reformed, and the parking minimums eliminated. How many people really want to live in a suburban mid-rise/high-rise apartment where you need a car, but have nowhere to park it? Changing zoning laws and building greater density isn't going to make public transportation any more reliable or less dangerous.
From an Italian standard 3 or 4 stories condominiums are not “middle”, but they would be perceived quite low density. In my opinion middle is something between 6 to 10 stories complexes, since if I think about the peripheries of the biggest cities here the average is maybe 10 stories with a few buildings with 15 or even 20 stories (sort of mini skyscrapers).
LOL to Mark Sutcliffe's NIMBY clip @6:37. In fairness I'm not sure NIMBY's are totally to blame in this case. There are legitimate financial issues with this project.
I wonder how the stats would pan out if the graph measured how much land was taken up by each type of housing, as opposed to the number of households each type had.
Housing abundance means lower property values and lower rents. The government has incentivized people who have the means to invest in properties to provide rental stock. So they risked their capital to do so.
I get that its important to build these more compact housing for cities for a ton of reasons. But dam that just seems miserable to live in, cramped so close to so many people.
Excellent video! I love your channel’s data-driven analyses of different urban issues. People sometimes don’t believe me when I say that the “missing-middle” critique is flawed, and now I can share this video with them to explain why.
Has anyone ever wondered if one big reason Canada and US have had high standards of living historically is our low populations relative to the rest of the world? It certainly seems like quality of life decline has come at the same time as large increases in population. It's not the fault of urban planners from the last 60 years that immigration policy has radically changed in the last 10 years.
this just shows cities/countries like to redefine their way out of fixing problems, no serious person would consider someone renting out their shitty basement to exploit some poor person into paying their mortgage for them as "the missing middle", but that's exactly the kind of thing a city would include in their census to make their city look better on a pretty graph without having to meaningfully make any changes
Interesting. I lived in Vancouver for 20 years, and watched the city become rapidly less affordable, mostly due to a lack of affordable housing. Some very wealthy areas on the West side of the city fought against any kind of missing middle housing, while those houses rose in value to ludicrous levels. A single family home that might have been $11,000 in 1960 is now worth in the $6-8 million dollar range. Insane. This is providing housing that will only cater to the very rich (not going to get any grubby worker bees living in these homes). I think the BC Government is on the right track, with much denser housing along the transit corridors, which hopefully will make more transit available as well as providing more housing options.
Good point, but I think its called the missing middle, not because there isn't a lot of it, but because we need so much more of it. As an aside, there needs to be more research as to what construction type actually provides the lowest cost per square foot for the life of the building, factoring in land cost, construction cost, maintenance costs, and other servicing costs like heat, ac, parking, security, etc. I'm guessing in most metro areas, a 3 story frame building that does not require an elevator or second stairwell or HVAC system with no parking and no doorman is actually the most affordable housing we can build, but this may change due to local conditions, particularly land prices.
So near me they are building what would be called high density house (5 stories) but it is anything but high density as there are only a few buildings on a massive plot of land mostly for parking, and there is hardly anything you could walk to, as it is being built where a minor highway intersects a major highway, so there are no side walks around to even get to the nearby shopping or post office (assuming you'd even want to cross the minor highway to reach them and walk along side it). It's all about housing per sq ft or meter (pick you prefered measurements) So a crappy duplex with basement rooms may be less dense than detached housing on small plots of land. Maybe a better measurement would be city/suburb area measured in housing per acre, which a lot of detached housing would score 1-2 on while a good low rise apartment might get a score of closer to 50 or 100 and a duplex could be getting a score of 2-4 really showing the difference between developments.
@@Rubicola174 land values are lower in rural areas far away from cities so the land value tax wouldn't have much of a distortionary effect on agriculture except making farming more efficient. The people who are affected the most negatively by land value tax are suburban homeowners and landlords in large expensive cities like Toronto, NYC, & London.
@@antonburdin9756 land value taxes and property taxes are different. A land value tax is a tax on the unimproved value of land only, not on the buildings occupying that land themselves. Property taxes are taxes on both land and building values. The biggest difference between land value taxes and property taxes is that land value taxes don't punish people for building large high density buildings on small parcels of land. They explicitly incentivize the most economically productive use of land. Under a property tax small single family suburban homes occupying a lot of land pay less in taxes than medium-large sized apartment/condo buildings occupying the same piece of land because the apartment building itself (without land) is worth more than the single family home (without land). This majorly disincentivizes the building of high density housing.
Vancouver resident here. A big problem in at least the Greater Vancouver area that I don't hear nearly enough discussion about is that while we may be increasing density and adding more and more towers and townhouses, almost all new build developments are strata developments, not full private ownership, which come with a huge price burden. The purchase price tag for a townhouse may be slightly lower than a detached home, but then you're stuck with $200-600/mo strata fees on top of mortgage and insurance for eternity. Beyond this, strata townhouses are also problematic because they all share walls, so they're louder and less insulated from each other. You also have far less control over your property that you're paying both a mortgage and monthly strata fee on. Then arguably the biggest problem is community related. Most townhouse developments are insular, inward facing in design; rather than extending and connecting streets naturally and forming extension to on-street neighbourhood feel and communities, they often have one or two entrances into insular neighbourhoods and feel cut off from the surrounding streets, which turn the actual streets into through roads instead of living spaces. Basically they act like gated communities without the gates. They also tend to be tightly crammed into these insular communities, and with small interior roads they tend to be very echoey and loud within, and have little to no garden space. Compare this to more tradition townhouses with narrow homes, built semi-attached to neighbours but still fully private, double walled between them since they're technically separate buildings, and they maintain a street community and fully functioning back yards/gardens. Density but still civilized and without eternal strata fees every month.
Outremont - Université de Montréal area has one the most spectacular architecture and dense middle housing with the best quality of life for families and students .
It should be easy to distinguish between semi detached, or duplex houses from appartment buildings as the later have many people share the same civic address with appartment numbers added. When it gets dicy is a triplex where there are 3 homes on 3 floors of the same building. They have separate civic addresses, yet start to behave as appartments from a density point of view. Another way to measure would be the number of bedrooms per unit of area. But when you get to special places like a summer cottage for railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbuilt in Hyde park NY with 54 bedrooms, it would skew density a bit (though the size of the land would bring it way down). If you weed out excesses from ultra rich mansions, you should get a better approximation of density by counting bedrooms.
I'm an American from Lexington, KY living in Huntsville, AL. A lot of our medium-sized cities tend to lack high-rises, but we do have a lot of low-rise apartments, maybe mid-rises downtown. The missing middle is between single-family detached homes and low-rise apartments. Also, apartment complexes tend to have large surface parking lots because no matter where you are, you're expected to personally own a car. This dilutes density quite a bit, and it makes low-rises feel just as unnatural and isolating as high-rises. That being said, I can think of 3 separate townhouse developments across the Huntsville area despite not knowing the area all that well. I think we could do better, though. Huntsville rents are skyrocketing with all the employers and yuppies (like me) moving here.
Around Toronto many places are part of R1 Zoning not allowing basement appartment to rent separtely. Often they don't even have meters for water and gas and electricity.
The missing middle refers to the type of properties that are not being put up for sale. The homes that most of us were raised in are not being listed in the same numbers as they were 20 years ago. Lots of new and expensive properties being built and sold but not these older 1970's and 1980's home that would be affordable if there were more of them on the market. And this is the same in most countries not just in Canada. These are homes that have paid off or have small mortgages and are occupied by one or two retirees that no longer rent out the suite in their homes because at their age they don't want a stranger living in their basement. There are also government incentives for them to defer their taxes that allows them to age in-place in a home that would suite a family needs. What we need is housing that would be appealing to mature adults and not to continue to incentivize mature adults to age in-place. We don't have a missing middle problem we have a distribution problem. Having said this, it won't last forever. Eventually these mature adults will get to an age that they no longer have the physical or mental capacity to manage a detached home and these homes will come back onto the market in large numbers. Then we will be revisiting blogs like this and wondering where did the glut of housing on the market come from? So we can continue to build three or more strata homes that suit one or two people each or we can look at existing homes where one home may house five or six people as they once did in the 1980's. In order to have affordable housing we need to remove the bottle neck which is causing the problem of not enough homes for families to live in.
I think the missing middle needs to count households per lot size. My city's suburbs have a ton of apartment complexes, but these complexes have a lot of parking lots and greenspace. This poor space usage essentially cuts down the density from middle, to something more akin to lower. In addition, their form tends to funnel that density more into automobile usage instead of transit or walking. So we get a stroad-like situation where the attempt to be both spread out and dense leads to a situation where the community feels like neither. it doesn't have the spacious quiet feel of R1 suburbs, but also cannot support the amenities and walkability of a denser neighborhood. Our cities, if they want to go for density, need to actually commit to actual density or else they get the worst of both worlds without the benefits of either.
Toronto has seen a alot more medium density housing lately (mid rise & TH) but local councillors & red tape limiting this type of housing so much of the city is only detached dwellings & even on major roads shops with 1 story above ..they only allow intensification in certain pockets downtown & old industrial areas so you see massive high rise tower complexes
I live in a duplex right now, but you can tell that it's built in a way that makes it easy to convert it back and forth between a duplex or a larger single family home. This is in an older neighborhood a few blocks from downtown, and I feel like when I look at new construction, they have duplexes but not the kind that have this kind of flexibility. From a home-buyer perspective, whenever I look at buying a home, I always get advice that I should go for a bigger 4-bedroom house around $300K instead of a $180k 2-bedroom home because it will be a better investment in the long run, even though that would be a huge mortgage for me, the $60k required for a 20% down payment is not realistic for me to save up in the near term, and I'm single with no kids so 4 bedrooms is just way too much space. If I bought the duplex I live in now, I could rent out the other half, only using the space that I need and paying down more principal, and then expand into the other half of the building once I start a family and actually need the space. Then once the kids are grown up, either they can live in the other unit for cheap so they can still live close while still having their own space, or if they want to live somewhere else then the other floor can still be rented out again. And at that point in life the mortgage should be mostly paid for, so the motivation of the land lord would be less about maximizing the property as an investment and more about having an amenable tenant and either finishing off the mortgage, or supporting someone's retirement. From a market perspective, it adds more short term flexibility in housing supply too. If rent prices are going way up, then someone who had been using one of these duplexes as a single family home could be incentivized to reduce their living space a bit to rent out the extra unit, which could add an extra housing unit to the market without any renovating or new construction necessary.
This is indeed a frustrating topic, as many politicians nowadays will champion their new "missing middle" policy which only permits the lowest end of density while keeping in place all the restrictive height, setback, and parking requirements. The politicians pat themselves on the back for doing essentially nothing and the anti-housing activists get to say upzoning doesn't work. See: Vancouver, Victoria, Minneapolis.
I think this may be a difference you've hit on between the US and Canada. In the US context, there absolutely are big cities where the "missing middle" is a serious problem, especially in the so-called "Sun Belt". Canadian cities and even suburbs seem much more accepting of townhouses and/or "attached single family homes" than do US cities and suburbs, outside of the usual "good urbanism" suspects. I also think cities in North America have been responding to the call for more middle-density housing for awhile now and I suspect that when the term was coined, the picture was less rosy! One last point: I still think there's a lot of value in replacing single-family houses with this type of housing. In the North American context, single-family houses are usually tremendously wasteful, often occupying very large lots (by international standards). They should be rare in large, expensive cities, but as your charts showed, they're often nearly half or more than half of the housing units in a city.
Ironically the niceness of Toronto's lightweight missing middle makes it a hotbed for left nimbyism. Who wouldn't want the amenities of a dense-ish neighbourhood but also have a front lawn? I look on with envy at the big city things Montreal can do (pedestrianizing streets, investing in parks) that work electorally when there's a civic assumption that people _don't_ have their own backyards
plexes in montreal have backyards, and ruelles vertes, which are public. the backyard can be for the landlord only or shared it depends. its usually enough space for a shed and bbq or small garden.
I don't know about anyone else but when I talk about the missing middle, I'm referring to the percentage of urban and suburban land occupied by each housing type and the percentage of new housing being built in each category. Not the percentage of people living in a certain unit type. Currently, a huge percentage of land in many metro areas in Canada is monopolized by a small percentage of people and this locks away land that could be used to house far more. The only way to currently accommodate significant population growth in a metro area is with sprawl and/or in highrises. The missing middle part is important because many of us don't want to live in a highrise, so if most land is occupied by either highrises or detached houses, it pushes people into sprawl. They see that as the only alternative to an uncomfortable shoe box. And even for the people who are willing to live in highrises, having most of a city's residential land off limits pushes up prices and reduces selection. But it's easier politically to build multi-unit housing in lowrise neighbourhoods if that housing is smaller and less imposing. But overall, if we don't deal with the land percentages issue we'll end up in a sort of housing apartheid where a smaller percentage of land downtown and in highrise nodes if forced to hold an ever increasing percentage of residents since as the population grows nearly all new residents will be forced to live there. The takeaway being that fully detached houses just waste too much land for a significant percentage of a major cities to dedicated to them. So we shouldn't be using civic laws to reinforce that usage pattern.
Great video. You’re delivering the best content about housing. So many people just keep saying that we need middle density housing but don’t really know what that means. Thank you for answering and delivering a great explanation. I’d love to see a video about what affordable housing actually means. Are those tiny houses? Houses subsidized by the government? Houses built by the government or owned by them? Housing for low/no income people? I live in Montreal too and I’m seeing a lot about this in the news lately. Like how new buildings of some sizes must include a number of affordable units in the project. What the hell does that mean? Adding a 1k/month rent unit in the middle of a luxury condo with average of 3k/month? How the hell would they do that? It just doesn’t seem logical to me.
To me, it's not affordable if you cannot pay the rent on a minimum wage job, so it would be under $1000/month. Rent growth is a major part of the necessity of minimum wage growth, and we're not really keeping pace. Can the clerk at the store or restaurant workers afford it? They have to live somewhere. To me tiny houses is just a last gasp at keeping detached housing. Land is too expensive near big cities, so it's not a practical. Apartment buildings of some kind are going to be the way to go, because land is expensive. You would also want them located in an area you can avoid the expense of car ownership. Ideally run in a not for profit manner, where the rents are based on upkeep. The size should be aimed at three bedroom ~1200 sqft. That's basically what we built post-WW2 to house the baby boomer generation as simple housing. Only instead of a significant yard, we're making them apartments, because we don't have an abundance of land near cities. It would likely involve some kind of government aided construction. Post construction, some kind of co-operative or not-for-profit organization, detached from government, to run these communities at a roughly maintenance level. To dial back to some real world examples, Toronto has a number of them built in the 80s, and 2 bedrooms are ~$1000 including utilities (one I looked at included cable internet/TV). Those co-ops of course waitlists that are "full" and take decades to get into. From a "we as a country need to build it" POV 3 bedroom makes more sense to me, because it means you can have a family and 2-3 kids without having to upsize. A 2 min-wage income household could cover a bit more rent and the expenses of raising kids.
Practicality aside, having below-market units in an otherwise luxury apartment means that those most able to spend more on housing are subsidizing those who can't 👍. The developer typically has an agreement with the government to provide a certain number of units (e.g. 20%) at below market rents in exchange for variances that allow them to build larger (e.g, 20% more floors). The marginal cost of building those extra floors is lower, so the project is equally (or more) profitable for the developer. The building still has to operate profitably once constructed, so market rents are higher to offset the below market ones (these types of agreements usually don't receive subsidies). In practice, these types of buildings often have people with median incomes (rather than high incomes) subsidizing people with lower incomes 🫤 - but the absence of these buildings would result in those with median incomes competing and raising the rents charged for the older and cheaper housing that lower income people could otherwise afford. The solution is better housing availabilty at all price points - without demolishing and displacing people from cheaper older housing - so that the market isn't forcing people to pay more and push others down the ladder of housing options. Building new housing that's truly affordable for those who need it (low income, disabilty, etc) will currently require significant government funding, but the pressure of need for that housing can be reduced by building new housing for those that can afford it (and improving incomes and reducing wealth disparity so that more people can afford housing).
Good video. I think the "missing middle" concept most specifically applies to the US, like I first heard about it when Seattle's Sightline Institute published a map of all the duplexes, triplexes, low rises etc. in Seattle that were in single-family-only zones. The "missing" was more about them missing from new construction, AFAIK, but that was also in 2010 and things are changing mostly for the better!
For a while I needed to make weekly trips out to the suburbs. [Medical reasons. I have a duplex 2 miles from downtown, where I work.] I am seeing *a lot* of mid-rise apartment complexes being built. My city also eliminated the single family houses only zoning, so infill development is also getting denser. One problem still remains ... most of the new housing stock is labeled as "luxury housing". It doesn't seem truly high end, but more like "if the builders add some minor features, they can charge more rent". So there is not nearly enough housing stock for lower income households. And those suburban 5 over 1 buildings ... you still need a car to get anywhere. They're right next to the highway, but there's no transit other than "every half hour, weekdays only" bus service. No other transit in the planning stages, either. When looked at from an economic view, there still is a missing middle. There's plenty of housing for those who can afford "luxury homes", the very poor can get assistance and live in less desirable areas, but there's nothing for those who want a decent, safe, affordable place to live.
What I was hopping more in this video is that car dependency really takes up a huge amount of space in parking lots, roads, etc. Transportation and housing are linked. Density shouldn’t just include housing but requires facilities like businesses, schools, and government services.
I feel like each time I see people complain about cars and parking lots, I absolutely lose brain cells; I'll repeat this till I'm dead: I'm left leaning in each sense of the term, however this needs to be appropriately addressed in an educated manner -- not by a 23 year old college drop out. Density doesn't require everything packed into one. That's clutter. In my area, Buffalo NY, we have numerous cities that are within minutes of each allocation you would need, however it separates neighborhoods from these allocations to provide adequate housing, parks, and places to live if you cannot afford a low income house (150k or less, say college student) across the board. The housing in this area in particular is no more than 1200sqft typically, and houses "above" this are considered wealthier gated communities with HOA's. When we discuss topics, such as "parking lots, roads, transportation", we need to understand that transportation is a requirement in the modern era, and in doing so -- it provides the capability of people to freely go as they please; Not just "to the store across the street", but to the store 30 cities away. The requirement of parking lots, roads and transportation are not linked. In fact, I watched a video by an entirely different youtuber (advocating for bikes this time) claiming that "parking lots are too much" while entirely disregarding that the zoning code for "larger businesses" require more parking spaces than smaller businesses -- if you own a Walmart or a Target, of course you're going to require the same amount of parking spots as the building capacity. The resolve of this, simply, would be creating "Parking garages", which they do in most cities anyway. Density isn't a good thing. Density is a bad thing. Requiring, asking, demanding and assuming "density is going to help the better of people" is equally as disturbing as thinking that erasing taxes will help the people (lmao). You don't want dense. You want adqeutte allocation of amenities and city buildings within a specified traversal distance to the general house. Building "City hall" 2 hours away, walking, from a person's household is bad, but most cities do this simply because "density" is what causes this to happen. This goes double for housing; You can't put 400 stores in a row, and build apartments on top and expect the average person living in those allocations to either "own the small business" (and thus suffer in life with their next generation leaving and this becoming vacant and run down), whilst forgetting that someone must own this, and it's typically never going to be the people that live there. When we discuss specifically cars, transportation and streets within allocations people live -- we need to also discuss that same flip side of the coin: Without cars, without a location to park, or a location for private transport (we'll get there in a moment), you remove the flexibility of an individual growing and becoming more self sufficient and less dependent upon others &, in particular, a wealthier individual who then "owns" the privatized allocation that is already owned by. The advocation isn't to "change the solution to be public", it's to "remove the individual option". It's like asking for fixes to healthcare, but forgetting that the privatization of healthcare is the primary problem that exists. Or fixes to the incarceration, while forgetting that privatization of prison's is what leads to everything wrong with the policing systems. It's entirely facetious, and designed solely to make you advocate for something that the creator literally only understands 1/10th the problem. Much like electric vehicles, verses gasoline, verses "Simply allowing someone to create a fuel source that isn't already controlled by the gas companies".
@@itsJoshW what your analysis fails to consider is cost. Cars cost money, fuel cost money, roads cost money. They also costs time, space, and human expertise, and health. Everything has a cost, and there are only trade offs. For example, money, location, and space. If you have a limited budget, you can either have more space but must commute further, or have less space and be nearer to where you want to be. If you want a spacious apartment in the city center with 2 parking spaces, we’ll that will cost quite a bit. Having access to many places is nice. However, car ownership is expensive and everyone has different preferences in the amount of access they are willing to pay for based on needs and wants. A college student, working professional, tourist, elderly, or a family man will have different needs and budgets. I do not advocate for density for its sake. When land becomes more valuable, a solution is to multiply its use. Walkable mix use neighborhoods are a tried and true solution. Which is why it’s so expensive to live there in the US but is common all through out the world. Zoning, parking requirements, and many anti density car centric policies effectively prohibit many viable cost effective solutions.
Interesting analysis and good video. I think I am confused by the critique and I will apologize as I may not be aware of how the concept has been interpreted in different municipalities across Canada. I appreciate that the form of Canadian cities has an intimate relationship with density. It's worth exploring and celebrating this fact in many cases. I think that the use of the term "missing middle" (and it's extension to townhouses and semis as well as multiplexes and low-rise apartments) was related to frustration with zoning regulations across North American cities that in many cases would have made a lot of the existing building stock in Canadian and US Cities illegal to replicate. I had understood the concept to recognize the existing varied housing stock and that that the variation in the existing housing stock was part of the critique that it leveled at the regulatory framework that at that time would not permit the same variety. In Toronto, I think the discourse has always understood the importance of density broadly - of old Parkdale cictorian apartments, post-war apartments in the Annex and of streetcar suburb semis and townhouses in Toronto's inner suburbs. The issue that pushed "missing middle" forward in the discourse in the 2010s was related to post-amalgamation zoning restrictions where small scale developers in York began to notice that the new City's new zoning and Official Plan wouldn't allow the triplexes that had long existed (and been permitted under the 1980s York By-law) to be newly constructed without overcoming significant regulatory hurdles. And in North York in 2015, it took as long to approve a townhouse as a tall building and NIMBYs would mount significant opposition at public meetings, leveraging the wording of the existing By-laws. Over time in Toronto and other cities, it has become far less politically contentious to build townhouses as the focus of NIMBY opposition has shifted to multiplexes and low rise apartments and as public support for housing has increased. I recognize that development outcomes in suburban municipalities in the GTHA were a bit different over this same period (though still often encountering some opposition), lots of "executive towns" and such forms were often approved through zoning By-law amendments and subdivisions applications. I think it's worth defending the original conception of the idea of "missing middle" while acknowledging a need for its evolution after a decade of relative success as an organizing principle in political discourse. I think it is also worth celebrating, as you have in this video, the complex and varied built form of Canadian cities while advocating for nuanced and varied approaches to building the Canadian cities of tomorrow.
Ah, yes. This reminds me of the "missing" bikes in bike lanes due to the efficiency of them as a means of transportation. You see pedestrians because they're slow. You see cars because they're big. But bikes zip by efficiently so unless you purposely watch for them, they're easy to undercount like "missing middle" housing.
Vancouver allows; basement suites, laneway houses, and coach houses (in heritage areas) in these so called single family areas. Therefore each lot could have 3 or 4 units so this should fit into a missing middle category. City Hall also just approved a multiplex zoning which includes four (4) townhouses on these similar type residential lots. Parking may be a big issue on selling these units.
It would've been interesting to have Edmonton in this comparison, and I actually don't understand why you don't, considering that it's essentially the same size as Ottawa and Calgary (Edmonton proper actually overtook Ottawa for 4th largest city in 2023, and the CMA overtook Ottawa-Gatineau for 5th largest). It is the only major city in Canada that banned parking minimums, back in 2020, and it is already showing the difference in new developments built and proposed since then. It also has the densest residential neighborhood in Alberta (Oliver) and most of it is actually comprised of walk-ups, as well as some other central neighborhoods, like Old Strathcona. At the same time, it's been building denser suburbs than most other Canadian cities, with smaller lots, required setback and the most relaxed single family zoning out of all major Canadian cities. Most subdivisions built since 2010 have densities higher than that of Richmond, with the vast majority of the housing being low-rise apartments and townhomes, and most detached houses being "duplexes". It is one of the reasons why it is so much more affordable than any other major city in the country, despite being one of the fastest growing, and having the second highest income. It also approved a new zoning bylaw in 2023 that pretty much reduced zoning to 3 types, removed a lot of barriers to infill development and adding higher density and mixes use to previously very restricted areas. Y'all are missing out on reporting on one of the Canadian cities that is doing the most to improve and modernize, and even if results might not appear significant in the short run, in the long run it'll likely not only help the city maintain affordability, but also improve the quality of life substantially, especially when thinking about a more urban lifestyle.
Speaking from a real estate/home cost pov, it makes absolutely no sense to include low rise in the missing middle. Price wise, they are no different than high rise is many communities. Midrise neighbourhoods also often offer similar density as high rise neighbourhoods when zoomed out. That completely skews the data. I understand why planners want to include it, but that’s a major disconnect from the marketplace.
I am always grateful for thoughtful urbanist content like yours. Thank you. However, my concern with using this definition, regardless of who penned it, is that it seems to fail to get at the basic concerns which are supposed to underpin the concepts that give it its name. The story of the loss of medium density housing, what that loss means for people, and how to fix the problem are all clearly intended to be implied by the term and are typically what those using the term are focused on. If it’s not, then why include the word “missing” at all? Middle housing typology would certainly be clearer and more conceptually concise. Data on housing typologies is not necessarily relevant for assessing whether housing areas have a medium population density, or, whether the built form is able to foster a sense of community and well-being like middle density housing is supposed to have done in the past. My point is, that the term is intentionally engaging in rosy retrospection as a call to action, a call to return to a former and, implied, better way of doing housing. While I agree increased density and public transport are likely to be the answers in most cases, it seems to me that trying to litigate exhaustively exactly which housing types in all circumstances can achieve medium densities in advance demonstrates an unintentional and unhelpful inherent bias. A bias that is closer to a re-working of the problematic mindset of mid-twentieth century urban planning, rather than reflecting an attempt to replace that mindset with a more contemporary, balanced, wholistic, and contextual approach. Trying to think of every eventuality and applying your solution universally seems to be repeating the same mistakes as the Robert Moses generation, it opens proponents up to related criticisms, and is about as likely to miss issues which turn out to be important later, but which were dismissed as peripheral or unimportant in the moment. Ultimately, we don't care about housing typology, we care if the results are good for residents, the neighbourhood, the city, and the region at large. What does it matter if an individual site is a Japanese-style single-detached house with no garden or parking taking up the whole plot, or, if it's a duplex with granny suites, provided it achieves the aims of restoring what is missing in missing middle housing. The fact of the matter is, a zoning ordinance cannot exhaustively capture every possibility and eventuality satisfactorily, and trying to do so unnecessarily constrains the possible solutions which can be presented for a given problem. Limiting the term to one only useful for conversations about zoning ordinance amendments seems odd, superficial, and self-defeating; especially when the housing that is misissing was built before zoning ordinaces existed. This is why I think those of us interested in missing middle housing might instead focus on the comparative urban densities of specific communities within chosen cities, how best cases are achieving their aims, yes what sorts of housing is present and positively contributing, how/why that is the case, what the quality and cost of public services like public transport is for those communities, the relative health of residents, and the overall vibrancy and inter-connectedness of those communities. We should also be keener to learn from other countries which do this better than we do, how and why their approach works for them, and seek to promote the adaption of such approaches to our own unique circumstances. Self-reflection certianly is important, but it also has quite profound diminishing returns when it comes to new learning. I would have loved to have seen an example of an outstanding neighbourhood from a Canadian city, perhaps one in either Vancouver or Montreal, compared with outstanding examples of neighbourhoods in say Barcelona and Tokyo, with analysis on how and why urban planning is leading to different results.
Montreal might have a number of townhouses, but swathes of the suburbs don’t, and it’s missing. Also, as you pointed out, the typology doesn’t mean density is as high as it should be. A duplex on a lot twice its size is missing the point and won’t increase density much compared to single family housing.
It feels like the argument in support of the missing-middle is more sensible in cities like Austin, where I live. Where medium-density is rare unless you're in the core of the city.
Another missing part of housing is small/modest detached homes, such as the small single family homes built directly after WWII that made it very affordable for families to own homes. If you look up the statistics of average home size by squares footage in the US since 1945, it has gone up drastically, this is directly correlated with average home prices too.
I can't speak for the other places, but Vancouver's problem wasn't a lack of mid density buildings existing, but a mess of factors meaning very little new mid density buildings were being built. As far as I understand, Vancouver proper still somewhat has this issue as well. Realistically, the problems are bad zoning, bad setbacks, bad transit, corruption in what new construction gets approved, and a mess of economic and permitting things making it not viable for developers to build anything besides houses or skyscrapers.
Thanks for analyzing Richmond, that was really interesting to me as I grew up here and now live in one of the densest neighbourhoods in the city. It's very easy to feel that the density isn't very high in Richmond as a whole, so it's very interesting to see that middle density housing, particularly low-rise apartments and townhomes make up as much of the housing as they do. It totally makes sense to me that of course it doesn't take as much land use of higher density housing to make up the same number of units, that's kind of the point - but it's still interesting to think about considering how much land *is* used by single family housing, and how you don't have to go very far to find the beginning of SFR territory where nothing else really exists. I tried to map out the impact of the new BC housing legislation here, just roughly comparing distances, and it doesn't really feel like it's going to change all that much in Richmond, except perhaps in Steveston. So where do we fail as a city? I think our biggest housing boom (by land area) happened at a period of highly auto-oriented development, we have a very coarse grid leftover from when most of Richmond was large farm plots, and winding streets within them (from master planned suburban SFR development) that are not so easily used as calm streets for cycling because of how indirect they are, and it's hard to get improvements on arterial streets - impeding the four lanes that are already there is politically difficult, and taking away street parking where that's a thing is also hard to do. Much of our commercial is also in the form of strip malls, outside of the larger malls and mixed use development in the city centre. We probably have a lack of "missing middle" neighbourhood commercial, a large amount of the city's land has really no reason for anyone to go there unless they live there. All things considered, I still like it here. I think it's very underrated. Being very flat and having nice dyke trails is actually great for cycling, you can probably do shopping by bike almost anywhere in Richmond because the distances are not bad at all, the infrastructure just isn't quite there yet and the pace of improvement is somewhat slow when compared with Vancouver. I know you guys don't really appreciate having to ride on the side of arterial roads without any bike lanes or anything and neither do I.
My family lived in Marpole and central Richmond to Edmonton, and got burnt because we were immigrants and thought all of suburban Canada was like those places, but it turned out it was more like Surrey. I definitely miss being able to comfortably walk to shops or the SkyTrain, though I'd argue in some regards parts of Edmonton suburbia can be better than Richmond.
@@DevynCairns It's complex. Richmond wins hands down on temperature for me, and central Richmond has nice density, but on the other hand, Edmonton doesn't get much in the way of precipitation, so even when there's snow everywhere the sky is generally clear and sunny. From what I've seen, suburban Edmonton has more stores in it than Richmond. Sure, they're generally strip malls with lots of parking, but it's still easier to get to them in comparison. South Edmonton Common is easy to reach by bicycle from some neighbourhoods, but getting around it is another matter (you can do it, but you won't particularly enjoy it). In regards to bike infrastructure, I'd give points to Edmonton for the sheer amount of shared-use lanes in the suburbs, which aren't as good as proper protected bike lanes (you have pedestrians on them too and crossings don't have cyclists in mind), but they're certainly far beyond puny sidewalks or painted gutters. The city has also been working to expand bike infrastructure a lot, and the 132 Ave renewal in the north in particular is a genuinely impressive project. The best part of the city's bike infrastructure, though, is the LRT. Being able to take your bike on the LRT makes lots of journeys across the city much easier, and makes a bunch of farther off places feel more in reach. There are still things I don't like, though. The road layouts for a lot of the new suburbs made since Mill Woods are messed up. The north side and core adheres to the grid and is more sensible to navigate, but Mill Woods, The Meadows, and the suburbs outside of the Henday are, lightly speaking, a mess. I don't know what the planners were thinking. And one particularly large problem of Edmonton's planning that I see: there's an industrial island in the south that splits parts of the residential area from the rest of the city, creating a divide. Richmond's industrial areas stay out of the way of the residential areas, but if you live in Mill Woods, you have to traverse Davies Industrial in order to get to the older core areas of the city, and that is not a pleasant thing to do. To be fair, the Valley Line has improved this a bit, but it's still a thing that has to be dealt with. Overall, if I had to choose suburban Richmond or suburban Edmonton, today I'd pick Richmond, because the factors it has going for it (temperate weather, less ice, no industrial islands, better grid, better bus services, connections to Vancouver, closer community centres) put it above for me. But if this question were to be asked sometime in the future, I'd probably lean towards Edmonton (way more mixed-use zoning, more expansive bike network, better rail access, more roads like 132 Avenue), because it's slowly but surely improving in dramatic ways.
@@yaygya Thanks for the detailed reply - was genuinely curious as I don't really know a lot about Edmonton, other than seeing the occasional story about great projects to improve cycling or transit infrastructure, and how the current municipal leadership seems to be very strongly in favour of that direction I volunteer as part of HUB Cycling in Richmond to try to push for better cycling infrastructure here, we know we have sort of a silly situation here where things could be pretty great, and yet we have a ton of really critical gaps. The city plans to fill those gaps, they've been in the Official Community Plan for quite a while, and they're slowly addressed as redevelopment happens. Naturally though, that leads to fragmentation to the point of being somewhat unusable in many cases. Very interested in what you said about shopping. I feel that the distances themselves are pretty good for bike to shop accessibility, I think almost everyone lives within 2 km or so of a local shopping centre with a grocery store, but I also do feel like that might be overly restrictive frankly; I think there would be more neighbourhood commercial built if it were allowed. The biggest problem definitely is though that many of those strip malls just don't have any bike infrastructure; no bike lanes or MUP leading to them and no (or just very bad) bike racks once you get there. Again, this is a case of the rules generally addressing this stuff going forward, but it does nothing for the current situation. Those strip malls probably won't be torn down and replaced so easily as land zoned for commercial is already scarce, and there isn't a big highest & best use difference incentivizing it like there is for City Centre mixed use residential. As for transit, you know, it's great if you want to go between the City Centre and Steveston and then anywhere you can reach from the Canada Line, but some of those bus lines have pretty poor frequency on their own; I have personal experience being passed by buses that are totally full that only come every 15-20 minutes haha. Hopefully higher density will force that situation to get better Personally I live in the City Centre and even here we have a lot of half-baked infrastructure and poor choices around use of street space, including the situation where Garden City has the bike lanes, and fairly direct access to both Vancouver and Steveston, but there's very few ways to get back and forth from it to No 3 Rd, and No 3 Rd itself has a crappy bike lane that only goes north all the way, big gap in the southbound. Politics holds some of this back and I think councillors need to see more people who vocally care about transit & active transportation, and I am glad I got involved in it more actively rather than just complaining about it internally
…additionally, when it comes to planning, density isn’t everything. Townhomes, such as those in the Metro Van suburbs of Surrey and Langley, often create road networks worse than exclusionary detached home zones. This defeats the purpose of the “missing middle”, since it creates car-oriented subdivisions where people all need cars and their parking spaces.
Mississauga is in close proximity to Toronto, but boasts a population of over 700,000 people. It's not part of the Toronto municipality and is in itself one of the largest cities in the country.
I think that what is far more important than actual form of cities is instead the capacity of a city to accept and process change. The real scandal of the 20th century was using law, in the form of zoning and other land use constraints, to lock-in only one type of urban form, single-family detached with large percentages of open land plus land set aside exclusively for cars. But fixing land use to a single form of use higher up the density scale would still have been a bad thing. Flexibility is the the real life-blood of the urban form. This is why I am hopeful about the change we are seeing across English North America these days. We are removing the worst of the constraints bit by bit and replacing it with rules that are less proscriptive, allowing for individual and local experimentation.
What’s “missing” until recently was the **legal right** to build more dense housing **WITHOUT** having to go through a costly and lengthy zoning change or variance in most of the US and Canada. This left easy to build single family housing or lucrative towers as the most viable options for developers. You also seem to be conflating the missing middle problem with issues of *urban vs. suburban design*. Large lot sizes, parking minimums and other wastes of scarce land are major issues onto themselves. Yes, it’s possible to build limited amounts of apartment blocks in the suburbs **as long as you waste a lot of space with turf lawns and mandatory parking** to bring the density down to a NIMBY-acceptable level.
I feel like semi-detached homes should not count toward the "Missing-middle". Also, I feel like missing middle or even high-rise houses are not very urbanist without mixed-use development. I think many Canadian cities are identifying somewhat but mixing uses is not happening or happening at a much slower pace. So we just end up with the same problems but with denser housing. Although many places in North America have made commendable strides toward densifying their cities it is not enough. Reducing minimum lot sizes, and setback requirements, getting rid of parking requirements and allowing mixed uses are all needed to fix North American cities. Any of these things by themselves will not solve anything.
My city is over 60% rentals. What do we learn from this? Not enough. We have quite a few duplex and 4-plex buildings. Still not saying much. There are whole neighborhoods of apartment complexes (usually 2 or 3 stories). None of this describes the overlying problem of land use. In my city we have food deserts, asphalt oceans (parking), limited bus lines with long intervals, and strip malls and shopping centers with more asphalt. We have over 30 parks...alk have parking lots. The problem is we're a car-centric society where cars have more rights and privileges than people. Access to basic goods and services are required to have high parking mandates. And a huge portion of our city has wide (unshaded) streets, boulevards, and stroads. The problem is the car dependency. Looking at the distribution of parks, it strikes me that we should be designing just the opposite--make most of the city a network of nature with islands of human ventures. Then we would be focusing on the distance between our homes and access to all human activities (except single-occupant cars).
I was surprised in recent trip to Vancouver and Toronto on how fast it goes from downtown high-rises to single family homes. According to your data, it seems like Vancouver is not too far from Montreal, guess I didn't go in the right neighborhoods.
It probably just really depends, you see those low rise apartments in busier corridor streets near buses or even skytrain stations. Though some duplexes are just mixed sometimes with the detached houses, couldn’t really tell if you look closely
Vancouver's definitely discreet about it with a significant part of it being in the form of laneway homes that wouldn't be in any evidence on the streets/avenues and the fact that there's always significant setbacks and a lot of foliage can help disguise things further.
Is Duplex a regional term? In the west (BC and Alberta) we use it to refer to semi-detached houses that share one wall and not two unit dwelings with one unit over the other. We just say "detached SFH with suite"
Well, no. A duplex is a house (yes, house) that was converted into an apartment for a multi-family unit. A semi-detached home is an apartment complex intentionally designed to be multi-family. They aren't the same, as duplex's typically were a notion of "I pay my mortgage by renting out the other half", and a semi-detached house is a larger complex that has a mirror housing while sharing the same lot. To simplify that a bit: A duplex is the term given when you renovate a single family house to turn it into a multi-family house (for profit, not for additional living space). Consider that you can charge double the renting cost this way. While most districts and cities/towns frown upon this action, others allow it in their code.
Wait a minute. Are you saying that Canadia defines a duplex as two vertically stacked dwelling units or is that just how the majority of them are built? In the USA, a side-by-side arrangement is the most common, but there's no definition of which I'm aware that excludes stacked units or that treats the two types differently.
The Canadian census defines a duplex as two vertically stacked dwellings, yeah. If they're side-by-side, I suppose that technically counts as a duplex but we'd usually refer to them as two semi-detached homes (and that's how they're categorized in the census).
I grew up in a four story apartment building, and I live in a 15 story apartment building now, and those feel very similar to me and should imo be in the same category
Many people are taking issue with our definition of the missing middle (housing denser than detached homes but shorter than mid-rise apartments) but it's the original definition from Dan Parolek who coined the term in 2010: www.planetizen.com/definition/missing-middle-housing
Other people have been suggesting that the missing middle refers to medium-sized units (2 to 3 bedrooms) or to the middle class or moderately-priced homes. It's possible other people have used the term in those ways, but that's not the norm in urban planning or housing policy circles from everything we've seen.
There's some research and info about the u.s. that's available. You could've done more on the U.S. housing crisis and we don't have any near the type of housing options you all have in Canada, especially in the southern U.S.
Middle should be 5-10 stories
I think the video made it pretty clear that it's not the "missing middle" people should look at, it's _density._ Density, for example, is what makes public transport feasible, not any particular style of housing. Density, and maybe pricing and amount of green space.
@@railroadforest30 Absolutely not, it's in the name, middle, or the in-between of single family detached homes and high rise buildings. 5+ stories are high rise towers, which are not undesirable but the argument for missing middle is that this type replaces single family homes because building high rise towers everywhere is not desirable.
@@hotswap6894 building 5 story towers should be desirable everywhere. The only way to solve the housing shortage in cities is to build taller. 3 stories is suburban density
Another type of ' missing middle ' is the first 1-2 floors goes to commercial space like shops and restaurants while the floors above goes to residential. NYC has this in abundance.
Yup. Mixed use development all the way. Some places even call those kinds of buildings 'live-work' buildings.
Other than Europe, Buenos Aires in Argentina does this really well.
On the other hand, “5-over-1” buildings (buildings with a concrete ground floor that is often, but not always, used for commercial/retail and five wood-framed stories of apartments on top) are being built nowadays in cities across North America.
@@AwesomeHairo Buenos Aires, the most European of all South American cities. Mexico City does pretty well as well.
@@ethandanielburg6356Those are often quite large buildings and Developments often on the upper end of the missing middle and not so missing anymore.
While it might be prevalent in Canada, in the US many neighborhoods have zoning rules that strictly prohibit these types of buildings. In Atlanta, where I live, you can see older brick 3 story 6 unit apartments, but these are only in the older sections that are a bit more dense and relatively close in. The further out you go, the more restrictive the zoning gets.
We definitely have restrictive zoning here too, including single-family zoning. It's just that semi-detached homes and townhouses aren't uncommon, even in newer suburbs.
I love the areas of Atlanta like Midtown historic district and Virginia Higland where apartments and single homes are mixed with schools, shops, etc! One specific type of housing I’d like to see promoted is low rise apts situated on plots normally used for single homes. I feel these neighborhoods promote density but keep a coziness that’s lost in big apartment block developments.
@@christianbruner8615 VA Highlands was exactly what I was thinking about!
Canada also seems to be "getting it" a bit more that housing prices and scarcity are becoming a major drag on our economy.
@Zraknul home prices in my area fell about 10%. This is a step into the right direction.
I live in a 'missing middle' apartment building with 12 units, but its still hopelessly car dependent and the closest two grocery stores are both Walmarts, both 1.5 miles away with no sidewalk no bike lane and a bus that comes once an hour which I've never taken because the schedule in the bus stop is way too confusing.
Thanks.
I argue that access is a critical part of the problem. You nicely illustrated just that.
All we have to do now is find a solution.
@crowmob-yo6ry the Arizona house has just introduced a law to legalize missing middle in the state. I would street view riverside Tempe to get a idea of what this could mean for phoenix and Tuscan!
It's not just number of housing units per building or number of stories, it's also population density and other things that make the neighborhood not car dependent, like nearby stores, walkability, bikeability, and access to public transit.
That was my thought. Having an entire neighbourhood consisting of nothing but 5-story apartment buildings is always going to be better for density than detached single-family homes, but a lot of the potential benefit is lost if it's a car-dependent exurb. Some of those flyovers of Richmond seemed to illustrate that: There were plenty of medium-density properties, but every single building in the area looked residential and I'd be surprised if it's possible to live there without a car. A lot of Montreal's examples do it right in that many of the medium-density neighbourhoods include plenty of commercial space and access to transportation infrastructure that mean they don't need to allocate tons of land to parking and access roads to accommodate every resident's need for a car.
The middle might not be *missing*, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's being designed correctly. Sustainably designing neighbourhoods has to include both medium density and mixed-use zoning.
This is one of the reasons why Doug Ford's idea of the greenbelt was so bad. Nothing was to be put in place to support the new housing developments. It was somehow supposed to magically appear.
Lately though the cost of housing in walkable areas has served to negate the costs saved by not needing a car. Many of these areas used to be occupied by many too poor or infirm to own a car.
The BC government just had a huge string of announcements from a broad legalization of the light density missing middle (4-6 plex) to development fee reforms, to the absolutely massive apartment allowance around transit infrastructure.
Going to be an interesting decade coming up if this all goes through.
RM Transit recently made a video that goes into more detail on this. It's a good watch if you want to learn more about the goals of the plan and in Vancouver's case how Translink will take charge of building more dense housing a la the Hong Kong MTR.
You probably want your government actively buying back housing for new subway stations or even entire above ground ROW. If too much density is dumped down without planning for the PT infrastructure that'll make accommodating that density more expensive and time consuming in the long run.
Don't forget to vote in the upcoming election. The BC Cons have said they want to roll back these changes.
We need to discuss 'missing middle' in smaller towns too (like, under 50,000). Particularly winter/summer vacation spots and boom towns. It keeps them very car-dependent.
Seems like things are changing in cities + suburbs but not further out.
In very small town less then 2000 people often don't get much multi unit buildings either.
Yeah it would be nice to get to ski hills, beaches, etc and be able to have shuttles/transit/walkable areas. Enjoy a nice dinner at the end of the day, have a few drinks and not have to worry about driving back to where you're staying.
The small, geographically isolated town of Kimberley, BC (pop. 8100) has a couple fully pedestrianized, car-free commercial streets in the town center. They were implemented about 50 years ago and have been quite successful. It's a very tourism-centric town but still a proof of concept that urbanist ideas can succeed in much smaller cities. BC's recent multiplex legislation will allow 3-4 units on a single lot in Kimberley, with up to 6 units permitted close to frequent transit, which is a good start for a small town.
Yeah, I was thinking of many small towns where even though there's stress on housing there's little impetus to build anything but new subdivisions of 3 or 4+ detached homes. That leaves renters/young people/empty nester/retirees/those on a tight budget with way less choice of 1/2 bed places, places near amenities in centre, etc. I grew up in a rural town of 7000 and the centre was filled with underused parking lots but no townhomes/apartments even though the rental market was super squeezed. Seems like if it'd been a suburb of a larger urban area it'd have been redeveloped.
I live in a lake town with a population of about 2,500 year-round plus about 4,000 cottagers. There are three issues that keep multi-family housing away, first and foremost is NIMBYism. Our council almost rejected four new fourplexes (the attached-garage kind, mind you) because the 6 wealthy property owners across the street thought it would hurt their property values. Second, we made permanent infrastructure mistakes in the name of the car. Residents of a 1980s subdivision petitioned for a sidewalk, but putting a proper one in would block access to utilities. In the end, they got a painted gutter instead. The last issue is short-term rentals. An 8-unit apartment that was finished last year is asking a ridiculous price for long-term rent, while using the waterfront units as unlicensed hotel rooms. Building the missing middle is one thing; providing affordable, long-term housing that stays affordable is another.
It’s a catch phrase in urban planning schools. But when looking back 5-10 years ago, these ‘Missing Middle’ are already existed or have been built more than we think, even in Midwestern US cities.
You guys said it really well, the term is too broad. But if planners want to advocate for more low-rise/mid-rise apartment blocks, then they need to come up with better/more specific terms when communicating to the public.
It is primarly term for research and the planning community itself.
The missing middle can be quite different from place to place.
I if you include the whole metropolitan are, single family use goes up. But one thing to note is that in my suburb of a midwestern city famous for unique types of multifamily housing, single family homes make up 50% of the housing stock in this suburb but take up 8 times as much land area as multifamily residential.
The term missing middle may be more popular because it still allows one to essentially talk about owner-occupied housing on separate plots of land. This is a feature rowhouses and cottage courts share with detached SFHs. Planners might not want to explicitly advocate any building form that's about accommodating apartments stacked on top of one another, because anything to do with apartments or rental housing unfortunately rings alarm bells in many peoples minds.
The biggest realization I've had from this video is that when people speak of the missing middle they usually mean low-density housing options like plex housing and rowhouses. Until now, I have always (falsely) assumed that it refers to the 5-story residential units (whether it's wall-to-wall, separated or in files) that make up a very large part of urban housing in some countries. Something like the standard 60s khrushchevka. This is what I usually associate with the terms "mid", "medium" or "middle".
Seeing rowhouses and highrise apartments next to each other is the image the term "missing middle" evokes for me - but apparently that really isn't it.
I guess this kinda shows how bad the term is at communicating what it actually wants to.
Yeah, good point. Some people use the term to refer to European mid-rises (5 to 10 storeys) but originally/technically/mainly it refers to anything below mid-rise but above a detached home: missingmiddlehousing.com
Yeah, I once related "missing middle" to "mid-rise" and got a lot less interested in it when I realised it counted semi-detached homes. I guess the "missing middle" stuff is the kind of housing that I'd intuitively think cities and suburbs should immediately allow into all SFH-zoned areas, whereas building more mid-rises feels more like actually rezoning residential areas with density as an explicit goal. So they both have a place, but they're answers to somewhat different questions.
@@noblegeas Yea, rowhomes aren't BAD, but anything big projects right now, especially remotely transit-adjacent, needs to be proper density of some type.
I think the distribution is also important.
Vancouver's westside was significantly down-zoned in the 70s (IIRC), so duplexes, townhomes, and small apartments are relatively missing there outside of where they had already been built at the time. E.g. there's a zig-zig line through Kitsilano that separates where 3-4 story apartments can be built from where only houses are allowed. Unless a SFH home was divided into multiple rental units years ago, usually at best some of the older homes are being replaced with a duplex (now costing $2-3M), and 6 story midrises are only (slowly) being allowed on arterial streets despite demand for 10-story apartments decades ago before they were banned. There's even a 10 unit small apartment in Kits Point that's being torn down and replaced with 3 SFHs because the zoning doesn't allow it to be replaced with a similar density.
Conversely, East Van has been seeing more "middle" development of low/mid rise apartments for a while, because it's been politically easier to accomplish.
I'm less concerned about the specific form of missing middle, but about the ability of neighbourhoods to incrementally build up the next level of density as older buildings are replaced. The westside should have been able to build way more townhomes, small multi-unit, and low rise apartments over the last few decades so that people weren't so polarized about the possibility of a 4 to 6 unit multiplex being built in their neighbourhood (such that the city kneecapped the zoning change to produce an expected 200 developments per year, and be non-viable in the cities most expensive SFH neighbourhoods)
@@Joesolo13 Agreed, though missing middle housing isn't meant to need a big project in the first place. The idea behind missing middle housing is that if you just allow it, then it could build up density naturally in current SFH-zoned areas according to demand. Plus it allows low-rise areas to build up density without dramatically "changing the character" of the area. That plus local retail and walkability gives you a pleasant, human-scale type of neighbourhood that lots of people would love to live and raise families in. And with relatively low costs per building, units could be built and become homes relatively quickly, instead of spending years under construction and opening up hundreds at once. Missing middle housing is more like a path toward organic growth and infill.
...which is great, and is something we should have started decades ago (and, going by the video, did in some places), but organic growth is slow, so it doesn't seem quite adequate for playing catch-up with housing demand. After all, it still prioritises the ideas of "neighbourhood character" and "human-scale" development over housing as many people as need to be housed
In contrast, the higher-density big projects feel more like an attempt at solving an urgent problem. And the big projects have to overcome the "neighbourhood character" and "human-scale" concerns rather than catering to them.
The both have a place though. As a supporter of high-density TOD, the best I can say to people who don't want to live in one is... they don't have to, they can live somewhere else. So let that somewhere else include walkable neighbourhoods and missing middle - or should we now just call it gentle density? - housing.
I can't speak for Canada (I live in Southern California), but a lot of cracker-box 2-3 story apartment complexes were put up in the late 70s through mid 90s. These usually were clusters of buildings that would contain 6-8 units each in a large block with a pool and a few other amenities. That would be classified as "missing middle" under a loose definition, but is still not considered "urban" as these were usually tucked in R-1 neighborhoods and not close enough to enough amenities like grocery stores, theaters, and restaurants. In my neck of the woods, they started to turn it around a bit with the construction of 5-over-1 construction that usually had commercial/retail/restaurant on the 1st floor and housing on the upper floors. These were usually built in areas to revitalize downtown city cores. The latter construction would be the "missing middle" style of construction that urbanizes a place as opposed to the apartment complexes I first described. One creates a neighborhood, while the other is where you go to sleep and watch TV
a) You'd probably find less "missing middle" in the US, especially in newer suburbs, and I think the term comes from the US. It's said that 75% of US urban land is zones for detached SFH only.
b) What matters most is not what the housing stock is but how it _changes_ (or is allowed to change) in response to changing demand. Where missing middle is legal, SFH can turn naturally into somewhat higher denser forms of housing. Instead we get swaths of fossilized SF housing, and a limited number of inherently expensive high rises trying to pick up the slack. (Also, to be fair, a limited amount of "5 over 1" buildings; not sure where they'd fall.)
Think those 5 over 1 are technically midrises.
Missing middle isn't just about the number of floors in a building, it's about the size and form of the actual units. 4 story studio apartments are still studio apartments. What people really mean by missing middle is pretty much just units with 3 or more bedrooms in anything but a detached house.
The missing middle also isn't just missing because it's low in total supply, but because there is a major shortage of it in the current market. Even cities with abundant missing middle housing tend to have far less than people want of this housing type and the lack of land allocated to this housing type in land use bylaws and OCPs creates a very justified fear that it will get increasingly out of reach.
Furthermore, the less urban you get, the more missing the missing middle tends to be. Even though Canada's major metro areas account for a huge portion of the housing supply, it's important to consider the impact of shortages in small and medium sized cities on trends in regional and national housing markets, where the missing middle is even more missing.
Edit: Overall, I think this particular video isn't one of your best. You basically choose a bad definition of missing middle and then criticize the concept based on that bad definition. If you actually look at real cities on the scale of neighbourhoods, middle-density housing types and siteplans are conspicuously absent from many areas where they make obvious sense, mostly due to land use restrictions.
We used the standard definition of missing middle: "Dan Parolek of Opticos invented the term Missing Middle Housing in 2010 to describe the long-neglected middle of the housing spectrum, buildings ranging in size and density between a single-family detached home and a mid-rise apartment building." www.planetizen.com/definition/missing-middle-housing
@@OhTheUrbanityyou just proved his point with your reply. Lol
@@robbiehanz7198 They've always been a bit tone-deaf. 🤣
I live on the Plateau in Montreal which is probably the missing middle paradise. Sadly as soon as you get out of Montreal the missing middle is missing again except for some nearby suburbs.
I cannot tell you how much I appreciate this data-driven approach to understanding the problems in our housing market. I'd love to see more videos like this!
Thanks for the nuance. One factor to consider is the impact of different building types beyond just density. There are also environmental impacts, construction costs, maintenance costs, etc. Those impacts per person are also important.
Which is one reason I really like tight terrace houses and mid rise buildings. Cheaper maintenance, and the cost per interior square meter if often lower.
Great video! I grew up in one of the older suburbs of Montreal, and assumed that most people lived in single detached homes, until I looked at the census data and learned that almost 2/3 live in either apartment towers or so-called "missing middle" housing. The reason why I had the wrong impression is that the majority of residential sectors are single-detached homes, but even in those sectors there are attached homes, townhouses and duplexes sprinkled among the detached homes, so you do not really notice them. If 20% of the buildings in those areas are attached homes, townhouses or small duplexes with front and back yards, they may account for a third of the households even in predominantly single-detached areas.
I'm an mtl resident love your video's!
I live in a "missing middle" house in Toronto and it makes everything much more accessible with walking and we have enough space for a family, without being in a cramped tower. Because in so many places the "middle housing" is truly missing, people think that it's either a suburban single family house or a cramped tower. They don't realize medium density even exists. After growing up in a suburb and then moving to a medium density home, I could NEVER think of moving back to the suburbs to raise my family.
At least where i live (a suburb near denver colorado) 78% of our homes are detahced single family. Townhouses and apartments are an extremely small percent.
Not to mention all the missing middle housing is stuck next to loud traffic corridors
5:06 - The row housing in Kanata is not walkable. Two decades ago, these were the only properties blue collar could afford due to the garbage zoning and density regulations in the city center. This isn't a case of effective policy.
Small scale density is the most powerful tool for maximizing the amount of housing per unit of money. It's in a sweet spot of low land use and low construction and maintenance costs, and by abandoning toxic residential-only zoning laws, they also minimize the need for transportation (both public transit and car-centric road networks). Mixed use zoning with low-rise apartment blocks is basically a magic bullet for affordable living, or at least close to it.
You don't even need mixed use zoning in the same parcel, you just need to zone a small part of your neighborhoods for commercial use, but with small buildings rather than the huge sprawling ones yanks usually build.
The main strip near me has a bunch of shops that front onto the footpath, have a tiny shared rear car park, are 6m - 14m wide and ~30m deep. They're mostly double story.
I kinda prefer this because it keeps the commercial noise a little separated from the residential properties right behind them.
@@shraka
Mixed use zoning allows for shops on the bottom floor with apartments above. Very convenient and cozy. It may not be strictly necessary, but it's superior to segregated zoning.
@@theuncalledfor I know how it works. My gym is in one and I used to live near a heap. It can be done extremely badly so I don't think it's a silver bullet.
I think urbanists - especially American urbanists - get hyper focused on a single solution which can deter people who see bad examples of it - of which there are many. Mixed use is good for cities but like I said you don't need it for suburbs. A few clusters of nice little terrace style shops scattered around a walkable terrace neighborhood is lovely and provides enough density to allow viable rail PT. Of course this can be done badly too, but that's sort of my point.
That's a great explanation of the category, I didn't know it encompassed such a broad range of housing. How can we better promote a hybrid development of low-rise apartments and a structuring transit network for cities? Our current Quebec provincial politicians, probably not the only ones, seem to have no inclination to build transit for future generations. Why can't they understand that the era of car dependency was a mistake and that dragging our feet on the issue will only make things worse?
Thanks for making videos like these, it's one of the best ways to change old mentalities.
Last week you commented that Canadian suburbs are generally denser than U.S. suburbs. That strongly suggests to me that Canadian suburbs have more “missing middle” housing than Canadian ones. Some American suburbs have low rise apartments and townhouses, but many do not.
You could get a sort of proxy for missing middle housing in the U.S. by adding up the statistics for single family attached units up through apartment buildings with 10-19 units. Few of those are taller than four stories.
Your critique of the term missing middle conflating many different types of housing is valid.
In Vancouver at least, it feels like what a lot of people mean when they say "missing middle" is not necessarily just anything in between SFHs and above 6 stories... they seem to mean mid-rise apartments, like anything from 6-20 stories or so. "Dense housing" that isn't tall towers, but also isn't just a 5-over-1 at highest that wastes potential density (seriously, seeing some 3-4 storey developments going up in prime locations these days, it feels like they'll have to be torn down within a decade or two to increase density... they're just too small for what we should be doing right now). We have a lot of low-rise apartment buildings that are 3-6 stories, and then we have a lot of tall towers going up that are 30 stories or more. But not a whole lot in the middle. This is our "missing middle". But it looks like the new provincial TOD requirements for MetroVan around rapid transit stations is gonna start adding some more 8-20 story developments, so we might start filling in some of that middle soon.
Cities need to be walkable or a short ride by bicycle to stores, supermarkets, restaurants and jobs.
Walking, running, bicycles, escooters, green open spaces, electric buses, electric commuter trains and trams are all parts of a good transportation system. Speak up for improved transportation options in your city. Every train station needs safe, protected places to park and lock bicycles. Children and older adults should be able to ride bicycles to work, school or for fun safely.
One of the things that I noticed when moving to Vancouver, BC from the USA was how basement suites and laneway houses are permitted in basically all so-called “single family” zones. Some US cities are only now belatedly playing catch-up in this regard. This is one of those areas where the difference between US and Canadian urbanism really manifests.
An incredibly valid point I hadn't really considered. If more high-density missing middle housing is built but it needs excessive Green Space and parking spaces that seriously cripples how much of it affect it can have.
It's very much missing in most of US. However the wide adoption of 5-over-1s are slowly changing that. Unfortunately a lot of these are constructed cheaply/poorly, with minimum sound/vibration insulation between floors. It's literally worse than 100-yr old buildings in NYC. Concrete towers are better, of course.
I think it would have been helpful to compare this data against cities of similar population size in countries that get it right. That share of missing middle may seem high, but ideally detached homes should be the rare exception in a city, not the rule.
Agree, even to US cities like Boston, NYC, Philly that are pretty good with missing middle then some European or Asian countries would have been good. Showing the numbers from a single country is not too useful
I think a big component of what is meant by missing middle is that we don’t have affordable housing in places like Vancouver for many families or people who want to wish to begin families. A 2 bedroom 2 bathroom condo in Vancouver is prohibitively expensive for most people and doesn’t offer a lot of room for a family of 4, for example. Space also becomes even more of an issue when people work from home. And I wouldn’t be surprised if this is part of the reason our birth rate is declining. Apartments are not really stable places you can start a family with all the renovictions going on in BC.
A very well made and informative video! I will continue to hold out hope that zoning and public perception will eventually converge and start returning to these denser styles of building(I am quite sick of seeing McCuldesac suburban sprawl myself). Cheers from Philly
Land is the main culprit here in Canada.
In Vancouver land is responsible for 90% of total property value. So the land area dedicated to each housing type (zoning) is the key. Most of “Missing middle” you showed is not new. In Vancouver most of law-rise condo buildings were built before year 2000. Yes, there are some newer ones, but the share of units is small. Townhomes and duplexes are common in Vancouver, but out of reach for the majority of residents. Even with all recent changes in regulation, law-rise (4-6 story) condo buildings are not allowed “as of right” on a majority (>80%) of Vancouver’s lots. Mixed-use buildings - not even in a policy pipeline.
isn't the low rise cut off used here rather low as well? I have a vague recollection that apartment buildings in places like Paris, Barcelona etc are often (usually?) 5-7 stories high, rather than 4, and they still don't seem anything like 'towers'
Buildings in those cities are typically mid-rise (5 to 10 storeys), which is actually still above the range for what's considered missing middle in North America. See for example: missingmiddlehousing.com
It's similar to car dominance. It's hard to miss cars on streets but easy to miss bikes and people.
and how a dedicated bus lane could look mostly empty, but move more people than multiple packed car lanes.
north america can learn from the suburbs of great britain, single family row houses that are not too sprawling nor too dense as high rises and just enough for optimal public transport
I keep saying you can have lovely walkable suburbs with mostly fully detached family homes if you're happy to have double or triple story houses on 7m / 23ft wide by 28-35m / 92-115ft deep lots, with mostly narrow ~10-12m / 33-40ft wide 30kph / 20mph shared streets.
I don't even think you need any high-rises if you don't want them - but tight dense planning with a minimum of 2 stories is really a requirement within 10 minutes walk of PT hubs, and you gotta heavily de-prioritize car space. SO much room is taken up by roads and parking that could be another house within walking distance of PT.
My town was a mix of row houses and smaller homes, now it’s just suburb after suburb of homes almost no one can actually afford because it has 3 stories, a basement and mid-size backyard
Love this video! Catchphrases are great so long as we remember they are just that and don’t forget to have a more detailed conversation about what we actually want.
Ultimately I think the 'missing middle' is borderline useless as a discreet policy goal. It'd be like specifically targeting 7 story apartment buildings as something we needed more of in a way that's somehow unique compared to 6 or 8 stories. I think the main driver here is the perception issues brought up in the video and a sense of impatience with how slow things are changing in aggregate set against the visual changes of things like Brentwood sprouting up so quickly. The form of the 'missing middle' is entirely replicable in the shape of a podium on which you also locate a tower allowing for the ground-level to fill out the lots to whatever minimum setback is allowed and make townhomes or the like with individual entrances while the 'roof' of those townhomes can provide a raised outdoor amenity space for the tower. Targeting any less density then the maximum achievable is crippling our ability to achieve the actual important goals ( bringing prices down and ameliorating homelessness ) in favor of what those who dwell in SFDs might find more familiar and comfortable and what others hope to be some weird silver bullet to solve all our problems.
Yes, our point at the end of the video is that there's no one type of housing that solves affordability. Affordability comes from whatever density/amount of housing allows supply to meet demand.
Segregation of uses so that the missing middle types are all together and separated from the single family subdivisions and high rise districts is part of the misperception. When we allow single family to be next to and integrated with small scale multi family with some larger true mixed use at corners and intersections to provide some of the needs of the nearby residents, then the missing middle will be closer to satisfying it’s purpose.
One aspect of the missing middle is to be able to shift housing types without having to leave your neighborhood as your needs change. The place we grow up in as children (often SF) will not work for early stage singles or childless couples, nor necessarily families with young children (who may do best in a townhouse style row home with a small yard). The SF house we grew up in is often too big and expensive for the single person or DINK (or aging retiree) who would do best in a flat or possibly a small duplex unit, without having to leave the neighborhood they grew up in. Having that support network from their parents, neighbors, and friends they have relationships with already as young parents into the growing-family stage is irreplaceable by government programs and corporate services-too expensive, ineffective and doesn’t allow for the organic development of social ties and relationships.
Speaking from a US perspective, not Canadian... Let's say the zoning laws were reformed, and the parking minimums eliminated. How many people really want to live in a suburban mid-rise/high-rise apartment where you need a car, but have nowhere to park it? Changing zoning laws and building greater density isn't going to make public transportation any more reliable or less dangerous.
From an Italian standard 3 or 4 stories condominiums are not “middle”, but they would be perceived quite low density. In my opinion middle is something between 6 to 10 stories complexes, since if I think about the peripheries of the biggest cities here the average is maybe 10 stories with a few buildings with 15 or even 20 stories (sort of mini skyscrapers).
6:05 off topic but it's so sad that this mixed use zoning would usually never fly in us suburbs
LOL to Mark Sutcliffe's NIMBY clip @6:37. In fairness I'm not sure NIMBY's are totally to blame in this case. There are legitimate financial issues with this project.
Lots of problems with the project, from my understanding, yeah. Just commenting on the loss of housing here.
I wonder how the stats would pan out if the graph measured how much land was taken up by each type of housing, as opposed to the number of households each type had.
Why would that matter? Either there's enough housing or there isn't.
@@ridesharegold6659 I like graphs
Housing abundance means lower property values and lower rents. The government has incentivized people who have the means to invest in properties to provide rental stock. So they risked their capital to do so.
I get that its important to build these more compact housing for cities for a ton of reasons. But dam that just seems miserable to live in, cramped so close to so many people.
Excellent video! I love your channel’s data-driven analyses of different urban issues. People sometimes don’t believe me when I say that the “missing-middle” critique is flawed, and now I can share this video with them to explain why.
Has anyone ever wondered if one big reason Canada and US have had high standards of living historically is our low populations relative to the rest of the world? It certainly seems like quality of life decline has come at the same time as large increases in population. It's not the fault of urban planners from the last 60 years that immigration policy has radically changed in the last 10 years.
this just shows cities/countries like to redefine their way out of fixing problems, no serious person would consider someone renting out their shitty basement to exploit some poor person into paying their mortgage for them as "the missing middle", but that's exactly the kind of thing a city would include in their census to make their city look better on a pretty graph without having to meaningfully make any changes
exactly .. duplexes, basement suites, laneway houses, etc are not "missing middle," they belong in the same low-density category as SFHs.
Another nuanced and informative take from this channel! Keep up the good work you two 🚴
This reminds me of the post you made about population weighted density. The "middle" really has to be the geometric mean, not the arithmetic one.
Interesting. I lived in Vancouver for 20 years, and watched the city become rapidly less affordable, mostly due to a lack of affordable housing. Some very wealthy areas on the West side of the city fought against any kind of missing middle housing, while those houses rose in value to ludicrous levels. A single family home that might have been $11,000 in 1960 is now worth in the $6-8 million dollar range. Insane. This is providing housing that will only cater to the very rich (not going to get any grubby worker bees living in these homes). I think the BC Government is on the right track, with much denser housing along the transit corridors, which hopefully will make more transit available as well as providing more housing options.
Good point, but I think its called the missing middle, not because there isn't a lot of it, but because we need so much more of it. As an aside, there needs to be more research as to what construction type actually provides the lowest cost per square foot for the life of the building, factoring in land cost, construction cost, maintenance costs, and other servicing costs like heat, ac, parking, security, etc. I'm guessing in most metro areas, a 3 story frame building that does not require an elevator or second stairwell or HVAC system with no parking and no doorman is actually the most affordable housing we can build, but this may change due to local conditions, particularly land prices.
Row housing in calgary is separated from condos. And row housing is up this year 40% from last year. Was just announced data from CMHC.
So near me they are building what would be called high density house (5 stories) but it is anything but high density as there are only a few buildings on a massive plot of land mostly for parking, and there is hardly anything you could walk to, as it is being built where a minor highway intersects a major highway, so there are no side walks around to even get to the nearby shopping or post office (assuming you'd even want to cross the minor highway to reach them and walk along side it). It's all about housing per sq ft or meter (pick you prefered measurements) So a crappy duplex with basement rooms may be less dense than detached housing on small plots of land. Maybe a better measurement would be city/suburb area measured in housing per acre, which a lot of detached housing would score 1-2 on while a good low rise apartment might get a score of closer to 50 or 100 and a duplex could be getting a score of 2-4 really showing the difference between developments.
Can you do a video on Vancouver’s new transit oriented development law?
We need a land value tax.
@@Rubicola174 land values are lower in rural areas far away from cities so the land value tax wouldn't have much of a distortionary effect on agriculture except making farming more efficient.
The people who are affected the most negatively by land value tax are suburban homeowners and landlords in large expensive cities like Toronto, NYC, & London.
We do have land value tax in Canada - it is major part of the property tax.
@@antonburdin9756 land value taxes and property taxes are different. A land value tax is a tax on the unimproved value of land only, not on the buildings occupying that land themselves. Property taxes are taxes on both land and building values.
The biggest difference between land value taxes and property taxes is that land value taxes don't punish people for building large high density buildings on small parcels of land. They explicitly incentivize the most economically productive use of land.
Under a property tax small single family suburban homes occupying a lot of land pay less in taxes than medium-large sized apartment/condo buildings occupying the same piece of land because the apartment building itself (without land) is worth more than the single family home (without land). This majorly disincentivizes the building of high density housing.
@@carfreeneoliberalgeorgisty5102 , what is land value free of infrastructure and zoning? What about taxes per resident?
Vancouver resident here. A big problem in at least the Greater Vancouver area that I don't hear nearly enough discussion about is that while we may be increasing density and adding more and more towers and townhouses, almost all new build developments are strata developments, not full private ownership, which come with a huge price burden. The purchase price tag for a townhouse may be slightly lower than a detached home, but then you're stuck with $200-600/mo strata fees on top of mortgage and insurance for eternity.
Beyond this, strata townhouses are also problematic because they all share walls, so they're louder and less insulated from each other. You also have far less control over your property that you're paying both a mortgage and monthly strata fee on. Then arguably the biggest problem is community related. Most townhouse developments are insular, inward facing in design; rather than extending and connecting streets naturally and forming extension to on-street neighbourhood feel and communities, they often have one or two entrances into insular neighbourhoods and feel cut off from the surrounding streets, which turn the actual streets into through roads instead of living spaces. Basically they act like gated communities without the gates. They also tend to be tightly crammed into these insular communities, and with small interior roads they tend to be very echoey and loud within, and have little to no garden space.
Compare this to more tradition townhouses with narrow homes, built semi-attached to neighbours but still fully private, double walled between them since they're technically separate buildings, and they maintain a street community and fully functioning back yards/gardens. Density but still civilized and without eternal strata fees every month.
Outremont - Université de Montréal area has one the most spectacular architecture and dense middle housing with the best quality of life for families and students .
It should be easy to distinguish between semi detached, or duplex houses from appartment buildings as the later have many people share the same civic address with appartment numbers added. When it gets dicy is a triplex where there are 3 homes on 3 floors of the same building. They have separate civic addresses, yet start to behave as appartments from a density point of view.
Another way to measure would be the number of bedrooms per unit of area. But when you get to special places like a summer cottage for railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbuilt in Hyde park NY with 54 bedrooms, it would skew density a bit (though the size of the land would bring it way down).
If you weed out excesses from ultra rich mansions, you should get a better approximation of density by counting bedrooms.
I'm an American from Lexington, KY living in Huntsville, AL. A lot of our medium-sized cities tend to lack high-rises, but we do have a lot of low-rise apartments, maybe mid-rises downtown. The missing middle is between single-family detached homes and low-rise apartments. Also, apartment complexes tend to have large surface parking lots because no matter where you are, you're expected to personally own a car. This dilutes density quite a bit, and it makes low-rises feel just as unnatural and isolating as high-rises. That being said, I can think of 3 separate townhouse developments across the Huntsville area despite not knowing the area all that well. I think we could do better, though. Huntsville rents are skyrocketing with all the employers and yuppies (like me) moving here.
Around Toronto many places are part of R1 Zoning not allowing basement appartment to rent separtely.
Often they don't even have meters for water and gas and electricity.
The missing middle refers to the type of properties that are not being put up for sale. The homes that most of us were raised in are not being listed in the same numbers as they were 20 years ago. Lots of new and expensive properties being built and sold but not these older 1970's and 1980's home that would be affordable if there were more of them on the market. And this is the same in most countries not just in Canada. These are homes that have paid off or have small mortgages and are occupied by one or two retirees that no longer rent out the suite in their homes because at their age they don't want a stranger living in their basement. There are also government incentives for them to defer their taxes that allows them to age in-place in a home that would suite a family needs. What we need is housing that would be appealing to mature adults and not to continue to incentivize mature adults to age in-place.
We don't have a missing middle problem we have a distribution problem. Having said this, it won't last forever. Eventually these mature adults will get to an age that they no longer have the physical or mental capacity to manage a detached home and these homes will come back onto the market in large numbers. Then we will be revisiting blogs like this and wondering where did the glut of housing on the market come from?
So we can continue to build three or more strata homes that suit one or two people each or we can look at existing homes where one home may house five or six people as they once did in the 1980's. In order to have affordable housing we need to remove the bottle neck which is causing the problem of not enough homes for families to live in.
Maybe this is why I don’t release videos anymore
I think the missing middle needs to count households per lot size. My city's suburbs have a ton of apartment complexes, but these complexes have a lot of parking lots and greenspace. This poor space usage essentially cuts down the density from middle, to something more akin to lower. In addition, their form tends to funnel that density more into automobile usage instead of transit or walking. So we get a stroad-like situation where the attempt to be both spread out and dense leads to a situation where the community feels like neither. it doesn't have the spacious quiet feel of R1 suburbs, but also cannot support the amenities and walkability of a denser neighborhood. Our cities, if they want to go for density, need to actually commit to actual density or else they get the worst of both worlds without the benefits of either.
Toronto has seen a alot more medium density housing lately (mid rise & TH) but local councillors & red tape limiting this type of housing so much of the city is only detached dwellings & even on major roads shops with 1 story above ..they only allow intensification in certain pockets downtown & old industrial areas so you see massive high rise tower complexes
Excellent deep dive! I didn't even consider that a duplex would be considered "missing middle". Great video as always.
I live in a duplex right now, but you can tell that it's built in a way that makes it easy to convert it back and forth between a duplex or a larger single family home. This is in an older neighborhood a few blocks from downtown, and I feel like when I look at new construction, they have duplexes but not the kind that have this kind of flexibility.
From a home-buyer perspective, whenever I look at buying a home, I always get advice that I should go for a bigger 4-bedroom house around $300K instead of a $180k 2-bedroom home because it will be a better investment in the long run, even though that would be a huge mortgage for me, the $60k required for a 20% down payment is not realistic for me to save up in the near term, and I'm single with no kids so 4 bedrooms is just way too much space.
If I bought the duplex I live in now, I could rent out the other half, only using the space that I need and paying down more principal, and then expand into the other half of the building once I start a family and actually need the space. Then once the kids are grown up, either they can live in the other unit for cheap so they can still live close while still having their own space, or if they want to live somewhere else then the other floor can still be rented out again. And at that point in life the mortgage should be mostly paid for, so the motivation of the land lord would be less about maximizing the property as an investment and more about having an amenable tenant and either finishing off the mortgage, or supporting someone's retirement.
From a market perspective, it adds more short term flexibility in housing supply too. If rent prices are going way up, then someone who had been using one of these duplexes as a single family home could be incentivized to reduce their living space a bit to rent out the extra unit, which could add an extra housing unit to the market without any renovating or new construction necessary.
This is indeed a frustrating topic, as many politicians nowadays will champion their new "missing middle" policy which only permits the lowest end of density while keeping in place all the restrictive height, setback, and parking requirements. The politicians pat themselves on the back for doing essentially nothing and the anti-housing activists get to say upzoning doesn't work. See: Vancouver, Victoria, Minneapolis.
I think this may be a difference you've hit on between the US and Canada. In the US context, there absolutely are big cities where the "missing middle" is a serious problem, especially in the so-called "Sun Belt". Canadian cities and even suburbs seem much more accepting of townhouses and/or "attached single family homes" than do US cities and suburbs, outside of the usual "good urbanism" suspects. I also think cities in North America have been responding to the call for more middle-density housing for awhile now and I suspect that when the term was coined, the picture was less rosy! One last point: I still think there's a lot of value in replacing single-family houses with this type of housing. In the North American context, single-family houses are usually tremendously wasteful, often occupying very large lots (by international standards). They should be rare in large, expensive cities, but as your charts showed, they're often nearly half or more than half of the housing units in a city.
Ironically the niceness of Toronto's lightweight missing middle makes it a hotbed for left nimbyism. Who wouldn't want the amenities of a dense-ish neighbourhood but also have a front lawn?
I look on with envy at the big city things Montreal can do (pedestrianizing streets, investing in parks) that work electorally when there's a civic assumption that people _don't_ have their own backyards
plexes in montreal have backyards, and ruelles vertes, which are public. the backyard can be for the landlord only or shared it depends. its usually enough space for a shed and bbq or small garden.
I don't know about anyone else but when I talk about the missing middle, I'm referring to the percentage of urban and suburban land occupied by each housing type and the percentage of new housing being built in each category. Not the percentage of people living in a certain unit type. Currently, a huge percentage of land in many metro areas in Canada is monopolized by a small percentage of people and this locks away land that could be used to house far more. The only way to currently accommodate significant population growth in a metro area is with sprawl and/or in highrises.
The missing middle part is important because many of us don't want to live in a highrise, so if most land is occupied by either highrises or detached houses, it pushes people into sprawl. They see that as the only alternative to an uncomfortable shoe box. And even for the people who are willing to live in highrises, having most of a city's residential land off limits pushes up prices and reduces selection. But it's easier politically to build multi-unit housing in lowrise neighbourhoods if that housing is smaller and less imposing.
But overall, if we don't deal with the land percentages issue we'll end up in a sort of housing apartheid where a smaller percentage of land downtown and in highrise nodes if forced to hold an ever increasing percentage of residents since as the population grows nearly all new residents will be forced to live there. The takeaway being that fully detached houses just waste too much land for a significant percentage of a major cities to dedicated to them. So we shouldn't be using civic laws to reinforce that usage pattern.
Great video. You’re delivering the best content about housing. So many people just keep saying that we need middle density housing but don’t really know what that means. Thank you for answering and delivering a great explanation.
I’d love to see a video about what affordable housing actually means. Are those tiny houses? Houses subsidized by the government? Houses built by the government or owned by them? Housing for low/no income people?
I live in Montreal too and I’m seeing a lot about this in the news lately. Like how new buildings of some sizes must include a number of affordable units in the project. What the hell does that mean? Adding a 1k/month rent unit in the middle of a luxury condo with average of 3k/month? How the hell would they do that? It just doesn’t seem logical to me.
To me, it's not affordable if you cannot pay the rent on a minimum wage job, so it would be under $1000/month. Rent growth is a major part of the necessity of minimum wage growth, and we're not really keeping pace. Can the clerk at the store or restaurant workers afford it? They have to live somewhere.
To me tiny houses is just a last gasp at keeping detached housing. Land is too expensive near big cities, so it's not a practical.
Apartment buildings of some kind are going to be the way to go, because land is expensive. You would also want them located in an area you can avoid the expense of car ownership. Ideally run in a not for profit manner, where the rents are based on upkeep. The size should be aimed at three bedroom ~1200 sqft. That's basically what we built post-WW2 to house the baby boomer generation as simple housing. Only instead of a significant yard, we're making them apartments, because we don't have an abundance of land near cities.
It would likely involve some kind of government aided construction. Post construction, some kind of co-operative or not-for-profit organization, detached from government, to run these communities at a roughly maintenance level. To dial back to some real world examples, Toronto has a number of them built in the 80s, and 2 bedrooms are ~$1000 including utilities (one I looked at included cable internet/TV). Those co-ops of course waitlists that are "full" and take decades to get into.
From a "we as a country need to build it" POV 3 bedroom makes more sense to me, because it means you can have a family and 2-3 kids without having to upsize. A 2 min-wage income household could cover a bit more rent and the expenses of raising kids.
Practicality aside, having below-market units in an otherwise luxury apartment means that those most able to spend more on housing are subsidizing those who can't 👍. The developer typically has an agreement with the government to provide a certain number of units (e.g. 20%) at below market rents in exchange for variances that allow them to build larger (e.g, 20% more floors). The marginal cost of building those extra floors is lower, so the project is equally (or more) profitable for the developer. The building still has to operate profitably once constructed, so market rents are higher to offset the below market ones (these types of agreements usually don't receive subsidies).
In practice, these types of buildings often have people with median incomes (rather than high incomes) subsidizing people with lower incomes 🫤 - but the absence of these buildings would result in those with median incomes competing and raising the rents charged for the older and cheaper housing that lower income people could otherwise afford.
The solution is better housing availabilty at all price points - without demolishing and displacing people from cheaper older housing - so that the market isn't forcing people to pay more and push others down the ladder of housing options.
Building new housing that's truly affordable for those who need it (low income, disabilty, etc) will currently require significant government funding, but the pressure of need for that housing can be reduced by building new housing for those that can afford it (and improving incomes and reducing wealth disparity so that more people can afford housing).
Good video. I think the "missing middle" concept most specifically applies to the US, like I first heard about it when Seattle's Sightline Institute published a map of all the duplexes, triplexes, low rises etc. in Seattle that were in single-family-only zones. The "missing" was more about them missing from new construction, AFAIK, but that was also in 2010 and things are changing mostly for the better!
For a while I needed to make weekly trips out to the suburbs. [Medical reasons. I have a duplex 2 miles from downtown, where I work.] I am seeing *a lot* of mid-rise apartment complexes being built. My city also eliminated the single family houses only zoning, so infill development is also getting denser.
One problem still remains ... most of the new housing stock is labeled as "luxury housing". It doesn't seem truly high end, but more like "if the builders add some minor features, they can charge more rent". So there is not nearly enough housing stock for lower income households.
And those suburban 5 over 1 buildings ... you still need a car to get anywhere. They're right next to the highway, but there's no transit other than "every half hour, weekdays only" bus service. No other transit in the planning stages, either.
When looked at from an economic view, there still is a missing middle. There's plenty of housing for those who can afford "luxury homes", the very poor can get assistance and live in less desirable areas, but there's nothing for those who want a decent, safe, affordable place to live.
What I was hopping more in this video is that car dependency really takes up a huge amount of space in parking lots, roads, etc. Transportation and housing are linked. Density shouldn’t just include housing but requires facilities like businesses, schools, and government services.
I feel like each time I see people complain about cars and parking lots, I absolutely lose brain cells; I'll repeat this till I'm dead: I'm left leaning in each sense of the term, however this needs to be appropriately addressed in an educated manner -- not by a 23 year old college drop out.
Density doesn't require everything packed into one. That's clutter. In my area, Buffalo NY, we have numerous cities that are within minutes of each allocation you would need, however it separates neighborhoods from these allocations to provide adequate housing, parks, and places to live if you cannot afford a low income house (150k or less, say college student) across the board.
The housing in this area in particular is no more than 1200sqft typically, and houses "above" this are considered wealthier gated communities with HOA's.
When we discuss topics, such as "parking lots, roads, transportation", we need to understand that transportation is a requirement in the modern era, and in doing so -- it provides the capability of people to freely go as they please; Not just "to the store across the street", but to the store 30 cities away. The requirement of parking lots, roads and transportation are not linked.
In fact, I watched a video by an entirely different youtuber (advocating for bikes this time) claiming that "parking lots are too much" while entirely disregarding that the zoning code for "larger businesses" require more parking spaces than smaller businesses -- if you own a Walmart or a Target, of course you're going to require the same amount of parking spots as the building capacity. The resolve of this, simply, would be creating "Parking garages", which they do in most cities anyway.
Density isn't a good thing. Density is a bad thing. Requiring, asking, demanding and assuming "density is going to help the better of people" is equally as disturbing as thinking that erasing taxes will help the people (lmao).
You don't want dense.
You want adqeutte allocation of amenities and city buildings within a specified traversal distance to the general house. Building "City hall" 2 hours away, walking, from a person's household is bad, but most cities do this simply because "density" is what causes this to happen.
This goes double for housing; You can't put 400 stores in a row, and build apartments on top and expect the average person living in those allocations to either "own the small business" (and thus suffer in life with their next generation leaving and this becoming vacant and run down), whilst forgetting that someone must own this, and it's typically never going to be the people that live there.
When we discuss specifically cars, transportation and streets within allocations people live -- we need to also discuss that same flip side of the coin: Without cars, without a location to park, or a location for private transport (we'll get there in a moment), you remove the flexibility of an individual growing and becoming more self sufficient and less dependent upon others &, in particular, a wealthier individual who then "owns" the privatized allocation that is already owned by.
The advocation isn't to "change the solution to be public", it's to "remove the individual option".
It's like asking for fixes to healthcare, but forgetting that the privatization of healthcare is the primary problem that exists. Or fixes to the incarceration, while forgetting that privatization of prison's is what leads to everything wrong with the policing systems.
It's entirely facetious, and designed solely to make you advocate for something that the creator literally only understands 1/10th the problem.
Much like electric vehicles, verses gasoline, verses "Simply allowing someone to create a fuel source that isn't already controlled by the gas companies".
@@itsJoshW what your analysis fails to consider is cost. Cars cost money, fuel cost money, roads cost money. They also costs time, space, and human expertise, and health.
Everything has a cost, and there are only trade offs. For example, money, location, and space. If you have a limited budget, you can either have more space but must commute further, or have less space and be nearer to where you want to be. If you want a spacious apartment in the city center with 2 parking spaces, we’ll that will cost quite a bit.
Having access to many places is nice. However, car ownership is expensive and everyone has different preferences in the amount of access they are willing to pay for based on needs and wants. A college student, working professional, tourist, elderly, or a family man will have different needs and budgets.
I do not advocate for density for its sake.
When land becomes more valuable, a solution is to multiply its use. Walkable mix use neighborhoods are a tried and true solution. Which is why it’s so expensive to live there in the US but is common all through out the world.
Zoning, parking requirements, and many anti density car centric policies effectively prohibit many viable cost effective solutions.
Interesting analysis and good video. I think I am confused by the critique and I will apologize as I may not be aware of how the concept has been interpreted in different municipalities across Canada.
I appreciate that the form of Canadian cities has an intimate relationship with density. It's worth exploring and celebrating this fact in many cases. I think that the use of the term "missing middle" (and it's extension to townhouses and semis as well as multiplexes and low-rise apartments) was related to frustration with zoning regulations across North American cities that in many cases would have made a lot of the existing building stock in Canadian and US Cities illegal to replicate. I had understood the concept to recognize the existing varied housing stock and that that the variation in the existing housing stock was part of the critique that it leveled at the regulatory framework that at that time would not permit the same variety.
In Toronto, I think the discourse has always understood the importance of density broadly - of old Parkdale cictorian apartments, post-war apartments in the Annex and of streetcar suburb semis and townhouses in Toronto's inner suburbs. The issue that pushed "missing middle" forward in the discourse in the 2010s was related to post-amalgamation zoning restrictions where small scale developers in York began to notice that the new City's new zoning and Official Plan wouldn't allow the triplexes that had long existed (and been permitted under the 1980s York By-law) to be newly constructed without overcoming significant regulatory hurdles. And in North York in 2015, it took as long to approve a townhouse as a tall building and NIMBYs would mount significant opposition at public meetings, leveraging the wording of the existing By-laws.
Over time in Toronto and other cities, it has become far less politically contentious to build townhouses as the focus of NIMBY opposition has shifted to multiplexes and low rise apartments and as public support for housing has increased.
I recognize that development outcomes in suburban municipalities in the GTHA were a bit different over this same period (though still often encountering some opposition), lots of "executive towns" and such forms were often approved through zoning By-law amendments and subdivisions applications.
I think it's worth defending the original conception of the idea of "missing middle" while acknowledging a need for its evolution after a decade of relative success as an organizing principle in political discourse. I think it is also worth celebrating, as you have in this video, the complex and varied built form of Canadian cities while advocating for nuanced and varied approaches to building the Canadian cities of tomorrow.
Ah, yes. This reminds me of the "missing" bikes in bike lanes due to the efficiency of them as a means of transportation. You see pedestrians because they're slow. You see cars because they're big. But bikes zip by efficiently so unless you purposely watch for them, they're easy to undercount like "missing middle" housing.
Vancouver allows; basement suites, laneway houses, and coach houses (in heritage areas) in these so called single family areas. Therefore each lot could have 3 or 4 units so this should fit into a missing middle category. City Hall also just approved a multiplex zoning which includes four (4) townhouses on these similar type residential lots. Parking may be a big issue on selling these units.
It would've been interesting to have Edmonton in this comparison, and I actually don't understand why you don't, considering that it's essentially the same size as Ottawa and Calgary (Edmonton proper actually overtook Ottawa for 4th largest city in 2023, and the CMA overtook Ottawa-Gatineau for 5th largest).
It is the only major city in Canada that banned parking minimums, back in 2020, and it is already showing the difference in new developments built and proposed since then.
It also has the densest residential neighborhood in Alberta (Oliver) and most of it is actually comprised of walk-ups, as well as some other central neighborhoods, like Old Strathcona.
At the same time, it's been building denser suburbs than most other Canadian cities, with smaller lots, required setback and the most relaxed single family zoning out of all major Canadian cities. Most subdivisions built since 2010 have densities higher than that of Richmond, with the vast majority of the housing being low-rise apartments and townhomes, and most detached houses being "duplexes".
It is one of the reasons why it is so much more affordable than any other major city in the country, despite being one of the fastest growing, and having the second highest income.
It also approved a new zoning bylaw in 2023 that pretty much reduced zoning to 3 types, removed a lot of barriers to infill development and adding higher density and mixes use to previously very restricted areas.
Y'all are missing out on reporting on one of the Canadian cities that is doing the most to improve and modernize, and even if results might not appear significant in the short run, in the long run it'll likely not only help the city maintain affordability, but also improve the quality of life substantially, especially when thinking about a more urban lifestyle.
Speaking from a real estate/home cost pov, it makes absolutely no sense to include low rise in the missing middle. Price wise, they are no different than high rise is many communities. Midrise neighbourhoods also often offer similar density as high rise neighbourhoods when zoomed out.
That completely skews the data.
I understand why planners want to include it, but that’s a major disconnect from the marketplace.
I am always grateful for thoughtful urbanist content like yours. Thank you. However, my concern with using this definition, regardless of who penned it, is that it seems to fail to get at the basic concerns which are supposed to underpin the concepts that give it its name. The story of the loss of medium density housing, what that loss means for people, and how to fix the problem are all clearly intended to be implied by the term and are typically what those using the term are focused on. If it’s not, then why include the word “missing” at all? Middle housing typology would certainly be clearer and more conceptually concise. Data on housing typologies is not necessarily relevant for assessing whether housing areas have a medium population density, or, whether the built form is able to foster a sense of community and well-being like middle density housing is supposed to have done in the past. My point is, that the term is intentionally engaging in rosy retrospection as a call to action, a call to return to a former and, implied, better way of doing housing. While I agree increased density and public transport are likely to be the answers in most cases, it seems to me that trying to litigate exhaustively exactly which housing types in all circumstances can achieve medium densities in advance demonstrates an unintentional and unhelpful inherent bias. A bias that is closer to a re-working of the problematic mindset of mid-twentieth century urban planning, rather than reflecting an attempt to replace that mindset with a more contemporary, balanced, wholistic, and contextual approach. Trying to think of every eventuality and applying your solution universally seems to be repeating the same mistakes as the Robert Moses generation, it opens proponents up to related criticisms, and is about as likely to miss issues which turn out to be important later, but which were dismissed as peripheral or unimportant in the moment. Ultimately, we don't care about housing typology, we care if the results are good for residents, the neighbourhood, the city, and the region at large. What does it matter if an individual site is a Japanese-style single-detached house with no garden or parking taking up the whole plot, or, if it's a duplex with granny suites, provided it achieves the aims of restoring what is missing in missing middle housing. The fact of the matter is, a zoning ordinance cannot exhaustively capture every possibility and eventuality satisfactorily, and trying to do so unnecessarily constrains the possible solutions which can be presented for a given problem. Limiting the term to one only useful for conversations about zoning ordinance amendments seems odd, superficial, and self-defeating; especially when the housing that is misissing was built before zoning ordinaces existed. This is why I think those of us interested in missing middle housing might instead focus on the comparative urban densities of specific communities within chosen cities, how best cases are achieving their aims, yes what sorts of housing is present and positively contributing, how/why that is the case, what the quality and cost of public services like public transport is for those communities, the relative health of residents, and the overall vibrancy and inter-connectedness of those communities. We should also be keener to learn from other countries which do this better than we do, how and why their approach works for them, and seek to promote the adaption of such approaches to our own unique circumstances. Self-reflection certianly is important, but it also has quite profound diminishing returns when it comes to new learning. I would have loved to have seen an example of an outstanding neighbourhood from a Canadian city, perhaps one in either Vancouver or Montreal, compared with outstanding examples of neighbourhoods in say Barcelona and Tokyo, with analysis on how and why urban planning is leading to different results.
Montreal might have a number of townhouses, but swathes of the suburbs don’t, and it’s missing. Also, as you pointed out, the typology doesn’t mean density is as high as it should be. A duplex on a lot twice its size is missing the point and won’t increase density much compared to single family housing.
It feels like the argument in support of the missing-middle is more sensible in cities like Austin, where I live. Where medium-density is rare unless you're in the core of the city.
Another missing part of housing is small/modest detached homes, such as the small single family homes built directly after WWII that made it very affordable for families to own homes. If you look up the statistics of average home size by squares footage in the US since 1945, it has gone up drastically, this is directly correlated with average home prices too.
I can't speak for the other places, but Vancouver's problem wasn't a lack of mid density buildings existing, but a mess of factors meaning very little new mid density buildings were being built. As far as I understand, Vancouver proper still somewhat has this issue as well.
Realistically, the problems are bad zoning, bad setbacks, bad transit, corruption in what new construction gets approved, and a mess of economic and permitting things making it not viable for developers to build anything besides houses or skyscrapers.
Thanks for analyzing Richmond, that was really interesting to me as I grew up here and now live in one of the densest neighbourhoods in the city.
It's very easy to feel that the density isn't very high in Richmond as a whole, so it's very interesting to see that middle density housing, particularly low-rise apartments and townhomes make up as much of the housing as they do. It totally makes sense to me that of course it doesn't take as much land use of higher density housing to make up the same number of units, that's kind of the point - but it's still interesting to think about considering how much land *is* used by single family housing, and how you don't have to go very far to find the beginning of SFR territory where nothing else really exists.
I tried to map out the impact of the new BC housing legislation here, just roughly comparing distances, and it doesn't really feel like it's going to change all that much in Richmond, except perhaps in Steveston. So where do we fail as a city? I think our biggest housing boom (by land area) happened at a period of highly auto-oriented development, we have a very coarse grid leftover from when most of Richmond was large farm plots, and winding streets within them (from master planned suburban SFR development) that are not so easily used as calm streets for cycling because of how indirect they are, and it's hard to get improvements on arterial streets - impeding the four lanes that are already there is politically difficult, and taking away street parking where that's a thing is also hard to do. Much of our commercial is also in the form of strip malls, outside of the larger malls and mixed use development in the city centre. We probably have a lack of "missing middle" neighbourhood commercial, a large amount of the city's land has really no reason for anyone to go there unless they live there.
All things considered, I still like it here. I think it's very underrated. Being very flat and having nice dyke trails is actually great for cycling, you can probably do shopping by bike almost anywhere in Richmond because the distances are not bad at all, the infrastructure just isn't quite there yet and the pace of improvement is somewhat slow when compared with Vancouver. I know you guys don't really appreciate having to ride on the side of arterial roads without any bike lanes or anything and neither do I.
My family lived in Marpole and central Richmond to Edmonton, and got burnt because we were immigrants and thought all of suburban Canada was like those places, but it turned out it was more like Surrey. I definitely miss being able to comfortably walk to shops or the SkyTrain, though I'd argue in some regards parts of Edmonton suburbia can be better than Richmond.
@@yaygya What do you like better?
@@DevynCairns It's complex.
Richmond wins hands down on temperature for me, and central Richmond has nice density, but on the other hand, Edmonton doesn't get much in the way of precipitation, so even when there's snow everywhere the sky is generally clear and sunny.
From what I've seen, suburban Edmonton has more stores in it than Richmond. Sure, they're generally strip malls with lots of parking, but it's still easier to get to them in comparison. South Edmonton Common is easy to reach by bicycle from some neighbourhoods, but getting around it is another matter (you can do it, but you won't particularly enjoy it).
In regards to bike infrastructure, I'd give points to Edmonton for the sheer amount of shared-use lanes in the suburbs, which aren't as good as proper protected bike lanes (you have pedestrians on them too and crossings don't have cyclists in mind), but they're certainly far beyond puny sidewalks or painted gutters. The city has also been working to expand bike infrastructure a lot, and the 132 Ave renewal in the north in particular is a genuinely impressive project. The best part of the city's bike infrastructure, though, is the LRT. Being able to take your bike on the LRT makes lots of journeys across the city much easier, and makes a bunch of farther off places feel more in reach.
There are still things I don't like, though. The road layouts for a lot of the new suburbs made since Mill Woods are messed up. The north side and core adheres to the grid and is more sensible to navigate, but Mill Woods, The Meadows, and the suburbs outside of the Henday are, lightly speaking, a mess. I don't know what the planners were thinking.
And one particularly large problem of Edmonton's planning that I see: there's an industrial island in the south that splits parts of the residential area from the rest of the city, creating a divide. Richmond's industrial areas stay out of the way of the residential areas, but if you live in Mill Woods, you have to traverse Davies Industrial in order to get to the older core areas of the city, and that is not a pleasant thing to do. To be fair, the Valley Line has improved this a bit, but it's still a thing that has to be dealt with.
Overall, if I had to choose suburban Richmond or suburban Edmonton, today I'd pick Richmond, because the factors it has going for it (temperate weather, less ice, no industrial islands, better grid, better bus services, connections to Vancouver, closer community centres) put it above for me. But if this question were to be asked sometime in the future, I'd probably lean towards Edmonton (way more mixed-use zoning, more expansive bike network, better rail access, more roads like 132 Avenue), because it's slowly but surely improving in dramatic ways.
@@yaygya Thanks for the detailed reply - was genuinely curious as I don't really know a lot about Edmonton, other than seeing the occasional story about great projects to improve cycling or transit infrastructure, and how the current municipal leadership seems to be very strongly in favour of that direction
I volunteer as part of HUB Cycling in Richmond to try to push for better cycling infrastructure here, we know we have sort of a silly situation here where things could be pretty great, and yet we have a ton of really critical gaps. The city plans to fill those gaps, they've been in the Official Community Plan for quite a while, and they're slowly addressed as redevelopment happens. Naturally though, that leads to fragmentation to the point of being somewhat unusable in many cases.
Very interested in what you said about shopping. I feel that the distances themselves are pretty good for bike to shop accessibility, I think almost everyone lives within 2 km or so of a local shopping centre with a grocery store, but I also do feel like that might be overly restrictive frankly; I think there would be more neighbourhood commercial built if it were allowed. The biggest problem definitely is though that many of those strip malls just don't have any bike infrastructure; no bike lanes or MUP leading to them and no (or just very bad) bike racks once you get there. Again, this is a case of the rules generally addressing this stuff going forward, but it does nothing for the current situation. Those strip malls probably won't be torn down and replaced so easily as land zoned for commercial is already scarce, and there isn't a big highest & best use difference incentivizing it like there is for City Centre mixed use residential.
As for transit, you know, it's great if you want to go between the City Centre and Steveston and then anywhere you can reach from the Canada Line, but some of those bus lines have pretty poor frequency on their own; I have personal experience being passed by buses that are totally full that only come every 15-20 minutes haha. Hopefully higher density will force that situation to get better
Personally I live in the City Centre and even here we have a lot of half-baked infrastructure and poor choices around use of street space, including the situation where Garden City has the bike lanes, and fairly direct access to both Vancouver and Steveston, but there's very few ways to get back and forth from it to No 3 Rd, and No 3 Rd itself has a crappy bike lane that only goes north all the way, big gap in the southbound. Politics holds some of this back and I think councillors need to see more people who vocally care about transit & active transportation, and I am glad I got involved in it more actively rather than just complaining about it internally
…additionally, when it comes to planning, density isn’t everything. Townhomes, such as those in the Metro Van suburbs of Surrey and Langley, often create road networks worse than exclusionary detached home zones. This defeats the purpose of the “missing middle”, since it creates car-oriented subdivisions where people all need cars and their parking spaces.
Mississauga is in close proximity to Toronto, but boasts a population of over 700,000 people. It's not part of the Toronto municipality and is in itself one of the largest cities in the country.
It definitely still feels missing if you count by land area, and that's not worthless. Land use is a critical component of sustainability.
I think that what is far more important than actual form of cities is instead the capacity of a city to accept and process change.
The real scandal of the 20th century was using law, in the form of zoning and other land use constraints, to lock-in only one type of urban form, single-family detached with large percentages of open land plus land set aside exclusively for cars.
But fixing land use to a single form of use higher up the density scale would still have been a bad thing.
Flexibility is the the real life-blood of the urban form.
This is why I am hopeful about the change we are seeing across English North America these days. We are removing the worst of the constraints bit by bit and replacing it with rules that are less proscriptive, allowing for individual and local experimentation.
I feel like the missing middle is more the feel of the area like the feel of a "Main Street" seems to me what the missing middle is.
What’s “missing” until recently was the **legal right** to build more dense housing **WITHOUT** having to go through a costly and lengthy zoning change or variance in most of the US and Canada. This left easy to build single family housing or lucrative towers as the most viable options for developers.
You also seem to be conflating the missing middle problem with issues of *urban vs. suburban design*. Large lot sizes, parking minimums and other wastes of scarce land are major issues onto themselves. Yes, it’s possible to build limited amounts of apartment blocks in the suburbs **as long as you waste a lot of space with turf lawns and mandatory parking** to bring the density down to a NIMBY-acceptable level.
I feel like semi-detached homes should not count toward the "Missing-middle". Also, I feel like missing middle or even high-rise houses are not very urbanist without mixed-use development. I think many Canadian cities are identifying somewhat but mixing uses is not happening or happening at a much slower pace. So we just end up with the same problems but with denser housing. Although many places in North America have made commendable strides toward densifying their cities it is not enough. Reducing minimum lot sizes, and setback requirements, getting rid of parking requirements and allowing mixed uses are all needed to fix North American cities. Any of these things by themselves will not solve anything.
My city is over 60% rentals. What do we learn from this? Not enough.
We have quite a few duplex and 4-plex buildings.
Still not saying much.
There are whole neighborhoods of apartment complexes (usually 2 or 3 stories).
None of this describes the overlying problem of land use.
In my city we have food deserts, asphalt oceans (parking), limited bus lines with long intervals, and strip malls and shopping centers with more asphalt.
We have over 30 parks...alk have parking lots.
The problem is we're a car-centric society where cars have more rights and privileges than people. Access to basic goods and services are required to have high parking mandates. And a huge portion of our city has wide (unshaded) streets, boulevards, and stroads.
The problem is the car dependency.
Looking at the distribution of parks, it strikes me that we should be designing just the opposite--make most of the city a network of nature with islands of human ventures. Then we would be focusing on the distance between our homes and access to all human activities (except single-occupant cars).
I was surprised in recent trip to Vancouver and Toronto on how fast it goes from downtown high-rises to single family homes.
According to your data, it seems like Vancouver is not too far from Montreal, guess I didn't go in the right neighborhoods.
It probably just really depends, you see those low rise apartments in busier corridor streets near buses or even skytrain stations. Though some duplexes are just mixed sometimes with the detached houses, couldn’t really tell if you look closely
Vancouver's definitely discreet about it with a significant part of it being in the form of laneway homes that wouldn't be in any evidence on the streets/avenues and the fact that there's always significant setbacks and a lot of foliage can help disguise things further.
The Missing Middle isn’t really missing in Canada. The USA has a much larger problem, particularly with cities that developed largely after WWII.
Is Duplex a regional term? In the west (BC and Alberta) we use it to refer to semi-detached houses that share one wall and not two unit dwelings with one unit over the other. We just say "detached SFH with suite"
Well, no.
A duplex is a house (yes, house) that was converted into an apartment for a multi-family unit.
A semi-detached home is an apartment complex intentionally designed to be multi-family.
They aren't the same, as duplex's typically were a notion of "I pay my mortgage by renting out the other half", and a semi-detached house is a larger complex that has a mirror housing while sharing the same lot.
To simplify that a bit: A duplex is the term given when you renovate a single family house to turn it into a multi-family house (for profit, not for additional living space). Consider that you can charge double the renting cost this way. While most districts and cities/towns frown upon this action, others allow it in their code.
Wait a minute. Are you saying that Canadia defines a duplex as two vertically stacked dwelling units or is that just how the majority of them are built? In the USA, a side-by-side arrangement is the most common, but there's no definition of which I'm aware that excludes stacked units or that treats the two types differently.
The Canadian census defines a duplex as two vertically stacked dwellings, yeah. If they're side-by-side, I suppose that technically counts as a duplex but we'd usually refer to them as two semi-detached homes (and that's how they're categorized in the census).
@@OhTheUrbanity That just goes to show you that agencies in charge of counting people shouldn't be allowed to define architectural terms!
I grew up in a four story apartment building, and I live in a 15 story apartment building now, and those feel very similar to me and should imo be in the same category