How Toronto Finally Opened Its Low-Rise Neighbourhoods to Mid-Rise Housing, And Why It Took This Long

Toronto City Council voted 18-7 on Wednesday to permit mid-rise residential buildings of up to six storeys in every residential zone across the city, a decision that effectively ends the postwar orthodoxy that kept the vast majority of Toronto's land locked in single-family and duplex housing. The rule change applies immediately to roughly 240,000 parcels that had been off-limits to anything taller than a stacked townhouse.

The timing is not accidental. Ontario's housing starts fell to their lowest quarterly figure since 2009 in the first three months of 2026, and the average resale price for a detached home in Toronto sat at $1.47 million as of May, according to the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board. The federal government is simultaneously pouring tens of thousands of new permanent residents into the city each year. Something structural had to give.

A Decade of Half-Measures

The path to Wednesday's vote runs through years of piecemeal attempts that satisfied almost nobody. The city's 2019 Expanding Housing Options in Neighbourhoods initiative, universally shortened to EHON, was supposed to unlock the missing middle. It allowed multiplexes on most lots but left height limits largely untouched, meaning a four-plex on a 25-foot-wide lot on Greenwood Avenue in Leslieville looked economically unattractive for most developers. Studies commissioned by the city's planning department found that without allowing five or six storeys, the construction math rarely pencilled out on smaller infill lots.

The provincial government's More Homes Built Faster Act, passed at Queen's Park in late 2022, forced Toronto's hand on some fronts, removing exclusionary zoning protections for low-density neighbourhoods near major transit corridors, but left wide swaths of residential land still effectively frozen. Advocacy groups including Realpac and the Toronto-based urbanist organization HousingNowTO spent 2023 and 2024 lobbying the city to go further. They pointed repeatedly to the Yonge-Eglinton Centre and the Danforth corridor, where property values soared partly because the surrounding low-rise streets could not absorb spillover demand.

The Eglinton Crosstown LRT, finally running full service after its years-delayed 2024 opening, added urgency. City planners projected that 14 of the new Crosstown stations had catchment areas still dominated by detached housing within a 500-metre walk, land that transit infrastructure could theoretically support at much greater density.

What the New Rules Actually Change

Under the zoning amendment approved Wednesday, a property owner on a standard 25-by-120-foot lot anywhere from Scarborough's Birchcliff neighbourhood to Etobicoke's Kingsway can now apply for a building permit for a six-storey residential structure by right, no rezoning application, no Ontario Land Tribunal hearing required. Setback, angular plane, and shadow rules still apply, and heritage-designated streets retain separate protections.

The city's planning department estimates the change could add theoretical capacity for 280,000 new units over the next 20 years, though analysts at Ryerson Metropolitan University's Centre for Urban Research caution that actual construction will depend heavily on interest rates, construction labour supply, and whether the city accelerates permit processing. Toronto's average permit approval time for mid-rise projects currently runs 28 months, a number the mayor has promised to cut to 12 months by 2027 under the Building Toronto Faster action plan.

For residents on streets like Cedarvale Avenue in the Annex or Queensbury Avenue in East York, the practical reality is slower. Most lots will not see cranes for years. Landowners must first assemble development capital, hire architects, and navigate building permits. But real estate lawyers and small developers say the removal of the rezoning step alone, which typically costs between $80,000 and $150,000 in consultant and legal fees, changes the calculation for mom-and-pop landlords who had never considered building beyond a garden suite.

The city's planning department will hold public information sessions at Scarborough Civic Centre on July 22 and at Metro Hall on July 29 to walk residents through the new rules. Property owners who want to understand what their lots can now support are being directed to the city's online zoning map, updated as of July 3, at toronto.ca/zoning.