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Ryerson City Building Institute executive director Cherise Burda acknowledged the trend last year at the National Housing Innovation Series in Toronto, saying, “New townhomes and stacked townhouse developments – the modern versions of the Missing Middle walk-up – are popping up in our residential neighbourhoods throughout the city, breathing new life into beer-store parking lots, autobody shops and railway lands.”
Since townhome blocks are becoming an increasingly effective way to boost density without the zoning challenges high-rise housing faces, a growing number of developers are planning, launching and building townhome projects along major Yellow Belt thoroughfares, which are exempt from detached-housing zoning rules, while they wait for new municipal policy to become a reality.
In Scarborough’s Birch Cliff neighbourhood, for instance, Core Development Group owns three parcels of land near Kingston Road, the largest of which has been devoted to building Clonmore Urban Towns, a community of 118 stacked townhomes now under construction on Warden Avenue. In pre-construction in Etobicoke’s Bloor and Islington area, the Plaza Fairfield Towns project, from Plazacorp Urban Residential Communities, pairs a dozen freehold townhomes with two semi-detached houses. South of the QEW at Royal York and Manchester St., the West Six Towns by Allegra Homes, also in pre-construction, is offering 18 four-storey units ranging from 2,006 to 2,285 square feet.
