Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
Halifax has policies like this too but the results are pretty mixed and the city has some areas that should be heritage districts but aren't. The economics are good, since the properties are below 1 million in a lot of cases, but the design is sometimes a huge step down...
A lot of the commentary on it is depressing, with a mix of self-flagellating or aesthetically braindead "we can't have reservations about this because housing crisis" logic, combined with "this is what you get when you allow too much density and not enough setbacks". This building design would be ugly at any number of floors or any amount of setbacks. The planning rules don't force ugly design and some of these are nice (not the ones pictured), but it is up to the developer. Note that rents for these units is probably around the $3k a month range and they don't even have decent windows.
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These days, unless it's being built as a luxury product, I find ground-oriented housing to be butt ugly. The exorbitant cost of construction has reared its ugly head (more literally than figuratively, these days), and to make things work, builders employ the cheapest materials. These are also often bespoke projects from small-time developers, so you won't have an experienced, high-priced architect signing off on these. I think we tell ourselves that missing middle is being built for a good cause to absolve ourselves of the hideous blight that most of them are.
When it comes to the aesthetics of infill, Halifax is an unfortunate spot. The cost of land is not astronomical like Vancouver, but Vancouver's high land cost forces MM developers to build a luxury product with at least some lip service to outward appearances. Also - just my personal opinion, but I don't think it's too controversial - Vancouver's bungalow neighbourhoods are aesthetically less interesting than Halifax's Victorian inner city neighbourhoods.
Toronto is kind of lucky in that the areas where missing middle makes sense are not areas with great heritage buildings. Those neighbourhoods contain semis and row houses which are difficult to sever, very high land costs, and often already have existing homes subdivided into apartments so there's not much of a net gain in unit count and rental income to just buying an existing property.
The areas where MM is taking off in Toronto are exactly what you said: interwar or late 1940s bungalow and mixed SFH/semi areas that were working class until pretty recently, and where you can buy a tear down 1,000 ft2 bungalow for <$900k. Neighbourhoods like
this. These areas were never pretty to begin with, and it's good to inject these areas with more people and life. Even when the multiplex is a hot mess, it kind of fits the aesthetics of the surrounding area and isn't the sore thumb it would be in a leafy Victorian neighbourhood.
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