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The list of things to celebrate could go on. This kind of “missing middle” small apartment complex is exactly what every pc28����neighbourhood needs: good for the people who live in them, good for the neighbourhood, good for addressing Toronto’s housing affordability problems. 

The only thing to hate about it is that, as my colleague May Warren reported recently, they may be the last of their kind built in Toronto. Because the two fourplexes are semi-detached, they’re considered a small apartment building. Which the city has confirmed is illegal to build in most of Toronto, even under new rules meant to encourage fourplex construction across the city. 

This is stupid. Small walk-up apartment buildings are a great boon to the neighbourhoods where they are located. You find them in many of the most desirable and well-established neighbourhoods in the city: there are a bunch of them on Palmerston Avenue and throughout the Annex, you find them in Rosedale, in Forest Hill, in the Beaches.

Better yet, as the builder of the Gerrard homes said, these are cheaper and easier to construct than highrise or even midrise condos or apartments, because they don’t need to add lobbies and elevators. 

Of course, when anyone proposes building one on a residential street, the neighbours come out to scream that the sky is going to fall. But they do that when you propose building anything besides what is already there. Healthy cities are always growing and evolving. But people, on the whole, tend to think that their very own family is the cherry on top of the sundae of their neighbourhood, that the day they moved in represented the last change needed to make things perfect, and that all change should stop there.

I have sat through committee of adjustment meetings in which residents complained bitterly that putting two semi-detached houses on a single lot will ruin the entire street (even on a street already dotted with semi-detached houses). The city has witnessed absolute freak-outs over proposals to add a second front door to a house already subdivided into flats. Former mayor John Tory thought he was going to need authoritarian strong-mayor powers to force legislation on council just to allow basic fourplexes across the city.

Here’s the thing: once these types of buildings are built, usually because some builder expends years of sweat and treasure to overrule all the NIMBY Chicken Littles and leap all the bureaucratic roadblocks, they turn out to be fine. Better than fine. They make the neighbourhoods they are in better places to live. 

In fact, the city should not just allow this kind of small apartment complex, ���ܳ���mandate them: requiring one to be built within the next 10 years on every single block of every single street in the city — and step in to build them itself if no one wants to. Clearly, given the timidity of our city council and the paralyzing fear of change that grips average homeowners, my suggestion there is fantasyland thinking. Me playing Sim City: Torontopia Edition. 

But in what every politician at every level acknowledges is a dire housing shortage, when young families are moving away from the city and the province in droves due to a lack of available places to live — surely it’s not too much to ask that we simply allow them to be built by property owners who want to build them.

Two separate fourplexes side-by-side are allowed. Why not two fourplexes attached on one side? It seems like a ridiculous oversight in the fourplex rules city council was so proud of having (belatedly, reluctantly) passed. 

The city says it will look at this in a multiplex report it will bring to city council in June. If it was an oversight in the rules, council should fix it then. And if it doesn’t, we’ll know we have an even bigger problem. Oversights can be fixed. Wilful resistance to the good of the city by those elected to govern it is tougher to solve.