Before I say anything more, I’m disclosing here that I’m an urbanist trained and based in Canada. I grew up in the U.S., but have lived in Canada for about twenty years. This includes multiple cities in multiple provinces and states within each nation-state.
So the following long take is a mix of qualified opinions and, as needed, qualified citations. Reader beware.
In the US there are lots and lots of 2 to 6 story apartments that is very common in the US but you just don’t see in Canada well out side of Victoria BC.
There are a couple of things to unpack here.
First is defining “apartment” scales: typically, one- and two-storey apartment developments and complexes are “low-rise”. Until not too long ago, “mid-rise” referred to apartment structures between three and maybe up to 12 storeys, with everything beyond that designated as “high-rise”.
In recent years, the planning profession have come to recognize apartment/condo housing structures between three and five-storeys as a missing link in what you’ve probably heard mentioned before. It’s called “the missing middle”. This “low-mid-rise” scale for many major North American cities, though not all, has been a blind spot in official zoning plans, which traditionally have specified limits on dwelling/structure capacity of developments based on “
floor-area ratio”, or
FAR.
For several decades after WWII, the priority was to develop an abundance of low-FAR housing — typically, single-family detached tract houses deployed in master-planned subdivisions which ringed a city centre and were segregated, by design and, principally speaking, by income bracket. It was rare to see call-outs for housing FARs in subdivisions to exceed 2 or maybe 2.5-to-1 — translated, that basically amounts to two-storey; two-storey plus basement; or two-storey-plus-loft structures.
For the most part, one could see an abundance of low-mid-rise apartments in both American and Canadian cities, but these were almost entirely constructed before 1940. Think of three- and four-storey “greystones” and “brownstones” — both the type with an entrance courtyard (and with a footprint of the structure, as seen from above, resembling a letter “C” and sometimes “L”, if located on a corner, with a rear-facing courtyard), as well as late 19th century walk-ups, like in Brooklyn and Philadelphia. There are also mixed-use brownstone buildings, usually under six storeys, built along commercial corridors prior to about 1940.
This former, pre-WWII style makes appearances in cities as
Los Angeles,
Toronto,
Seattle,
Minneapolis/St. Paul,
Chicago, Hamilton,
Winnipeg, and even central
Vancouver, as well as smaller cities on both sides of the border.
In fact, because so many low-mid-rise brownstones of the “C/L”-footprint were built in and around
Los Angeles during the 1920s and into the 1930s, it gave the city the distinction of, paradoxically, being a bad case of sprawl (as L.A. was built by stitching together a bunch of scattered villages and towns, via use of boulevards and highways, once the local petroleum industry and automobiles took off), yet also sporting among the greatest number of low-mid-rise apartments in the U.S. — making the city unusually efficient at building mid-density housing
at the time they were built than in other newer cities (that is: those cities founded after Jefferson’s
Land Ordinance of 1785 — the origin of most road grids of N-S and E-W cardinal orientation — or, basically any city established after about 1800, west of Appalachia).
But there’s
another style of low-mid-rise housing built before WWI which not only came about early, but are also specific to two North American cities:
Boston and
Montréal. Both cities, indisputably, have made excellent use out of limited geography by building contiguous blocs of three- and four-storey apartments, often with two external sets of staircases emerging from the front of the buildings. This style was derived from Glasgow in the late 1800s and was considered a smart way to build for colder climates.
Some American cities, like Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and also much of the desert southwest, meanwhile, eschewed low-mid-rise housing almost completely, instead later dropping in one- and two-storey apartment complexes built to resemble suburban tract housing: typically built with parking lot moats on private driveways and, occasionally, limited carport coverings for parking closest to the private, internal walkways leading to an apartment bloc).
* * *
Second is your confirmation bias.
In the U.S., only a few cities, prior to about 1995, were really taking on robust development of mid-rise
new construction of apartments, condos, and townhouses. (It was rare for new, low-mid rise developments outside of, say, Portland and Seattle.) This began to change after cities lost their industrial and manufacturing bases, leaving behind both multi-storey warehouses which would later get converted to pricey lofts, and the conversion of brownfield lands for new condo projects.
By the mid ’90s, it was clear the next place where people were looking to live was more inward than in the previous half-century, and a lot of cities scrambled to catch up and to convert. That is: cities saw potential in old industrial lands being be returned to earning property tax revenue, via retrofitted housing. Many of those became the low-mid rise dwellings one now sees more frequently in gentrified cities around the U.S. and Canada. For American cities which lacked them, their sudden appearance since 2000 has completely changed how those cities look today — even smaller cities like Kansas City, Little Rock, Birmingham, and Buffalo have several of these new-build low-mid rise condos.
Also, a distinctly American style of condo development, usually around five or six storeys (but often consuming long city blocks facing a commercial street), are the “fortress condos” to have popped up in several cities — most notably in Seattle (with
Capitol Hill and Belltown being huge, well, offenders in city planners granting those developments).
In cities like Halifax and Toronto, meanwhile, the target scale of housing these cities wanted to see built, ca. 1996–2004, were taller mid-rise buildings, up to twelve storeys, with “step-backs”, often from fifth floor and up. The step-backs were mandated to create a less imposing façade on the main streets they faced. But these developments were not generally the low-mid-rise of the “missing middle” being discussed today.
And yes, these days the “missing middle” is freaking out people who defend a highly inefficient style of housing, the single-family detached house, as developers are striving to meet updated city plans house more people in the city by increasing FAR allowances in places which, previously, kept them very low.
A way to do this is to buy disused one- and two-storey houses (either left sitting empty for years or the cost to renovate would far outweigh the value of the structure), and to re-purpose the lots for
three- and four-storey apartments or town homes which do run taller than the tallest of adjacent of the older, two-storey houses, but make much better use of that land and preserve access to core amenities (like groceries and fixed-rail transit stops).
But there’s this thing called NIMBY, and that’s a whole other conversation about two conflicting, irreconcilable principles which have made the current housing shortage so severe.
And well likewise there are lot and lots of mid and high rise apartments build in the 50s, 60s and 70s in Canada. It also not uncommon to see high rise residential in Canada in small communities of only 50,000 people or 100,000 people and cities of only 200,000 people to have many high rise apartments and witch is also not uncommon to plonked down high rise residential in low density suburb away from the down town area or urban core areas. And lot of these high rise residential are next to mall, park or major street or highway.
So there’s a whole thing about what you’re describing, and yes, I am well familiar with the phenomenon. To understand the logic behind why so many taller housing buildings were built in major and medium Canadian cities throughout the late ’60s to the mid ’80s, one must look at two factors.
The first was an anticipated demographic surge of baby boomers entering the housing market for the first time. Canada, more so than the U.S., rose to address this expected surge whilst also recognizing how many of the family-sized houses (some of those large estates in neighbourhoods like Toronto’s Annex), were quickly going empty as families aged out. Yet these emptying estates were still too expensive for all but the most well-to-do — even for ornate, turn-of-century houses which looked more like haunted houses — to afford. Many would end up abandoned.
Recognizing how boomers would typically be looking for one- and two-bedroom apartments, Canadian planners zoned for high-FAR housing along major corridors and developers began quickly building a lot of
higher-rise apartments — typically greater than ten storeys, and sometimes
as high as maybe 25 storeys. Although a few were built along side streets, most were built on major concession line roads. In addition, in the rush to build upward, many of the blueprints would get re-used multiple times within even the same city, often by the same developer, to cut costs. They were cookie-cutter in every way.
The second was a lot of cities, including Vancouver (I’m name-dropping that for a reason, hold tight), were building these high-rise towers along where municipal- and provincial-level transportation planners were foreseeing where they would be razing neighbourhoods full of large, but mostly dilapidated, semi-empty houses, to make way for expressways. For a time, many cities expected this to be the new way of city building, and zoned land for high-rises adjacent to potential, high-vehicle-use throughways. This idea was modelled after Le Corbusier’s utopian (but really, just plain dystopian)
vision of the modern city, ca. 1926.
But by the time Jane Jacobs left NYC for Toronto, there was strong backlash against this planning trend (one mirroring, in part, what was happening with the Eisenhower Interstate Highway system in the U.S.), as razing entire neighbourhoods and communities, typically non-white, absolutely shattered the social fabric and brought in a lot of airborne lead pollution.
In Toronto, one of those expressways was halted by 1971. To this day, one can still see several high-rise and tall mid-rise 1960s-era apartments built along Spadina Road, where the
Spadina Expressway was slated to be built…
…which today, same vantage, looks like this (in Google Earth).
[Fun fact: If you have ever watched
Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World with Michael Cera, the most distal end of that road in the second pic is actually a steep city park staircase — the same used to portray the demise of Lucas Lee as Evil Ex #2.]
The third, concentrated to specific developments, is the social safety net in Canada: since WWII, it has long been much stronger than in the U.S. — possibly in part because Canada never really had a New Deal; the Great Depression lingered a lot longer; and remedial, but comprehensive efforts to correct, including Tommy Douglas’s single-payer healthcare, to emerge after the war).
A minority share of new-build, high-rise apartments in nearly every major Canadian city, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, reserved allocated capital budgeting for social and community housing in ways which the U.S. generally did not.
After learning lessons on how
not to build social and community housing, cities like Toronto abandoned Ebenezer Howard-like “garden city” renewal projects cordoned off from the city, after recognizing the fundamental flaw with that approach to development, after Regent Park was built as an urban renewal initiative in 1948 (replacing unsafe row-housing tenements built in the 1880s, often without central plumbing).
So by the 1960s, high-rise social and community housing, connected to the city grid (and not removed from it), took shape in the form of high rises peppered around the cities. At time of build, high rises were also more cost-effective than, say, renovating old houses or finding dwindling tracts of greenfield (undeveloped) land far at the city’s peripheries. It was less expensive for a city or province to buy a parcel of land the size of a fraction of a city block and build upward, rather than to buy lots of land and build flat.
So I brought up Vancouver. Vancouver was the one major North American city to ban construction of expressways cutting through previously-developed neighbourhoods. It is why Highway 99, most of it the Sea-to-Sky Highway, turns into a boulevard around, I think, the Marpole neighbourhood, and doesn’t return to being highway until one gets north of the city.
Vancouver, like Seattle and San Francisco, deals with hard geographic constraints, so the rise, pun intended, of high-rise housing emerged there faster than other cities where the land constraints weren’t so pronounced.
So,
tl;dr: You
do see low-mid-rise apartments in Canada, in several of the major cities, with many of those built before WWII. You just need to know where in town to look and to know the style of construction used. You also need to keep a mental picture of roughly when certain scales of housing were being built and why they were being built like that.
Some one said the reason was public transit was one of the factors if it is low rise or high rise.
Before WWII, public transit and walking got you to work. Before WWII, trolleys and streetcars were common, even in smaller cities. The only housing just beyond the city’s outer limits, particularly in older cities, was either farm/ranch housing or housing built hastily to circumvent city by-laws and ordinances mandating central plumbing and sewage by a certain deadline. The bulk of automobile owners were folks who joined leisurely motoring clubs and were not, typically, working class.
The first “suburbs” were those areas served by streetcars and, in big cities, subways. It was effective, less cramped than the original city plans at time of founding, and offered convenient access to nearby amenities, like the once-ubiquitous corner grocery and corner laundromat.
Cities which grew substantially, prior to WWII, were the earliest cities to build mid-rise and early high-rise brick towers, including L.A., St. Louis, and Chicago.
WWII and what came after completely changed all of that.
Where if you are poor and low income in the US you are more likely to drive so they build more low rise apartments with set backs and parking lots.
I’m discussing the public transit infrastructure laid into place before WWII. Until, basically, the 1970s and 1980s, low-income households tended to be left behind in expressway-gutted, white-flight-drained cities, or relegated to old, rural housing in poor repair. From the 1950s to the early 1990s, the suburbs were being built for people in the middle class (the North American meaning of the term) or working class. This began to shift after the recession of the early 1990s and, in no small part, was linked to the shuttering of manufacturing and industrial activity.
Where in Canada if you are poor and low income you more likely to take city bus so they opt for more high rise apartments.
Sorry to be this way, but I already covered this above. Also, the relationship between wealth and the use of public transit in major cities is a poor metric. That is to say: a lot of comfortable and well-to-do people, including Bay Street types (that’s the Canadian Wall Street), will take the subway to and from the downtown “core”. Subways and surface public transit are still the easiest ways to get to major sporting events in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montréal.
Canada lacked a national-level Interstate highway or National highway funding, planning, and execution like that of U.S. cities. Canada largely missed
the established conspiracy of Standard Oil, General Motors, and Firestone, working together from 1950 to sway cities to rip out their public transit infrastructure to put in petroleum buses (whose routes, unlike fixed rail, could be moved around or yanked easily).
So Canada, missing all that mess, invested in their cities, post-WWII, in ways U.S. cities did not.
Cities like Vancouver maintained its electric trolley bus infrastructure; cities like Edmonton and Calgary dropped in light-rail lines in the early 1980s (where almost nowhere else in the U.S. — Portland and SFO excepted — was doing that); cities like Toronto and Montréal engineered their entire subway systems between 1954 and 1986; and Toronto, instead of retreating from streetcars, sought to replace them with a newly designed fleet to enter service at the end of the 1970s, when no other North American city was doing that.
Not all of the provincial and municipal highways planned for several medium- and larger Canadian cities were built.
There was also no way Canada could afford a robust national highway plan like the U.S., because it was too much capital to cover spans as long as the U.S., but serving only a tenth the population. So a lot of development in Canadian cities tended to look at extracting better uses for transit-served lands where, previously, razed houses (which were structurally sound, but no longer had families to fill them) and parking lots had once stood. And for those highways which were built federally, they are the Trans-Canada routes, some of them overlays with provincial highways — for which long stretches are, still, two-lane highways.
They go on to say high rise apartments can have better public transit than low rise apartments in different parts of the city. And because Canada is more culturally public transit than the US hey built more high rise apartments and now high rise condos boom going on.
Who is “they”? I’d really like to know. Cheers.
EDIT to add: While apartment housing heights remain an overarching topic here, there’s a
recent illustrated overview on the history of public high-rise housing in, specifically, New York City and its federally funded origins. (NYC is also its own creature in a number of ways unique to an American city.) The graphic illustration recap covers how and why disinvestment on capital upkeep of existing high-rise housing stock, coupled with partial privatization of that housing, precipitated a cascade of persistent shortfalls plaguing access to affordable housing in good states of repair to this day. It also touches on the aforementioned razing of communities for major expressways, but also underscores the community ties to emerge out of the need to not only keep their homes, but also to find new financial instruments for maintaining that public housing stock.
It’s a sidebar, but a worthwhile one to ponder along with the above I posted earlier.
