Cities in North America tend to have a lot of rules about housing that enforce a very
suburban vision of what a neighbourhood should look like and be. This includes zoning laws
that only allow single-family detached houses to be built in a lot of areas, plus other
miscellaneous rules like parking requirements and large minimum lot sizes. These rules might
seem like common sense if they’re all you’ve ever known but many of them are actually pretty
absurd when you step back and consider how often things work fine in other cities without
these rules.
One example of such a rule is Toronto’s restrictive approach to residential front
doors. In 1999, Canada’s largest city legalized homeowners having secondary suites in their
houses, which in most cases means a basement apartment. However, what they didn’t do
is allow these units to have their own front entrance, unless it could be hidden away under
a porch. In most cases, secondary suites were expected to have some other access, like from
the side.
This topic of front entrances came up in 2019 when the Planning and Housing Committee recommended
a change to the bylaw to allow front entrances on secondary suites by default. City council
debated this but ultimately upheld the restriction on the grounds that more front doors are a
threat to the stability, character, and feel of Toronto’s neighbourhoods.
Meanwhile, in Montreal, it’s extremely common for a building to have multiple front entrances.
They don’t even stop at two; lots of residential buildings here have three, four, six, and
even eight front entrances. You can find multiple front doors on more ornate residences built
for the wealthy, on more plain housing built for the working class, and everything in between.
They’re especially common in pre-war neighbourhoods but you can find post-war suburban variants
too.
If having even two doors on a residence really did such harm to the feel of a neighbourhood
then you might expect Montreal’s neighbourhoods to have a severe problem with character but
that’s not really the case. These neighbourhoods are among the most charming and interesting
parts of the city. There are things about Montreal that visitors often complain about,
like the bad roads or cold winters, but a lack of neighbourhood character just isn’t
one of those things.
These doors also serve a practical purpose that residents appreciate. Along with the
city’s iconic external staircases, multiple front doors allow small-scale multi-unit buildings
where each household has their own easy and independent access to the street, in addition
to usually having similar access in the back to a court, alley, or backyard. The external
staircases can be a little dangerous in the winter but in general this building style
creates a very livable kind of density that we talk about in more detail in another video
that we have on Montreal housing.
But not that far away in Toronto, City Council considers front-facing doors a big enough
threat to neighbourhoods that they legally restrict having even just two of them. From
a Montreal perspective, that’s kind of absurd. This is such a minor feature to restrict by
law—a second front door is not a major aesthetic or character change and it doesn’t really
stand out any more than normal variations in building material, like stone versus brick.
It changes the look of the house less than a garage does. The policy just comes across
as being based on the idea that renting is shameful and tenants should be hidden away,
regardless of whether a front-facing door is more convenient for the renter or more
practical given the construction of the house.
Some people might defend the Toronto policy by saying that multiple front doors work fine
in Montreal but they just don’t fit into the Toronto neighbourhood aesthetic. Setting
aside that the government probably shouldn’t be micromanaging minor aesthetic stylings
like that, this isn’t actually true. Toronto isn’t the city of plexes and plentiful front
doors that Montreal is, but it does have many neighbourhoods, especially in older parts
of the city, where two front doors are common due to a prevalence of semi-detached houses.
It would be surprising to hear someone visit these neighbourhoods in Old Toronto and genuinely
think to themselves that semi-detached homes somehow harm the neighbourhood mood.
In our experience these semi-detached homes or duplexes with two front doors are the most
you commonly see in Toronto, but we are aware of one residence in the city on Davenport
Road west of Christie with a Montreal-level of four front doors. If you’re going to
criticize this building’s look, the garages on the bottom stand out much more than the
doors do, but again nothing here is that much more shocking than the normal housing variation
you should expect to find in a city.
It’s hard to argue that cities should never place rules on housing, but in general people
should be more aware of what’s going on in other cities. If you want to ban or restrict
something, you should have to look to places where that thing is not banned and seriously
ask whether it’s a problem there. If multiple front doors work fine in Montreal, and they
even work fine on semi-detached houses in older parts of Toronto, they probably shouldn’t
be banned or restricted for basement suites in Toronto. Thanks for watching, and as always,
don’t forget to bike and subscribe.