Do we need to create village-type communities or adapt courtyard living from the East here in the West?The magic of my maternal grandfather’s house in Karachi wasn’t just the five generations that grew up within its walls.
Toronto’s multi-generational families have new demands for our urban landscape that are not being met, explains Sandeep Agrawal, an Alberta-based urban and regional planner.“If we addressed it today, maybe designs in the next five to 20 years will change,” Mann-Lewis says. They change over time as families age and their needs, as well as their ability to pay for housing, evolve.
Extra Special Housing was designed by Workshop Architecture.
But it’s actually extending it,” she says.
The few emerging architects and urban planning or geography experts who have explored this phenomenon have noted that our housing market isn’t dynamic enough to accommodate a population that is simultaneously aging and becoming more diverse. Unit combinations range from nine separate households, in one- to three-bedroom homes, to three households with three to eight bedrooms each. The living spaces in the Extra Special design are more generous than typical condominiums or even town homes, providing family-sized spaces that also can support different cultural traditions and living arrangements. Our proposal built on the success of the “Vancouver Special” housing type – a low-cost house design prevalent in the region since the 1970s, whose form was developed as a direct expression of the maximization of existing zoning bylaws.
In the face of rising gentrification and booming condominium culture, the Greater Toronto Area does not yet have the capacity to properly house three or more generations under one roof.My grandfather’s multi-generational model is rare to find in North America.
House Divided: How the Missing Middle Can Solve Toronto’s Affordability Crisis is now available from Coach House Books. In this excerpt from House Divided: How the Missing Middle Can Solve Toronto’s Housing Crisis (edited by Alex Bozikovic, Cheryll Case, John Lorinc and Annabel Vaughan), Fatima Syed examines an old concept to see how it can be reborn. “It’s just different generations living in the same home and having similar needs and supporting each other in ways we haven’t thought of.”Agrawal calls this kind of thinking “shadow planning” — a city’s choice to design urban spaces and infrastructure with the next 20 to 30 years in mind. “Now, as their kids return to ask for their parents’ help, we’re seeing people customize their houses.” They are renovating basements, adding stairs and an extra entrance.Mirza pioneered an intergenerational housing exchange with the City of Toronto called the Toronto Home Share Pilot Project, which started in June 2018. We haven’t created complete communities. One was for my grandfather’s family downstairs; the other, for whoever was renting the portion upstairs. They had the space to expand their houses to develop seniors’ apartments as they aged and create new living quarters to accommodate new generations.The consensus is that, over the next two decades, Ontario will have an oversupply of condos and townhouses — neither of which are suitable for an era of bigger families of various kinds.
Some urban planning experts say the phenomenon first arrived in Toronto in the early to mid-20th century with the settlement of Italian, Portuguese and Greek immigrants who crossed the oceans with big families and built houses with character and grandeur. The younger generation generally can’t move into the housing market, and if they do, the older generation often don’t want to leave their long-time homes. That kind of lifestyle is nearly impossible to replicate in the context of high-rise buildings and sprawling suburbs.Marshall watches his neighbourhood in Pickering, where he has lived for over 30 years, change as his children’s friends start returning home.
A garden-level pass through and courtyard brings more sunlight from the south into the homes and makes the garden-level units accessible. Choosing to move in with your kids — or into a retirement home for reasons of health or personal safety — comes with its own challenges. Young adults are moving back in with their parents, and the population of senior citizens 65 and over — the largest it has ever been in Canadian history — is looking for ways to continue living on their own.