Part IV — Who pays · Chapter 16

Land Use, the Slowest Lever

Working chapter of Why can’t Toronto move? — the report’s summary page uses only claims that passed our receipt check. Figures below marked ⚠️ are still in the re-verification queue, labelled honestly rather than hidden. How that works: check our work.

Land use is the deepest lever under everything else this report describes — and in 2025, at the exact moment the evidence pointed hardest toward using it, the province pulled two of its strongest levers back.

Every fix discussed so far in this report — faster buses, dedicated lanes, better fares, new funding — operates on top of a fixed built form: how many homes and jobs already sit within walking distance of a station. Land use sets that built form. It determines whether a transit line has enough riders in its catchment to justify running it every five minutes instead of every twenty, and whether a trip to the corner store requires a car in the first place. It is also the slowest lever by a wide margin, because it plays out at the scale of individual neighbourhoods and individual rezoning fights rather than a single vote or budget line — which is exactly why it tends to get less political attention than a subway announcement, even though the research base suggests it may do more per dollar spent.

Toronto keeps getting the sequence backwards. Compare it with Metrotown in Burnaby, built directly on the Vancouver region's first SkyTrain line. There, the land-use designation and the rail investment were planned together from the 1970s: the town centre was zoned for towers because the transit line was coming, not after it arrived. By the 2021 census, Metrotown's transit mode share to work reached roughly 42% area-wide and 53% in the census tract immediately next to the station — among the highest in the entire region. Vancouver's Cambie Corridor, along the Canada Line, follows the same pattern: a 30-year plan, adopted alongside the transit investment, aiming to more than double the corridor's population and add over 30,000 homes, with the city still approving further rezonings under that plan as recently as October 2025. Toronto's own transit-oriented development program typically runs in the opposite order — a line gets announced and funded provincially, station-area planning studies follow, sometimes years later, and the underlying zoning around many of these "station areas" remains low-rise until a site-specific rezoning is filed and fought, often through an appeal process, one project at a time. The research base both cities draw on is identical; what differs is sequencing, land control, and who actually holds the zoning pen when the transit commitment is made. Part of the reason Toronto can't simply copy Hong Kong's or Tokyo's model — where the rail operator itself owns the land around its stations and captures the value directly — is structural, not a policy choice: those models rest on land-ownership positions built up over a century or more that Toronto's transit agencies never held and cannot now recreate. Toronto's own version, run through Infrastructure Ontario as a separate landowner-developer, splits the job of building the line, zoning the land, and capturing its value across three institutions with three different mandates — which is a harder coordination problem by design than a single operator with one balance sheet.

Then, in 2025, the one lever the evidence says works best got weaker, not stronger. Two changes matter here, both provincial, both landing the same year. First, inclusionary zoning: Toronto's original 2021 by-law was building toward 22% affordable units by 2030 with a 99-year affordability commitment inside station areas. A provincial regulation in force from May 2025 capped that province-wide at a maximum of 5% of units and a maximum 25-year affordability period — and a further regulation that took effect in January 2026 exempted any development application filed before July 2027 from the requirement entirely. Second, and more directly relevant to ridership: Toronto's push to legalize "missing middle" housing — fourplexes, sixplexes, small walk-up apartments, the building types dense enough to matter but small enough for local builders to deliver quickly — stalled at exactly the scale that matters. Citywide fourplex permission has been in force since 2023, but when Council took up sixplexes in 2025, it approved them as-of-right in only a handful of central wards, leaving roughly sixteen more suburban wards — many of them sitting directly inside station-area catchments — to opt in individually rather than receiving the permission automatically.

This matters because the research on what actually moves ridership — density, land-use mix, and especially how close jobs and destinations sit to a station — consistently points toward exactly this kind of small-to-mid-scale, fast-to-build housing as the highest-leverage, lowest-political-cost move available: it works with existing neighbourhood opposition patterns rather than against them, and it doesn't require the years-long assembly and financing that a single tower does. It is also the one move in this whole chapter that Toronto's own reform agenda had already identified as the top-ranked, most-deliverable land-use lever — and it is the one the province chose to dilute rather than expand, in the same year it also capped how much affordability a growing station area can require.

Not everything moved backward. Toronto's 2021 removal of minimum parking requirements — one of the first North American cities to do this citywide rather than only downtown — is now showing measured results: average resident parking built per unit fell from just over one space in 2016 to roughly a third of a space by 2022, and has held there since, with the reduction sharpest in the areas already best served by transit. That is a real, working example of the same underlying logic — remove a built-in subsidy for driving, and building form shifts on its own, without a public dollar spent forcing it.

The honest read on this chapter: Toronto's planners are working from the same evidence base as Vancouver's, and know what the research says works. What differs is sequencing — zoning still tends to follow the transit commitment instead of leading or matching it — and, as of 2025, political direction: the one reform most likely to compound with every dollar this report's other chapters propose spending on faster buses and better funding just got smaller, not bigger.