We Need to Talk About the “Missing Middle” 

Many people are taking issue with our definition of the missing middle (housing denser than detached homes but shorter than mid-rise apartments) but it's the original definition from Dan Parolek who coined the term in 2010: www.planetizen.com/definition/missing-middle-housing Other people have been suggesting that the missing middle refers to medium-sized units (2 to 3 bedrooms) or to the middle class or moderately-priced homes. It's possible other people have used the term in those ways, but that's not the norm in urban planning or housing policy circles from everything we've seen.

Another type of ' missing middle ' is the first 1-2 floors goes to commercial space like shops and restaurants while the floors above goes to residential. NYC has this in abundance.

While it might be prevalent in Canada, in the US many neighborhoods have zoning rules that strictly prohibit these types of buildings. In Atlanta, where I live, you can see older brick 3 story 6 unit apartments, but these are only in the older sections that are a bit more dense and relatively close in. The further out you go, the more restrictive the zoning gets.

The BC government just had a huge string of announcements from a broad legalization of the light density missing middle (4-6 plex) to development fee reforms, to the absolutely massive apartment allowance around transit infrastructure. Going to be an interesting decade coming up if this all goes through.

We need to discuss 'missing middle' in smaller towns too (like, under 50,000). Particularly winter/summer vacation spots and boom towns. It keeps them very car-dependent. Seems like things are changing in cities + suburbs but not further out.

I live in a 'missing middle' apartment building with 12 units, but its still hopelessly car dependent and the closest two grocery stores are both Walmarts, both 1.5 miles away with no sidewalk no bike lane and a bus that comes once an hour which I've never taken because the schedule in the bus stop is way too confusing.

It's not just number of housing units per building or number of stories, it's also population density and other things that make the neighborhood not car dependent, like nearby stores, walkability, bikeability, and access to public transit.

The biggest realization I've had from this video is that when people speak of the missing middle they usually mean low-density housing options like plex housing and rowhouses. Until now, I have always (falsely) assumed that it refers to the 5-story residential units (whether it's wall-to-wall, separated or in files) that make up a very large part of urban housing in some countries. Something like the standard 60s khrushchevka. This is what I usually associate with the terms "mid", "medium" or "middle". Seeing rowhouses and highrise apartments next to each other is the image the term "missing middle" evokes for me - but apparently that really isn't it. I guess this kinda shows how bad the term is at communicating what it actually wants to.

a) You'd probably find less "missing middle" in the US, especially in newer suburbs, and I think the term comes from the US. It's said that 75% of US urban land is zones for detached SFH only. b) What matters most is not what the housing stock is but how it _changes_ (or is allowed to change) in response to changing demand. Where missing middle is legal, SFH can turn naturally into somewhat higher denser forms of housing. Instead we get swaths of fossilized SF housing, and a limited number of inherently expensive high rises trying to pick up the slack. (Also, to be fair, a limited amount of "5 over 1" buildings; not sure where they'd fall.)

It’s a catch phrase in urban planning schools. But when looking back 5-10 years ago, these ‘Missing Middle’ are already existed or have been built more than we think, even in Midwestern US cities. You guys said it really well, the term is too broad. But if planners want to advocate for more low-rise/mid-rise apartment blocks, then they need to come up with better/more specific terms when communicating to the public.

I can't speak for Canada (I live in Southern California), but a lot of cracker-box 2-3 story apartment complexes were put up in the late 70s through mid 90s. These usually were clusters of buildings that would contain 6-8 units each in a large block with a pool and a few other amenities. That would be classified as "missing middle" under a loose definition, but is still not considered "urban" as these were usually tucked in R-1 neighborhoods and not close enough to enough amenities like grocery stores, theaters, and restaurants. In my neck of the woods, they started to turn it around a bit with the construction of 5-over-1 construction that usually had commercial/retail/restaurant on the 1st floor and housing on the upper floors. These were usually built in areas to revitalize downtown city cores. The latter construction would be the "missing middle" style of construction that urbanizes a place as opposed to the apartment complexes I first described. One creates a neighborhood, while the other is where you go to sleep and watch TV

Can you do a video on Vancouver’s new transit oriented development law?

We need a land value tax.

It's similar to car dominance. It's hard to miss cars on streets but easy to miss bikes and people.

Missing middle isn't just about the number of floors in a building, it's about the size and form of the actual units. 4 story studio apartments are still studio apartments. What people really mean by missing middle is pretty much just units with 3 or more bedrooms in anything but a detached house. The missing middle also isn't just missing because it's low in total supply, but because there is a major shortage of it in the current market. Even cities with abundant missing middle housing tend to have far less than people want of this housing type and the lack of land allocated to this housing type in land use bylaws and OCPs creates a very justified fear that it will get increasingly out of reach. Furthermore, the less urban you get, the more missing the missing middle tends to be. Even though Canada's major metro areas account for a huge portion of the housing supply, it's important to consider the impact of shortages in small and medium sized cities on trends in regional and national housing markets, where the missing middle is even more missing. Edit: Overall, I think this particular video isn't one of your best. You basically choose a bad definition of missing middle and then criticize the concept based on that bad definition. If you actually look at real cities on the scale of neighbourhoods, middle-density housing types and siteplans are conspicuously absent from many areas where they make obvious sense, mostly due to land use restrictions.

I'm an mtl resident love your video's!

That's a great explanation of the category, I didn't know it encompassed such a broad range of housing. How can we better promote a hybrid development of low-rise apartments and a structuring transit network for cities? Our current Quebec provincial politicians, probably not the only ones, seem to have no inclination to build transit for future generations. Why can't they understand that the era of car dependency was a mistake and that dragging our feet on the issue will only make things worse? Thanks for making videos like these, it's one of the best ways to change old mentalities.

Cities need to be walkable or a short ride by bicycle to stores, supermarkets, restaurants and jobs. Walking, running, bicycles, escooters, green open spaces, electric buses, electric commuter trains and trams are all parts of a good transportation system. Speak up for improved transportation options in your city. Every train station needs safe, protected places to park and lock bicycles. Children and older adults should be able to ride bicycles to work, school or for fun safely.

I think it would have been helpful to compare this data against cities of similar population size in countries that get it right. That share of missing middle may seem high, but ideally detached homes should be the rare exception in a city, not the rule.

Thanks for the nuance. One factor to consider is the impact of different building types beyond just density. There are also environmental impacts, construction costs, maintenance costs, etc. Those impacts per person are also important.

isn't the low rise cut off used here rather low as well? I have a vague recollection that apartment buildings in places like Paris, Barcelona etc are often (usually?) 5-7 stories high, rather than 4, and they still don't seem anything like 'towers'

Small scale density is the most powerful tool for maximizing the amount of housing per unit of money. It's in a sweet spot of low land use and low construction and maintenance costs, and by abandoning toxic residential-only zoning laws, they also minimize the need for transportation (both public transit and car-centric road networks). Mixed use zoning with low-rise apartment blocks is basically a magic bullet for affordable living, or at least close to it.

Land is the main culprit here in Canada. In Vancouver land is responsible for 90% of total property value. So the land area dedicated to each housing type (zoning) is the key. Most of “Missing middle” you showed is not new. In Vancouver most of law-rise condo buildings were built before year 2000. Yes, there are some newer ones, but the share of units is small. Townhomes and duplexes are common in Vancouver, but out of reach for the majority of residents. Even with all recent changes in regulation, law-rise (4-6 story) condo buildings are not allowed “as of right” on a majority (>80%) of Vancouver’s lots. Mixed-use buildings - not even in a policy pipeline.

Ironically the niceness of Toronto's lightweight missing middle makes it a hotbed for left nimbyism. Who wouldn't want the amenities of a dense-ish neighbourhood but also have a front lawn? I look on with envy at the big city things Montreal can do (pedestrianizing streets, investing in parks) that work electorally when there's a civic assumption that people _don't_ have their own backyards

Housing abundance means lower property values and lower rents. The government has incentivized people who have the means to invest in properties to provide rental stock. So they risked their capital to do so.

This reminds me of the post you made about population weighted density. The "middle" really has to be the geometric mean, not the arithmetic one.

north america can learn from the suburbs of great britain, single family row houses that are not too sprawling nor too dense as high rises and just enough for optimal public transport

this just shows cities/countries like to redefine their way out of fixing problems, no serious person would consider someone renting out their shitty basement to exploit some poor person into paying their mortgage for them as "the missing middle", but that's exactly the kind of thing a city would include in their census to make their city look better on a pretty graph without having to meaningfully make any changes

I blame the lack of density on car-addicted suburbanite NIMBYs like John Phillips of 790 KABC. You should make a video responding to him!

Great video! I grew up in one of the older suburbs of Montreal, and assumed that most people lived in single detached homes, until I looked at the census data and learned that almost 2/3 live in either apartment towers or so-called "missing middle" housing. The reason why I had the wrong impression is that the majority of residential sectors are single-detached homes, but even in those sectors there are attached homes, townhouses and duplexes sprinkled among the detached homes, so you do not really notice them. If 20% of the buildings in those areas are attached homes, townhouses or small duplexes with front and back yards, they may account for a third of the households even in predominantly single-detached areas.

I wonder how the stats would pan out if the graph measured how much land was taken up by each type of housing, as opposed to the number of households each type had.

I cannot tell you how much I appreciate this data-driven approach to understanding the problems in our housing market. I'd love to see more videos like this!

I think this may be a difference you've hit on between the US and Canada. In the US context, there absolutely are big cities where the "missing middle" is a serious problem, especially in the so-called "Sun Belt". Canadian cities and even suburbs seem much more accepting of townhouses and/or "attached single family homes" than do US cities and suburbs, outside of the usual "good urbanism" suspects. I also think cities in North America have been responding to the call for more middle-density housing for awhile now and I suspect that when the term was coined, the picture was less rosy! One last point: I still think there's a lot of value in replacing single-family houses with this type of housing. In the North American context, single-family houses are usually tremendously wasteful, often occupying very large lots (by international standards). They should be rare in large, expensive cities, but as your charts showed, they're often nearly half or more than half of the housing units in a city.

It's very much missing in most of US. However the wide adoption of 5-over-1s are slowly changing that. Unfortunately a lot of these are constructed cheaply/poorly, with minimum sound/vibration insulation between floors. It's literally worse than 100-yr old buildings in NYC. Concrete towers are better, of course.

This is indeed a frustrating topic, as many politicians nowadays will champion their new "missing middle" policy which only permits the lowest end of density while keeping in place all the restrictive height, setback, and parking requirements. The politicians pat themselves on the back for doing essentially nothing and the anti-housing activists get to say upzoning doesn't work. See: Vancouver, Victoria, Minneapolis.

At least where i live (a suburb near denver colorado) 78% of our homes are detahced single family. Townhouses and apartments are an extremely small percent. Not to mention all the missing middle housing is stuck next to loud traffic corridors

Outremont - Université de Montréal area has one the most spectacular architecture and dense middle housing with the best quality of life for families and students .

Interesting. I lived in Vancouver for 20 years, and watched the city become rapidly less affordable, mostly due to a lack of affordable housing. Some very wealthy areas on the West side of the city fought against any kind of missing middle housing, while those houses rose in value to ludicrous levels. A single family home that might have been $11,000 in 1960 is now worth in the $6-8 million dollar range. Insane. This is providing housing that will only cater to the very rich (not going to get any grubby worker bees living in these homes). I think the BC Government is on the right track, with much denser housing along the transit corridors, which hopefully will make more transit available as well as providing more housing options.

The correct unit of analysis is land, not households.

Wild how your videos always seem to be based on taking a common urbanist talking point and say "oh it isn't really a problem" by changing the definitions. So weird!

I bet the missing middle is more missing in the US.

I don't know about anyone else but when I talk about the missing middle, I'm referring to the percentage of urban and suburban land occupied by each housing type and the percentage of new housing being built in each category. Not the percentage of people living in a certain unit type. Currently, a huge percentage of land in many metro areas in Canada is monopolized by a small percentage of people and this locks away land that could be used to house far more. The only way to currently accommodate significant population growth in a metro area is with sprawl and/or in highrises. The missing middle part is important because many of us don't want to live in a highrise, so if most land is occupied by either highrises or detached houses, it pushes people into sprawl. They see that as the only alternative to an uncomfortable shoe box. And even for the people who are willing to live in highrises, having most of a city's residential land off limits pushes up prices and reduces selection. But it's easier politically to build multi-unit housing in lowrise neighbourhoods if that housing is smaller and less imposing. But overall, if we don't deal with the land percentages issue we'll end up in a sort of housing apartheid where a smaller percentage of land downtown and in highrise nodes if forced to hold an ever increasing percentage of residents since as the population grows nearly all new residents will be forced to live there. The takeaway being that fully detached houses just waste too much land for a significant percentage of a major cities to dedicated to them. So we shouldn't be using civic laws to reinforce that usage pattern.

I keep saying you can have lovely walkable suburbs with mostly fully detached family homes if you're happy to have double or triple story houses on 7m / 23ft wide by 28-35m / 92-115ft deep lots, with mostly narrow ~10-12m / 33-40ft wide 30kph / 20mph shared streets. I don't even think you need any high-rises if you don't want them - but tight dense planning with a minimum of 2 stories is really a requirement within 10 minutes walk of PT hubs, and you gotta heavily de-prioritize car space. SO much room is taken up by roads and parking that could be another house within walking distance of PT.

What’s “missing” until recently was the **legal right** to build more dense housing **WITHOUT** having to go through a costly and lengthy zoning change or variance in most of the US and Canada. This left easy to build single family housing or lucrative towers as the most viable options for developers. You also seem to be conflating the missing middle problem with issues of *urban vs. suburban design*. Large lot sizes, parking minimums and other wastes of scarce land are major issues onto themselves. Yes, it’s possible to build limited amounts of apartment blocks in the suburbs **as long as you waste a lot of space with turf lawns and mandatory parking** to bring the density down to a NIMBY-acceptable level.

Last week you commented that Canadian suburbs are generally denser than U.S. suburbs. That strongly suggests to me that Canadian suburbs have more “missing middle” housing than Canadian ones. Some American suburbs have low rise apartments and townhouses, but many do not. You could get a sort of proxy for missing middle housing in the U.S. by adding up the statistics for single family attached units up through apartment buildings with 10-19 units. Few of those are taller than four stories. Your critique of the term missing middle conflating many different types of housing is valid.

I'm sorry, but looking purely at large metro regions in Canada is simply not enough to say there isn't really a "missing middle." Try comparing mid-size cities in Canada and the US to mid size cities in Asia or Europe. I've been to towns in Italy with less than 20k residents that have more mid-rise buildings than cities in the US of 100K+ people. Obviously the big metro areas of NA are going to have a decent proportion of mid-density housing. That's where housing supply pressure is greatest. So this analysis completely misses the point.

I feel like semi-detached homes should not count toward the "Missing-middle". Also, I feel like missing middle or even high-rise houses are not very urbanist without mixed-use development. I think many Canadian cities are identifying somewhat but mixing uses is not happening or happening at a much slower pace. So we just end up with the same problems but with denser housing. Although many places in North America have made commendable strides toward densifying their cities it is not enough. Reducing minimum lot sizes, and setback requirements, getting rid of parking requirements and allowing mixed uses are all needed to fix North American cities. Any of these things by themselves will not solve anything.

Speaking from a US perspective, not Canadian... Let's say the zoning laws were reformed, and the parking minimums eliminated. How many people really want to live in a suburban mid-rise/high-rise apartment where you need a car, but have nowhere to park it? Changing zoning laws and building greater density isn't going to make public transportation any more reliable or less dangerous.

From an Italian standard 3 or 4 stories condominiums are not “middle”, but they would be perceived quite low density. In my opinion middle is something between 6 to 10 stories complexes, since if I think about the peripheries of the biggest cities here the average is maybe 10 stories with a few buildings with 15 or even 20 stories (sort of mini skyscrapers).

I am always grateful for thoughtful urbanist content like yours. Thank you. However, my concern with using this definition, regardless of who penned it, is that it seems to fail to get at the basic concerns which are supposed to underpin the concepts that give it its name. The story of the loss of medium density housing, what that loss means for people, and how to fix the problem are all clearly intended to be implied by the term and are typically what those using the term are focused on. If it’s not, then why include the word “missing” at all? Middle housing typology would certainly be clearer and more conceptually concise. Data on housing typologies is not necessarily relevant for assessing whether housing areas have a medium population density, or, whether the built form is able to foster a sense of community and well-being like middle density housing is supposed to have done in the past. My point is, that the term is intentionally engaging in rosy retrospection as a call to action, a call to return to a former and, implied, better way of doing housing. While I agree increased density and public transport are likely to be the answers in most cases, it seems to me that trying to litigate exhaustively exactly which housing types in all circumstances can achieve medium densities in advance demonstrates an unintentional and unhelpful inherent bias. A bias that is closer to a re-working of the problematic mindset of mid-twentieth century urban planning, rather than reflecting an attempt to replace that mindset with a more contemporary, balanced, wholistic, and contextual approach. Trying to think of every eventuality and applying your solution universally seems to be repeating the same mistakes as the Robert Moses generation, it opens proponents up to related criticisms, and is about as likely to miss issues which turn out to be important later, but which were dismissed as peripheral or unimportant in the moment. Ultimately, we don't care about housing typology, we care if the results are good for residents, the neighbourhood, the city, and the region at large. What does it matter if an individual site is a Japanese-style single-detached house with no garden or parking taking up the whole plot, or, if it's a duplex with granny suites, provided it achieves the aims of restoring what is missing in missing middle housing. The fact of the matter is, a zoning ordinance cannot exhaustively capture every possibility and eventuality satisfactorily, and trying to do so unnecessarily constrains the possible solutions which can be presented for a given problem. Limiting the term to one only useful for conversations about zoning ordinance amendments seems odd, superficial, and self-defeating; especially when the housing that is misissing was built before zoning ordinaces existed. This is why I think those of us interested in missing middle housing might instead focus on the comparative urban densities of specific communities within chosen cities, how best cases are achieving their aims, yes what sorts of housing is present and positively contributing, how/why that is the case, what the quality and cost of public services like public transport is for those communities, the relative health of residents, and the overall vibrancy and inter-connectedness of those communities. We should also be keener to learn from other countries which do this better than we do, how and why their approach works for them, and seek to promote the adaption of such approaches to our own unique circumstances. Self-reflection certianly is important, but it also has quite profound diminishing returns when it comes to new learning. I would have loved to have seen an example of an outstanding neighbourhood from a Canadian city, perhaps one in either Vancouver or Montreal, compared with outstanding examples of neighbourhoods in say Barcelona and Tokyo, with analysis on how and why urban planning is leading to different results.

The Missing Middle isn’t really missing in Canada. The USA has a much larger problem, particularly with cities that developed largely after WWII.

Good point, but I think its called the missing middle, not because there isn't a lot of it, but because we need so much more of it. As an aside, there needs to be more research as to what construction type actually provides the lowest cost per square foot for the life of the building, factoring in land cost, construction cost, maintenance costs, and other servicing costs like heat, ac, parking, security, etc. I'm guessing in most metro areas, a 3 story frame building that does not require an elevator or second stairwell or HVAC system with no parking and no doorman is actually the most affordable housing we can build, but this may change due to local conditions, particularly land prices.

It definitely still feels missing if you count by land area, and that's not worthless. Land use is a critical component of sustainability.

I live on the Plateau in Montreal which is probably the missing middle paradise. Sadly as soon as you get out of Montreal the missing middle is missing again except for some nearby suburbs.

Has anyone ever wondered if one big reason Canada and US have had high standards of living historically is our low populations relative to the rest of the world? It certainly seems like quality of life decline has come at the same time as large increases in population. It's not the fault of urban planners from the last 60 years that immigration policy has radically changed in the last 10 years.

"So many people in under regulated capitalist America are saying the middle class is missing. They're wrong, and we have examples from our more socialist country to prove it." 😂😂

5:06 - The row housing in Kanata is not walkable. Two decades ago, these were the only properties blue collar could afford due to the garbage zoning and density regulations in the city center. This isn't a case of effective policy.

IMHO, Not Just Bikes lumps Canada and the United States into the same category. But Canadadian cities are way better than housing

When I think "missing middle", I don't count apartment complexes that contain more than 20 units...like "post apartments". I'm thinking of single buildings that contain anywhere from 2 to 10 units under one roof. Not the new generic apartments they keep constructing all over the place that look exactly the same.

One of the things that I noticed when moving to Vancouver, BC from the USA was how basement suites and laneway houses are permitted in basically all so-called “single family” zones. Some US cities are only now belatedly playing catch-up in this regard. This is one of those areas where the difference between US and Canadian urbanism really manifests.

I get that its important to build these more compact housing for cities for a ton of reasons. But dam that just seems miserable to live in, cramped so close to so many people.

I grew up in a four story apartment building, and I live in a 15 story apartment building now, and those feel very similar to me and should imo be in the same category

I feel like the missing middle is more the feel of the area like the feel of a "Main Street" seems to me what the missing middle is.

Another nuanced and informative take from this channel! Keep up the good work you two 🚴

Love this video! Catchphrases are great so long as we remember they are just that and don’t forget to have a more detailed conversation about what we actually want.

I was surprised in recent trip to Vancouver and Toronto on how fast it goes from downtown high-rises to single family homes. According to your data, it seems like Vancouver is not too far from Montreal, guess I didn't go in the right neighborhoods.

Good video. I think the "missing middle" concept most specifically applies to the US, like I first heard about it when Seattle's Sightline Institute published a map of all the duplexes, triplexes, low rises etc. in Seattle that were in single-family-only zones. The "missing" was more about them missing from new construction, AFAIK, but that was also in 2010 and things are changing mostly for the better!

I do think that even Vancouver is a bit low on ‘middle’ density compared to European or East Asian cities.

Mark Sutcliffe my behated I want Watson back...

LOL to Mark Sutcliffe's NIMBY clip @6:37. In fairness I'm not sure NIMBY's are totally to blame in this case. There are legitimate financial issues with this project.

Ultimately I think the 'missing middle' is borderline useless as a discreet policy goal. It'd be like specifically targeting 7 story apartment buildings as something we needed more of in a way that's somehow unique compared to 6 or 8 stories. I think the main driver here is the perception issues brought up in the video and a sense of impatience with how slow things are changing in aggregate set against the visual changes of things like Brentwood sprouting up so quickly. The form of the 'missing middle' is entirely replicable in the shape of a podium on which you also locate a tower allowing for the ground-level to fill out the lots to whatever minimum setback is allowed and make townhomes or the like with individual entrances while the 'roof' of those townhomes can provide a raised outdoor amenity space for the tower. Targeting any less density then the maximum achievable is crippling our ability to achieve the actual important goals ( bringing prices down and ameliorating homelessness ) in favor of what those who dwell in SFDs might find more familiar and comfortable and what others hope to be some weird silver bullet to solve all our problems.

To me you're not really entering the conversation of "middle" until you get rows of stacked units with minimal setbacks and limited yards and parking areas. ie: Less than 2 parking spaces per unit (including a garage as parking rather than as an attached self-storage facility). "Very low" density needs to be used for 1 housing unit per 1/4 acre.

Another missing part of housing is small/modest detached homes, such as the small single family homes built directly after WWII that made it very affordable for families to own homes. If you look up the statistics of average home size by squares footage in the US since 1945, it has gone up drastically, this is directly correlated with average home prices too.

I live in a duplex right now, but you can tell that it's built in a way that makes it easy to convert it back and forth between a duplex or a larger single family home. This is in an older neighborhood a few blocks from downtown, and I feel like when I look at new construction, they have duplexes but not the kind that have this kind of flexibility. From a home-buyer perspective, whenever I look at buying a home, I always get advice that I should go for a bigger 4-bedroom house around $300K instead of a $180k 2-bedroom home because it will be a better investment in the long run, even though that would be a huge mortgage for me, the $60k required for a 20% down payment is not realistic for me to save up in the near term, and I'm single with no kids so 4 bedrooms is just way too much space. If I bought the duplex I live in now, I could rent out the other half, only using the space that I need and paying down more principal, and then expand into the other half of the building once I start a family and actually need the space. Then once the kids are grown up, either they can live in the other unit for cheap so they can still live close while still having their own space, or if they want to live somewhere else then the other floor can still be rented out again. And at that point in life the mortgage should be mostly paid for, so the motivation of the land lord would be less about maximizing the property as an investment and more about having an amenable tenant and either finishing off the mortgage, or supporting someone's retirement. From a market perspective, it adds more short term flexibility in housing supply too. If rent prices are going way up, then someone who had been using one of these duplexes as a single family home could be incentivized to reduce their living space a bit to rent out the extra unit, which could add an extra housing unit to the market without any renovating or new construction necessary.

Its missing everywhere else though, outside of these bigger cities. its an obvious given theres a lot more in these bigger cities. the point is its missing in smaller cities and towns. And for the case of most american cities, it is indeed missing. you need to look at places outside of the biggest cities to see it.

Semis shouldn't count. Townhouses can have a significant range... 24' wide with no basement apartment or 16' with one?

seems like what's missing here is mixed-use

lol so NJB was wrong about this too?

Wait a minute. Are you saying that Canadia defines a duplex as two vertically stacked dwelling units or is that just how the majority of them are built? In the USA, a side-by-side arrangement is the most common, but there's no definition of which I'm aware that excludes stacked units or that treats the two types differently.

For a while I needed to make weekly trips out to the suburbs. [Medical reasons. I have a duplex 2 miles from downtown, where I work.] I am seeing *a lot* of mid-rise apartment complexes being built. My city also eliminated the single family houses only zoning, so infill development is also getting denser. One problem still remains ... most of the new housing stock is labeled as "luxury housing". It doesn't seem truly high end, but more like "if the builders add some minor features, they can charge more rent". So there is not nearly enough housing stock for lower income households. And those suburban 5 over 1 buildings ... you still need a car to get anywhere. They're right next to the highway, but there's no transit other than "every half hour, weekdays only" bus service. No other transit in the planning stages, either. When looked at from an economic view, there still is a missing middle. There's plenty of housing for those who can afford "luxury homes", the very poor can get assistance and live in less desirable areas, but there's nothing for those who want a decent, safe, affordable place to live.

Great video. You’re delivering the best content about housing. So many people just keep saying that we need middle density housing but don’t really know what that means. Thank you for answering and delivering a great explanation. I’d love to see a video about what affordable housing actually means. Are those tiny houses? Houses subsidized by the government? Houses built by the government or owned by them? Housing for low/no income people? I live in Montreal too and I’m seeing a lot about this in the news lately. Like how new buildings of some sizes must include a number of affordable units in the project. What the hell does that mean? Adding a 1k/month rent unit in the middle of a luxury condo with average of 3k/month? How the hell would they do that? It just doesn’t seem logical to me.

I'm an American from Lexington, KY living in Huntsville, AL. A lot of our medium-sized cities tend to lack high-rises, but we do have a lot of low-rise apartments, maybe mid-rises downtown. The missing middle is between single-family detached homes and low-rise apartments. Also, apartment complexes tend to have large surface parking lots because no matter where you are, you're expected to personally own a car. This dilutes density quite a bit, and it makes low-rises feel just as unnatural and isolating as high-rises. That being said, I can think of 3 separate townhouse developments across the Huntsville area despite not knowing the area all that well. I think we could do better, though. Huntsville rents are skyrocketing with all the employers and yuppies (like me) moving here.

Missing middle? What about missing entry level? In 30. I cannot afford to rent or own a home. I’m educated enough that this should not be the case but I just cannot find employment in the thing I’m most educated in. The economy is broken for anyone not already in a career….

In Vancouver at least, it feels like what a lot of people mean when they say "missing middle" is not necessarily just anything in between SFHs and above 6 stories... they seem to mean mid-rise apartments, like anything from 6-20 stories or so. "Dense housing" that isn't tall towers, but also isn't just a 5-over-1 at highest that wastes potential density (seriously, seeing some 3-4 storey developments going up in prime locations these days, it feels like they'll have to be torn down within a decade or two to increase density... they're just too small for what we should be doing right now). We have a lot of low-rise apartment buildings that are 3-6 stories, and then we have a lot of tall towers going up that are 30 stories or more. But not a whole lot in the middle. This is our "missing middle". But it looks like the new provincial TOD requirements for MetroVan around rapid transit stations is gonna start adding some more 8-20 story developments, so we might start filling in some of that middle soon.

Thanks for analyzing Richmond, that was really interesting to me as I grew up here and now live in one of the densest neighbourhoods in the city. It's very easy to feel that the density isn't very high in Richmond as a whole, so it's very interesting to see that middle density housing, particularly low-rise apartments and townhomes make up as much of the housing as they do. It totally makes sense to me that of course it doesn't take as much land use of higher density housing to make up the same number of units, that's kind of the point - but it's still interesting to think about considering how much land *is* used by single family housing, and how you don't have to go very far to find the beginning of SFR territory where nothing else really exists. I tried to map out the impact of the new BC housing legislation here, just roughly comparing distances, and it doesn't really feel like it's going to change all that much in Richmond, except perhaps in Steveston. So where do we fail as a city? I think our biggest housing boom (by land area) happened at a period of highly auto-oriented development, we have a very coarse grid leftover from when most of Richmond was large farm plots, and winding streets within them (from master planned suburban SFR development) that are not so easily used as calm streets for cycling because of how indirect they are, and it's hard to get improvements on arterial streets - impeding the four lanes that are already there is politically difficult, and taking away street parking where that's a thing is also hard to do. Much of our commercial is also in the form of strip malls, outside of the larger malls and mixed use development in the city centre. We probably have a lack of "missing middle" neighbourhood commercial, a large amount of the city's land has really no reason for anyone to go there unless they live there. All things considered, I still like it here. I think it's very underrated. Being very flat and having nice dyke trails is actually great for cycling, you can probably do shopping by bike almost anywhere in Richmond because the distances are not bad at all, the infrastructure just isn't quite there yet and the pace of improvement is somewhat slow when compared with Vancouver. I know you guys don't really appreciate having to ride on the side of arterial roads without any bike lanes or anything and neither do I.

Isn't Edmonton bigger than Ottawa in any way it's now measured?

My city is over 60% rentals. What do we learn from this? Not enough. We have quite a few duplex and 4-plex buildings. Still not saying much. There are whole neighborhoods of apartment complexes (usually 2 or 3 stories). None of this describes the overlying problem of land use. In my city we have food deserts, asphalt oceans (parking), limited bus lines with long intervals, and strip malls and shopping centers with more asphalt. We have over 30 parks...alk have parking lots. The problem is we're a car-centric society where cars have more rights and privileges than people. Access to basic goods and services are required to have high parking mandates. And a huge portion of our city has wide (unshaded) streets, boulevards, and stroads. The problem is the car dependency. Looking at the distribution of parks, it strikes me that we should be designing just the opposite--make most of the city a network of nature with islands of human ventures. Then we would be focusing on the distance between our homes and access to all human activities (except single-occupant cars).

I've never heard term 'missing middle' being reffered to housing of less than 3 or 4 stories. Like, you've shown a city panorama, and there was nothing of it. Just threes, and at some point skyscrappers, no 5 or 10 story buildings were seen, only skyscrappers. The term is wide indeed, but examples of MM you've shown here are just "single family house but with wall connected to another", or "single family house but with smaller grass area".

It's all about affordable housings at convenient locations, not the height of buildings. If we had a technology to build 10km tall buildings to solve the housing crisis, then just build them. Btw we actually already have such technology, which is called transit oriented development where the "buildings" extend horizontally, not vertically, while keeping convenient access to the city centers.

If you want to look up the housing composition of your city (unfortunately, Canada only), type it in here: www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/dp-pd/prof/index.cfm?Lang=E Under "Household and dwelling characteristics", you'll see the number of households in detached homes, the number of households in mid/high-rise buildings, and then everything in between.

It would've been interesting to have Edmonton in this comparison, and I actually don't understand why you don't, considering that it's essentially the same size as Ottawa and Calgary (Edmonton proper actually overtook Ottawa for 4th largest city in 2023, and the CMA overtook Ottawa-Gatineau for 5th largest). It is the only major city in Canada that banned parking minimums, back in 2020, and it is already showing the difference in new developments built and proposed since then. It also has the densest residential neighborhood in Alberta (Oliver) and most of it is actually comprised of walk-ups, as well as some other central neighborhoods, like Old Strathcona. At the same time, it's been building denser suburbs than most other Canadian cities, with smaller lots, required setback and the most relaxed single family zoning out of all major Canadian cities. Most subdivisions built since 2010 have densities higher than that of Richmond, with the vast majority of the housing being low-rise apartments and townhomes, and most detached houses being "duplexes". It is one of the reasons why it is so much more affordable than any other major city in the country, despite being one of the fastest growing, and having the second highest income. It also approved a new zoning bylaw in 2023 that pretty much reduced zoning to 3 types, removed a lot of barriers to infill development and adding higher density and mixes use to previously very restricted areas. Y'all are missing out on reporting on one of the Canadian cities that is doing the most to improve and modernize, and even if results might not appear significant in the short run, in the long run it'll likely not only help the city maintain affordability, but also improve the quality of life substantially, especially when thinking about a more urban lifestyle.

Just a little criticism but i think your analysis here is flawed. The first graph you present for your argument shows that many people live in "missing middle" housing, however this fails to capture the nature of bad land use. In Surrey BC something like 75% of the population lives on just 25% of the residential land. What this shows os that a majority of the land in the city is occupied by SFH. The question we ask shouldn't be: what percentage of people live in missing middle housing? But should rather be: what percentage of land is used for missing middle housing?

Interesting analysis and good video. I think I am confused by the critique and I will apologize as I may not be aware of how the concept has been interpreted in different municipalities across Canada. I appreciate that the form of Canadian cities has an intimate relationship with density. It's worth exploring and celebrating this fact in many cases. I think that the use of the term "missing middle" (and it's extension to townhouses and semis as well as multiplexes and low-rise apartments) was related to frustration with zoning regulations across North American cities that in many cases would have made a lot of the existing building stock in Canadian and US Cities illegal to replicate. I had understood the concept to recognize the existing varied housing stock and that that the variation in the existing housing stock was part of the critique that it leveled at the regulatory framework that at that time would not permit the same variety. In Toronto, I think the discourse has always understood the importance of density broadly - of old Parkdale cictorian apartments, post-war apartments in the Annex and of streetcar suburb semis and townhouses in Toronto's inner suburbs. The issue that pushed "missing middle" forward in the discourse in the 2010s was related to post-amalgamation zoning restrictions where small scale developers in York began to notice that the new City's new zoning and Official Plan wouldn't allow the triplexes that had long existed (and been permitted under the 1980s York By-law) to be newly constructed without overcoming significant regulatory hurdles. And in North York in 2015, it took as long to approve a townhouse as a tall building and NIMBYs would mount significant opposition at public meetings, leveraging the wording of the existing By-laws. Over time in Toronto and other cities, it has become far less politically contentious to build townhouses as the focus of NIMBY opposition has shifted to multiplexes and low rise apartments and as public support for housing has increased. I recognize that development outcomes in suburban municipalities in the GTHA were a bit different over this same period (though still often encountering some opposition), lots of "executive towns" and such forms were often approved through zoning By-law amendments and subdivisions applications. I think it's worth defending the original conception of the idea of "missing middle" while acknowledging a need for its evolution after a decade of relative success as an organizing principle in political discourse. I think it is also worth celebrating, as you have in this video, the complex and varied built form of Canadian cities while advocating for nuanced and varied approaches to building the Canadian cities of tomorrow.

Are you lumping Toronto, Oakville, Mississauga, Burlington and Hamilton together?

I live in a "missing middle" house in Toronto and it makes everything much more accessible with walking and we have enough space for a family, without being in a cramped tower. Because in so many places the "middle housing" is truly missing, people think that it's either a suburban single family house or a cramped tower. They don't realize medium density even exists. After growing up in a suburb and then moving to a medium density home, I could NEVER think of moving back to the suburbs to raise my family.

I guess what’s actually “missing” is the type of granular, small scale missing middle mixing in with other housing types and commercial uses that define great neighborhoods of Montreal or the Toronto streetcar suburb. An auto-dependent Sun Belt apartment complex would be, I guess, missing middle in the context of this data, but is definitely not the building typology the internet urbanism movement is yearning for.

Row housing in calgary is separated from condos. And row housing is up this year 40% from last year. Was just announced data from CMHC.

I'm not an urban planner or an architect, but I'm going to guess (before watching the whole video) that the North American 'middle', rather than 'missing' is too small, specifically too low. You see 3- and 4-storey buildings with a handful of apartments in them, but not so many 6- to 8-storey blocks with, say 4 flats on each floor. These slightly taller, but still not tower block-sized, buildings are the absolute backbone of the housing stock in Europe. Come to any city and even many smaller towns in Spain, and the default type of urban construction has commercial premises on the ground floor, maybe a floor of office space above that, and then four to six floors of residential property above that. Newer buildings will usually have a couple of floors of underground parking below it all (if geologically and urbanistically appropriate). I don't know much about North America, really, but I think they tend to be more into the suburban living model of detached houses in the suburbs. They do the same in the UK (which I do know well) and it is disastrous for communities, affordability, small business, and the environment. It seems completely insane to me that people think that they need an overpriced plot of land miles from the city to live a good life, often with few services nearby and increasingly built on flood plains. They will eventually learn to build more vertically, but they defy all logic!

The missing middle should be 5-8 storey buildings on the main streets, at least in Toronto it is. 39' height restrictions in the core of the city has killed development. Massive development charges, 5% land transfer taxes, and crazy NIMBYS have kept smaller more intimate family buildings to flourish on the main streets.

…additionally, when it comes to planning, density isn’t everything. Townhomes, such as those in the Metro Van suburbs of Surrey and Langley, often create road networks worse than exclusionary detached home zones. This defeats the purpose of the “missing middle”, since it creates car-oriented subdivisions where people all need cars and their parking spaces.