Street Fight

City council’s big swing came in May of 2023. North America’s fastest-growing metropolis, Toronto desperately needed more housing—and a lot more variety in that housing—if it was going to accommodate existing residents and absorb the more than 250,000 people moving into the city annually.

The problem: Toronto has single-family homes hogging prime square footage on residential streets. It has condos and apartment towers dominating some of the more densely populated areas. What’s missing is a middle option: low-rise walk-up buildings with multiple units—a form of housing that was popular here in the mid-20th century but has fallen out of favour. So, after more than three years of holding public forums, hosting meetings and analyzing survey results, council finally voted: yes, it would allow new duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes to be built across Toronto and, crucially, in single-family strongholds like High Park, Rosedale and the Beaches.

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The initiative was part of a larger push called Expanding Housing Options in Neighbourhoods. The idea was to encourage gentle forms of density by allowing mixed residential and retail along major streets and making it easier to build laneway houses, garden suites, stacked townhouses and multiplexes in established residential areas. In zoning parlance, these buildings could now be erected “as of right,” meaning they complied with new building codes and zoning by-laws and could be approved instantaneously, cutting down on irritating delays. Within 18 months, 452 multiplex permits were issued, netting 726 new housing units. It was a small but necessary step in a city where the vacancy rate sits at a mere three per cent (five to seven per cent is considered healthy for an urban centre).

This past summer, city council handed down another approval: multiplexes of up to six units could be built in nine of the city’s 25 wards, including Parkdale–High Park, Davenport, Toronto-Danforth, Beaches–East York and Scarborough North. The choice of certain neighbourhoods over others hinged on their proximity to transit, retail, walkable streets, large or deep lots, aging housing stock and the presence of historic multiplexes.

On Palmerston Boulevard, halfway between Bloor and Harbord, real estate developer Leonid Kotov pinpointed a great lot. GreenStreet Flats, his construction and property management firm, had built a dozen multiplexes in Toronto since 2017, and he could spot potential. Kotov put together a proposal for something a little larger than a sixplex at 501 Palmerston: he would replace the existing three-storey, three-unit brown-brick home with a three-storey, 10-unit building and throw in a garden suite on the site of the existing garage.

Kotov knew from experience that breaking ground would be a lot easier if he had buy-in from the neighbours. The company’s final rendering showed an exterior façade that was roughly in keeping with the street’s architectural character—or, at least, some interpretation of it. Along with wrought-iron Juliet balconies, it featured Victorian-esque exterior mouldings and cornices. The proposed building was certainly more attractive than the character-free towers that make up so much of the city’s new housing, but it didn’t entirely fit.

The pushback was swift. Johnny Lucas—the owner of the $2.7-million home right next door—was adamantly opposed to Kotov’s proposal. There would be too many garbage bins and too many bicycles spilling out onto the front of the property, he said. Also, the building was too big for the lot, and the units, which Lucas likened to “tiny rabbit holes that will lead to a transient slum,” were far too small. He made it clear that he would do everything in his power to block the project. On November 12, he passed through city hall’s doors prepared to run defence for his street. And he wasn’t the only one. Residents from all over Toronto were waiting for their own hearings before the committee of adjustment to air grievances about similar proposals for new developments in their neighbourhoods.

Lucas, a 76-year-old retired speechwriter, had spent 30 years drafting remarks for parliamentarians of all political stripes at Queen’s Park, and he was ready for his Mr. Smith Goes to Washington moment. “This project is a fat man wearing small-size clothes,” Lucas told the committee. “I know a little about this—I could lose some weight. But I am not standing before you wearing small-size clothes with the buttons bulging. In this project, the buttons are bulging, there is stress on every seam and you just know something is going to give. The result will not be pretty.” Determined to head off potential critics, Lucas hit one particular note hard: “Let me be very, very clear,” he said emphatically. “This is not NIMBYism.”

Then what was it? At the city, Lucas spoke with passion about his beloved Palmerston and the inherent threat that multiplexes posed. It was a common refrain among other deputants, particularly homeowners in Toronto’s wealthier neighbourhoods who see multiplexes as an affront to their way of life. They’re passionate about preserving the uniqueness of their streets—and, it follows, their substantial property values. Many of these folks hold fast to the idea that certain neighbourhoods should look a certain way—meaning more or less the way they have always looked. Some pockets of the city are prized specifically because of their architectural traits, which, taken together, constitute what architects call “built form.” The recent push for multiplexes threatens this built form and, arguably, the things that make these areas valuable. It is an undeniably polarizing issue. And nowhere is that more apparent than on Palmerston Boulevard.

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On the other side of the fracas are housing advocates and renters who are pushing for growth, density and newer styles of housing. In recent months, instead of being a civic chamber where cases about relatively small zoning variations are adjudicated, the committee of adjustment has become a sort of tribunal where these two factions face off, and it’s where the future of Toronto’s housing stock—and its architectural aesthetic—is being shaped. There’s a sense that the city’s current make-up, with grids of single-family homes protected from incursion by a bulwark of skyscrapers and condos, is Toronto. What’s at stake is not just the character of a particular boulevard or neighbourhood but of the city itself.

Torontonians didn’t invent NIMBYism—the term first appeared in a 1979 Virginia newspaper article about the safe disposal of radioactive waste. But locals here have, over the years, perfected the attitude with a sustained street-level objection to change, embedding NIMBYism in Toronto’s DNA. In some instances, this spirit of opposition has made the city better. Without it, green spaces and heritage buildings would have been bulldozed. Most infamously, there would be a very wide, very fast road cutting through the heart of Toronto. The Spadina Expressway, a wildly controversial project, was cancelled in 1971 following years of criticism from urban theorist Jane Jacobs, future mayor John Sewell and other protesters. They feared that a highway bisecting the city’s core would destroy neighbourhoods such as Kensington Market and the Annex, devastate the environment, and cement a car culture the city would be unable to, well, walk back.

The resistance to multiplexes, specifically, has a long and storied history in the city. One of the earliest and savviest developers was a man named Alfred Hawes. In touch with the WASP-y, proto-NIMBY sentiments of early 20th-century Torontonians, Hawes purchased a lot on Spadina Road and threatened to build an apartment complex. His neighbours were outraged, so Hawes auctioned it back to them at a tidy profit. Thumbing his nose, he then bought a lot across the street and got to work on a four-storey building. Those same neighbours—the Eaton family among them—attempted to hinder the permitting process, but Hawes forged ahead without a permit. When his project was completed in 1906, he christened it Spadina Gardens. An article in Saturday Night magazine hailed the building as the centrepiece of the area’s renewal, announcing the dawn of the “era of apartment houses.” But, seven years later, amid a wave of immigration from eastern Europe, Toronto passed laws restricting the construction of apartment buildings in residential neighbourhoods.

Spadina Gardens, which has retained its high ceilings, stained glass features and Edwardian red-brick façade, is now Toronto’s oldest apartment complex and a site of considerable historical interest. Sir Henry Pellatt, the financier behind Casa Loma, was a resident, as was contralto Maureen Forrester and her family. Louise Dennys, the publisher and founder of Knopf Canada, lived there in the 1990s, hosting lively salons attended by Gabriel García Márquez, Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie.

The development that, 120 years ago, so galled its neighbours is now regarded as a heritage building of such importance that its tenants had hoped to maintain it as-is for years to come. But, in October of 2024, despite objections from residents and heritage experts, the city approved a proposal from Spadina Gardens’ new owner, Dutch developer ProWinko, to add a 10-storey, 70-unit structure above the existing building—a floating, glassy top hat held aloft by a pedestal and support columns.

Anti-development sentiments exist on a broad continuum, with righteous urban-minded objection on one end and bald self-interest on the other. NIMBYism couldn’t stop Hawes or ProWinko, but Toronto does like to trumpet its NIMBY success stories. Outside the Dupont subway station, there are a series of plaques commemorating local objections to the Spadina Expressway, which state that the movement “helped give a voice to citizens in the planning of their neighbourhoods, and encouraged greater respect for the historic urban fabric during a period of intense redevelopment.” While the kiboshing of that project is now universally acknowledged as a good thing, it is nevertheless remarkable that Toronto puts up plaques commemorating where stuff isn’t. This city is a place where so much civic and political will, so much energy, is marshalled in the service of inertia.

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The battle of where, when and how to build Toronto’s multiplexes may be bloodless, but it’s plenty ferocious. “It’s a kind of culture war,” says Damien Moule, an engineer and member of the pro-housing advocacy group More Neighbours, which champions increased urban density in Toronto. “The neighbourhood associations often feel very set upon,” he says. “You will see this conspiratorial and resentful tone in a lot of their letters: We don’t want this. This is coming from outside. This is a big evil developer just trying to turn a profit at the expense of our neighbourhood.” Developers and even housing advocates are viewed as interlopers despite being part of the same city, social networks and tax base. And it’s not just older residents who hold this view. More than once, Moule has spotted residents in their 20s and 30s attending committee of adjustment hearings to oppose new housing developments.

Quite often, these complaints have to do with the nebulous concept of neighbourhood “character.” Under that umbrella are square footage, driveway width, construction materials, front-yard landscaping and other features. Graig Uens, who worked as a planner at the city for a dozen years, says that, in his experience, the arguments for preserving character are circular. The objectors seek to deny much-needed change on the grounds of not wanting change to occur. “Why do we have all these regulations around quote-unquote character?” he says. He believes the city’s policies have created “economically gated communities.”

The concept of character carries the whiff of classism. A claim that a development clashes with the historic nature of a neighbourhood can be used to keep out anything—and anyone—different, including renters. In recent decades, Toronto homeowners have enjoyed tremendous increases in their property values. A snowballing need for housing, combined with limited stock, drove housing prices up. Homeowners trying to protect their property values may not realize it, but their protestations are stalling efforts to address the housing crisis.

Uens, however, has an impressive track record when it comes to nudging Toronto, and Torontonians, into the future. Beginning in 2015, he led the charge to change the brewery by-laws (joined by a team called, no joke, the Cask Force) to make it easier for craft brewers to operate within city limits. In 2017, he turned his attention to laneway housing, eventually securing, after a whackload of consultations, the city’s approval in certain neighbourhoods. Allowing for the construction of new housing abutting Toronto’s labyrinthine laneway corridors was a pivotal step toward urban density. “The laneway stuff was a catalyst,” Uens says. “It was the thin end of the wedge, to allow new types of housing into neighbourhoods where they weren’t previously allowed.”

Under the Expanding Housing Options program, new multiplexes and low-rise apartment buildings were written into the city’s official plan, but efforts to move forward with many of these projects have been shouted down. Just one example: after GreenStreet Flats proposed a three-storey apartment building with two laneway suites at 91 Barton Avenue in Seaton Village, the committee of adjustment received 52 letters of objection, many of which focused on the size and density of the development. Despite nearly 100 letters of support—including one from area resident and Globe and Mail architecture critic Alex Bozikovic, who wrote that the “proposal represents intensification that our neighbourhood and Toronto badly need”—the project was rejected.

The Palmerston residents’ association leans heavily on the neighbourhood character argument, a defence with deep roots in the street’s history. Originally settled in the early 1900s, Palmerston became known for its shady silver maples, cast-iron lamp posts and the stone gateposts that bookend the street at Bloor and College. Its wide lots accommodated residents who formed the upper echelons of the city’s economic and social circles. Doctors and professors lived on the street, as did former mayors Sam McBride and Horatio Hocken and baker-entrepreneur George Weston.

Over time, some of those doctors’ and lawyers’ houses were subdivided into apartments to accommodate urban growth. Single-family homes were remodelled to welcome multiple families under a shared roof without significantly altering the streetscape. In March of 1982, with a grant from the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Toronto firm Brown and Storey Architects published a 144-page report, titled “Palmerston Boulevard: An Evaluation of a Unique Residential Street,” that tried to codify the street’s character. And more than four decades later, some locals can cite it chapter and verse, like holy writ. In the words of the report, the boulevard is an “enclave.” As architect Kim Storey, one of the co-authors of the report, told me, “Palmerston is special.”

Even today, the street has an undeniable charm, one amplified by its canopy that grows lush in summer and its vintage lamps—which might have disappeared if not for Johnny Lucas. In 2003, the city announced plans to remove Palmerston’s distinctive lamp posts, which it claimed were too old and too expensive to maintain and no longer in accordance with lighting standards. Following in the steps of a similar program in Rosedale, the city intended to replace them with standardized street lighting. Justifiably alarmed at this demolition by neglect, Lucas went door-to-door with flyers that read, “Palmerston Lights: Gone Forever? Is this what you want?” He and other locals spent the next few years mobilizing until the city capitulated. It agreed to leave the lamp posts alone, though it did insist on replacing the glass globes with less-fragile acrylic equivalents. During the extended skirmish, the residents’ association sharpened its skills at navigating bureaucracy, a prowess on display once it caught wind of the 501 Palmerston project—along with another multiplex proposal a few doors north of it.

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“One concerned citizen, a 90-year-old living north of Dupont, feared that the Palmerston project “would be the beginning of the end for Toronto’s most loved street”

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In July, a developer called the Six Properties submitted a proposal to the city for 509 Palmerston: a fourplex of three-bedroom units. It promised to retain the building’s original façade, porch and balcony, but that wasn’t enough to appease local objections. One concerned citizen, a 90-year-old living north of Dupont, feared that the “project would be the beginning of the end for Toronto’s most loved street.” Another fretted over the fate of the boulevard’s established “grandeur.” But the proposal had its boosters too. As one supporter wrote: “This proposal cleverly transforms an underused property into four comfortable family residences while preserving the attractive street-facing elements that give our area its charm.” Another said that, far from ruining the grandeur, the new property “balances growth with neighbourhood preservation.”

Uens, who is now employed in the private sector as an urban planning consultant, represented the Six Properties before the committee. He worked with the new owner to address neighbours’ concerns, including issues with driveway access and the size of a proposed parking pad. These tweaks quelled some of the protestations but not all—some Torontonians seem determined to oppose multiplexes no matter what. Uens says there are lots of people who support this form of housing, but it’s the nays who make the most noise.

In response to the objections, Uens guided the owner through more changes, including removing the parking pad altogether and adding backyard landscaping. And, on July 30, the project was approved. In the end, the proposal was modest enough: it was converting what was already a four-unit building into a building with four larger units, doubling the number of bedrooms—and potential residents—in the process. But the 11-unit apartment building down the street at 501 was a different story altogether.

By opposing the development at 501 Palmerston, were Lucas and his naysaying compatriots picking up the mantle from Jane Jacobs? Or were they just cranky neighbours standing in the way of progress? For more than 30 years, Susan Wright lived next door to Lucas, in one of the units at 501. When she moved to Palmerston in the early 1990s, her rent was $735 a month—a bargain, even then, for a three-bedroom downtown. Her rent rose in increments over the years, but it wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle. Then the eviction notices started arriving. Wright fought and survived several attempted evictions and, until earlier this year, lived well below market rates with a rent of $1,093. “If you have affordable housing in the city, you do not give it up,” she says.

Wright’s luck finally ran out with her seventh eviction notice. The building’s latest owner, Leonid Kotov, exercised the simplest, most effective means of shooing out even the most resilient, resourceful tenants: GreenStreet Flats planned to demolish the building. This past August, an adjudicator at the Landlord and Tenant Board ruled in favour of the developer, and Wright was given six months to find new housing. Under Kotov’s plans, a three-bedroom apartment at 501 would cost up to $3,800, much higher than Wright’s rent, so returning to one of the new units wasn’t an option for her.

Ultimately, Toronto’s housing crisis is also an affordability crisis. In the view of city planners, developers and politicians, density and affordability are entwined. As Mayor Olivia Chow recently told reporters, “We must build more housing, faster, because building more homes means life can be more affordable.” It’s Supply and Demand 101—except in the cases where, as with Kotov’s proposal, the rental cost for the units going up is more than for the ones coming down.

But affordability wasn’t the core of the Palmerston objections. The residents also fretted over the units themselves, which they felt were too cramped and not homey enough, therefore more apt to attract tenants uninterested in settling down there. Regardless, those are determinations that should fall to potential tenants, not to people who live up the boulevard. And anyhow, now that multiplexes are permitted as of right, city adjudicators no longer consider complaints about potential tenant transience or a property’s interior aesthetic character. Instead, objecting organizers have to comb through proposals, nitpick the fine print and mount their cases using language that is friendlier to the committee of adjustment. For example, a letter filed by the Palmerston Area Residents’ Association referenced “major negative impacts on the tree canopy and on green space.” One resident claimed that the “minor” variances GreenStreet Flats was requesting weren’t so minor after all. The size of the building reduced the soft landscaping (grass, shrubbery and so on) typically required by zoning regulations; there wasn’t enough of it to absorb stormwater, which risked running over onto neighbouring properties.

Other letters aired concerns that garbage and recycling bins stored at the front of the property would be conspicuously on display. The south face of the property was set back merely an inch from the adjoining property line and contained four windows, which some residents’ association members deemed “nonsensical.” One member even complained that the development poses a “negative impact” on “neighbours’ rights.” (Toronto does not have an official charter outlining neighbours’ rights.)

For all their fine-grained particularity, many of these objections read a lot like the same old complaints about character dressed up in technocratic language. As for the concerns about smaller units discouraging potential tenants from putting down roots on the street? The fact is that many Torontonians will live in small spaces their whole lives, and many will be forever renters. There’s no way around that, and they need to live somewhere, so why not in some of the city’s lovelier neighbourhoods?

Kotov thinks that some of these concerns are valid but maintains that most of the arguments are distractions, lobbed by people unwilling to compromise with developers. Ultimately, he says, many neighbourhood groups, including Palmerston’s, just don’t want more rental housing in their neighbourhood—they believe their neighbourhoods are plenty dense already. Further, he claims that in private meetings, many of the concerns voiced had little to do with setbacks and trash-bin visibility; they were, essentially, aesthetic in nature. “They wanted something that looked Edwardian,” he says. “Palmerston is a beautiful street. And they have this perception that it can’t be touched at all. We redesigned everything to make a building that looked and felt the way they suggested. Despite doing that, a lot of neighbours still came out in opposition.”

I spoke with residents to try to understand their point of view and what about it wasn’t textbook NIMBYism, as they strenuously and repeatedly claimed. Lucas brought up the density question, clarifying that 20 years ago, he’d split his own home into three apartments. Palmerston is dense, he says. “But it doesn’t look like it, so we get beat up.”

More than one local complained about setbacks, the disruption caused by construction, and parking—which was odd given the street’s proximity to public transit. The developers of 509 Palmerston advertised that it didn’t provide parking “to encourage sustainable transportation.” There was objection, too, to the very idea of larger developments as a model of housing and living. One resident I spoke with joked that Palmerston locals call downtown condo buildings “ant farms,” a term that doesn’t seem especially neighbourly.

When taken together, the residents’ concerns—combined with a visit to city hall from architect Kim Storey, who donated her time and expertise pro bono to buttress the Palmerstonian POV—proved sufficient to sway the committee of adjustment. At a public hearing on November 12, 2025, all four of the attending committee members voted to deny the variances, effectively rejecting the GreenStreet Flats proposal.

Lucas, who was present at the vote, returned home to find that the placard flagging a proposed change to the site at 501 Palmerston had fallen to the ground. He picked up the corrugated plastic board and later delivered it to the office of Brown and Storey Architects. He suggested that Storey could add it to a trophy wall of defeated projects. Lucas also brought along a basket of treats from Summerhill Market and a $170 bottle of scotch that a few of the neighbours had chipped in on. At the architects’ insistence, they slugged back a dram—a celebratory toast that the residents of Palmerston were not to be messed with.

Kotov, who spent eight months on his proposal, now has to start over or appeal the decision. “This is the biggest headache,” he says, still unable to fully wrap his mind around the intensity of the resistance.

The Palmerston residents may have won their battle, but in doing so they have become emblematic of stubborn resistance to change. On Reddit, people mocked them as NIMBYs and applauded the design of the nixed development. One Torontonian summed up their own feelings on social media in two words: “Nuke Palmerston.” It’s a harsh suggestion, of course, and no solution to the housing crisis. But, in the jaded eyes of its critics, Palmerston represents the worst, most elitist elements of city life. Property owners may hold the title to a lot or a heritage Edwardian home, but that doesn’t grant them an exclusive claim to Toronto’s future. Such thinking calls to mind Jane Jacobs, who warned against the sentimentality of the very concept of the neighbourhood. “It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or suburban life,” she wrote in her 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. “Sentimentality plays with sweet intentions in place of good sense.”

Even if it is well-intentioned, the Palmerston resistance is frustrating precisely because it’s so sentimental. These people love their street, and why shouldn’t they? It’s gorgeous and probably even special. But such thinking is counterproductive— not just to the call for increased growth but to the vibrancy of a city. Every street is special. Every avenue is full of real people with opinions and memories and warm feelings, regardless of the width of its lots or the historic character of its lamps. Euclid Avenue has history. So does St. Clarens. Clendenan, too. Drop a pin into a map of the city—or any city—and you’ll find a place people care about and want to protect. Can such profound affections really not withstand the construction of a few—or even many—low-rise apartments like the ones found in Montreal, Berlin, Philadelphia, San Francisco and countless other cities? I have travelled all over the world, and never once, after I said I lived in Toronto, has anyone responded, “Right, the place with all the well-preserved Edwardians and Victorians!” They ask about the food, the traffic, the Blue Jays and that crack-smoking mayor.

Lucas believes Palmerston is often targeted with accusations of NIMBYism for the same reasons that make it so special. The boulevard’s historic quality distinguishes it from many other Toronto streets. To outsiders, this can make it seem to be somehow against those other streets, against the city itself. But the Palmerstonians insist that they do want more development, as long as it retains the area’s distinctive features.

A time will come, however—if it is not already here—when the plans for 501 Palmerston will seem quaint, and proposals for 12- or even 22-unit buildings will become the norm. When I asked Palmerston renter turned owner Graham Lewis where arrivals to the city are expected to live, he pointed to the new Mirvish Village development around the corner at Bloor and Bathurst, with its hundreds of rental units. “We don’t want to erase our heritage for the sake of adding in one more unit,” he said.

There’s an irony here. In 1982, when Storey’s firm completed its analysis of Palmerston’s uniqueness, it noted that one of the street’s key features was its “endurance through significant densification.” At a certain point, however, Palmerston’s ability to remain resolutely itself will seem sharply out of step with the rapidly changing city around it. And many of its residents seem okay with that. “There’s another solution,” says Lucas, mulling over the housing shortage. “I’m not saying I know what it is. Maybe the city’s full. What’s wrong with Windsor instead? Or Cornwall? A hundred years ago, manufacturing and employment were spread out way better than they are now. Everybody needing to be in Toronto and Vancouver is killing us.”

Unwilling to wait until the next developer swoops in to make a move, Lewis and other Palmerston residents are eyeing permanent solutions. In October, at the urging of residents’ groups, Dianne Saxe, the city councillor for the neighbouring ward of University-Rosedale, brought forth a motion to council. It called for the city to initiate a character study of Palmerston in order to get the boulevard zoned as a heritage conservation district.

Sections of wealthy neighbourhoods such as Rosedale, Cabbagetown, Riverdale and the East Annex currently enjoy such designations. In the event of a conflict between city zoning regulations and the heritage conservation designation plan, the rules outlined in the latter take precedence. If Saxe’s motion passes, Palmerston’s sense of being an enclave—and its accompanying enclave mentality—would become official.

Housing and density advocates find the workaround preposterous. “The enclave is just a quirk of history,” says More Neighbours’ Damien Moule. “Every street is a quirk of history. If every street has their particular development pattern worthy of protection, then every street needs to have heritage protection.” The concept of uniqueness is a slippery slope in a city where practically any street can claim it. It’s a vexing tautology: the street is special because it has always been special.

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“There’s another solution,” says Johnny Lucas, mulling over the housing shortage. “I’m not saying I know what it is. Maybe the city’s full. What’s wrong with Windsor instead? Or Cornwall?”

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If the story of Spadina Gardens proves anything, it’s that the arc of “heritage,” like that of history, is long. Alfred Hawes’s apartment complex was regarded by its neighbours as an eyesore and a social blight when it was built. More than a century later, it became so historically significant that a case was made for its preservation. Developers can’t conjure authentic double-wide Edwardian homes and airlift them onto lots to perfectly match existing standards of built form. In time, residents living beside and around new developments will get used to once-alien features and forms as they accrue the residue of history. If it had been approved, perhaps Kotov’s proposal at 501 Palmerston would have eventually been regarded as an architectural gem, a significant intervention to address Toronto’s housing crisis. Worst-case scenario, some people would have gotten to live there and appreciate the neighbourhood’s tree-lined sidewalks, proximity to shops and TTC stops, and Korean barbecue joints—all the conveniences and amenities other Palmerstonians have enjoyed for generations.

If Saxe’s Palmerston Boulevard character study gets the go-ahead, it could take a couple of years to complete. Yet it may prove to be in vain. For, as much as the city is moving to embrace multiplexes, the provincial government’s densification measures are more ambitious. Ontario’s Bill 60, the so-called Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, has Premier Doug Ford ramping up his “cranes in the sky” agenda to fast-track housing construction in Toronto. A separate initiative between the city and the province gives Ontario’s minister of municipal affairs and housing, Rob Flack, increased authority to expedite construction in order to build 1.5 million new homes by 2031.

Bill 60 has whipped up plenty of controversy. Housing advocates have noted that certain provisions within the omnibus bill will make it much easier for landlords to evict tenants without compensation and will erode other tenant protections. When it passed in Queen’s Park in late November, protesters poured into the chamber, chanting, “Evict Doug Ford.” Others see the bill as a necessary redress to the city’s and province’s housing shortfalls. The bill extends the concept of as-of-right variances, making it easier to get planning approvals. It allows up to 10 per cent variance from municipal zoning setbacks for new developments, including multiplexes. It also enables larger builds in neighbourhoods located within 800 metres of major transit hubs—like Palmerston Boulevard.

Leonid Kotov, who is currently renting out the units at 501 Palmerston on Airbnb, says he’s considering just sitting on the lot until the province’s new rules take effect. “Maybe we’ll end up waiting until they make that as of right,” Kotov says. “Then we’ll be able to build something even bigger than what we were proposing.” Palmerstonians’ crusade against Kotov’s development may go down in the history of their thoroughfare as a quixotic last stand. In a decade, a 10-unit building could seem, when cast in the shadow of the larger, denser developments in the offing, like a mere cottage.

Against such prevailing forces, a heritage designation may be woefully insufficient. Uncompromising Palmerstonians, and other residents who are inclined to go to war for the character of their streets, may have to adopt even more drastic measures. As evicted Palmerstonian Susan Wright put it to me, half-jokingly, “We really need to secede from the province.”

This story appears in the February 2026 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.