Canada’s Broken Zoning: Why We Can’t Fix the Housing Crisis Without a Map

Alex Beheshti on the Data Crisis Fueling Canada’s Housing Shortage

In this episode of The Missing Middle, Sabrina Maddeaux and Mike Moffatt are joined by urban planner Alex Beheshti for a deep dive into one of the most overlooked barriers to solving Canada’s housing crisis: zoning data.

Alex makes the case for a Canadian Zoning Atlas—an ambitious but essential tool to bring clarity, consistency, and transparency to the country’s fragmented planning systems. They explore why zoning laws are so confusing, how the lack of machine-readable data cripples good policy, and what Canada can learn from international best practices. If we can map census data, why not zoning? From obscure codes to wedding vows about development charges (really!), this is a smart, heartfelt conversation about why better data might be the key to better housing.

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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, which has been lightly edited.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Hi Alex, how are you doing?

Alex Beheshti: Great, thanks for having me Sabrina.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Of course, I read your recent article titled Canada's Housing Crisis Needs a Map and I thought it was very interesting but I was also a little bit surprised how well it did over 3,500 reads and like for a somewhat niche issue you never know how this is going to go. So why do you think this resonated so well with our audience?

Alex Beheshti: Well maybe this is a little bit hokey pokey but there are no guarantees in life but I think in life when you put out good vibes and you put a lot of energy into something you tend to get good results.

Because I mentioned in the piece my wife's vows to me so I recently got married for the audience that doesn't know. I want to give a bit of background on why I chose to include that rather personal story in between a very data-analytic piece and it just circles back into what I said about putting energy into your work.

So when we exchanged our vows my wife mentioned how, for whatever reason, endearing she finds my passion for housing affordability and yes, development charges. Development charges were mentioned in our exchange of vows. Why she finds this attractive I honestly don't know but I'm clearly lucky that there is somebody out there that gets my weird.

But the point I want to drive to is her words inspired me to focus and put some energy and thoughts that I've been having about zoning data and mapping that I wanted to get out of my head and onto a piece of paper.

One of the great things about working at MMI is that if you're passionate or obsessed about something, Mike is going to try and give you the time and space to pursue your passion. So I guess I just really got lucky that I had both a super supportive partner and a supportive boss and a bit of time before I went on a honeymoon that I could get all my thoughts and put all my energy into a piece that I'm really happy to see resonated with folks.

Mike Moffatt: Well that's super and obviously Alex it's great to see you again. This is your third time on the podcast. First time since you've worked at MMI. It's good to have you back.

One of the great things that we do here is experiment. One of the philosophies I have is that five to ten percent of everything that we do should fail in the sense that we should try to extend the line, experiment and learn new things to the point where we should go ‘Oh well that didn't work.’ So I have to admit, Alex's piece, I thought would be one of those five to ten percent failure points where I'm like ‘we got to be experimental, we got to be weird and this has a high outcome of failure but that's okay because that's how you learn something and if you never strike out you're not swinging hard enough.’

But you didn't strike out, you had a great piece. So let's go to that piece. You make the point in the article that policymakers, even if they want to advocate for reform, have a hard time getting clear data and are left to, in your quotes, “navigate the complexities of zoning laws without a clear centralized source of information.”

Now some of our audience might not even know what zoning is let alone zoning maps. So what is it and why is it so complicated?

Alex Beheshti: So the little Mike in me is saying: “Triage, triage!” Because zoning is…the planner in me wants to go on and on about it.

There are two aspects of zoning; development envelopes and uses. So to understand what a development envelope is, picture a 3D box over a piece of land. Zoning regulates how tall that box is, how wide that box is, how long that box is and then you get to fit a structure within it. If your structure pokes outside of that box, then you need to go through rezoning, or you'll be denied permission to build.

Then the second aspect is uses, and these are the activities that can take place within zoning. Very famously, in Toronto, we distinguish between retail uses that allow for prepared foods and for foods that can be prepared on site.

So think of the difference between a convenience store and a fast food chain and so the zoning will create permutations between development envelopes and uses and they'll create codes.

So, for example, within the retail example, we have c1, c2 for residential. And housing, because that's what we really focus on, you get things like r1, which is, let's say, two-storey single attached homes etc, etc, r2, r3. Now the complication is that no two codes are the same between municipalities. There's no master code like we do with the building codes.

We have a national building code and then we have provincial versions of that building code that then apply across the provinces. We don't have a master zoning code and every municipality, or every place can set up the structure how they want.

So last time I looked at it, in 2021, Victoria British Columbia had 775 codes. In Toronto, we have about 40 codes. It's hard to tell because not all of the zoning bylaws are online which is a whole issue. And then in Japan, they have 12 codes.

So if you can imagine trying to compare those areas it's very difficult, but you already can't do it if the bylaws aren't online for you to get the base level of information.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Now I want to read something directly from your article. You say:

[The] lack of machine-readable zoning data prevents anyone from performing analysis at scale. Want to know how much land is zoned for low-density housing in the Greater Toronto Area? No one can tell you. Want to compare the most restrictive and least restrictive zoning codes across Canada’s major cities? No one has the necessary data to compute that answer either, not even the provincial or federal government.

No government official can claim that we are treating the crisis like a crisis with this state of disorganization present

Now that all sounds pretty crazy, say more about why you think having a centralized database of zoning regulations would be helpful. Why do you think that would be?

Alex Beheshti: So I use a little bit of jargon in that passage that I'm just going to quickly explain to the audience. “Machine-readable” is a piece of software that can read some pieces of data. So, imagine you have a table and it has a bunch of numbers on it on a piece of paper. Software can't read that. Now imagine taking those numbers and putting it into an Excel file. All of a sudden Excel can add, subtract, divide, create charts, do whatever. That's what we have with zoning. We have a lot of zoning that are either in paper copies or they are in PDFs, which is a type of digital paper copy that doesn't allow for analysis or any sort of computations.

The reason I think we need a centralized database is because, in Ontario, we have 444 municipalities. Across Canada is probably a thousand plus. I don't think I've ever - anyone's ever actually counted how many municipalities but there are a lot of them. A municipality's job is not to organize and coordinate itself with its neighbour. That's unfortunately not part of their core competency.

If we can imagine for a moment that we hosted census data the way we host zoning data, we wouldn't be able to do our jobs. You'd have to go on each municipal website to download all their population data, and all that information just to do any sort of analysis. Some municipalities might have certain kinds of population data while others are missing what their colleagues have, and it would just be an absolute mess.

So we really need an institution, or an apparatus, that can go in there and collect all this information and it gives researchers, or policymakers, an opportunity to access information that is consistent and in one place and where you're not spending time trying to create that data - try to create that consistency.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, and in the piece, you also make the point that government agencies collect all kinds of data on other housing stuff, including construction, and I will point out that that data is of variable quality and depth, but it exists - finance, demographics and so on. But there is a huge gap in urban planning data let alone development charge data.

I am obliged to use the term development charge in every single episode.

But if we go to this gap in urban planning data, like why do you think it is? Why is it that nobody's bothered to aggregate all of this data and put it in one place?

Alex Beheshti: That's a really great question. I think it comes down to what we consider as evidence and what we see more as personal opinion today.

For generations, planners within my profession would assure the public, as experts, that zoning wide swaths of land with super restrictive regulations would have little to no impact. The same goes for development charges. For years, people would say, ‘Oh yeah, high development charges have no impact.’ And when you have low housing prices nobody cares.

For the few voices out there saying ‘Hey this stuff is going to cause problems in the future, let's try to get ourselves organized and ready for it. Let's do good governance.’ There's no reason to listen to them, there's no impetus to listen to them.

Over the years a lot of research has been done on zoning, not by planners but outside of the field, by economists. And it's the planners who own the zoning data, and it's incumbent on us to care about this information. I always say, ‘If you want to be responsible for something, you have to act responsibly,’ and the time is here. We have to roll up our sleeves and say, ‘We’ve got to solve this issue of lack of data.’

But I just want to say that just because the zoning data isn't there doesn't mean we don't know for certain that zoning regulations cause high prices. There is another tool called the Warden School Survey and as the name suggests it's just a survey that you fill out.

The problem with this is while it's great it's like the difference between a farmer knowing every day that it rains versus how much it rains. So the Warden School Survey tells you what days it rains, what days it didn't rain, and then you can figure out how that hurt my crop yields, or does that hurt my crop yield? That question is pretty easy to answer but how do I maximize my crop yield for soybean versus canola? That you need to know something more precise which is the exact amount that it rained not what day it rained on.

So we can tell from the Warden School Survey that there are high restrictions. It's hard to quantify precisely but we do see a correlation between when this survey points to correlations of restrictions and high prices. But we need to move past this. This is ancient technology at this point, it's almost, I think, 25 years old, which is what the Zoning Atlas moves us to. It allows us to ask better questions.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah so you suggest that idea of a Canadian Zoning Atlas tell me a bit more about what you envision there. So, at its most basic, a Canadian Zoning Atlas is both an organization and a product. It's an organization whose job it is to gather maps, digitize them, do that whole machine- readable thing I talked about, and turn static maps into GIS data. That's Geographic Information System data. Organize them so they're comparable. That whole example I gave between Victoria and Toronto, and the different codes, and then share or disseminate that final product, which [is meant to address that] issue I talked about that if every municipality is hosting it you'd get inconsistent results.

So my vision is you have an organization that solves for all those problems. At the heart of the exercise though is realizing that this data has a huge amount of economic value. Right now it's not economical to analyze zoning and so it solves for that problem.

We need to recognize that land is literally our most valuable economic and societal asset, so having deeper insights about how we make decisions on it, be it policy making or someone deciding to build something, that's going to have a huge knock-on economic and social benefit.

Canada is really blessed that we're a country that has a lot of resources and a lot of opportunities, but there are countries that don't have those sorts of opportunities or resources, but they have a very equivalent level of economic development, and that's because they're making better decisions. I think with something like a tool, like a zoning atlas, it is what's going to help a highly developed country like Canada go to that next level of development and really drive that better decision-making.

Mike Moffatt: I'm going to ask a classic business school question of what are the best practices on this? Who should Canada be emulating, other jurisdictions and say these two or three countries have it right? We should take what they're doing, make it maple-flavoured and have it here in Canada. So who should we be emulating?

Alex Beheshti: So I think, in typical Canadian fashion, I'm going to say a zoning atlas comes from the United States. They already have a fully functional atlas project so this isn't something that I've conceived out of the ether, this is something that is already being done.

The Americans are evolving their land use analysis and they're going to the next stage but the Americans aren't actually at the forefront. I talk about the zoning atlas and I do mention in the article it is the second best option. The first best option is what the state of Victoria in Australia does. They marry a zoning atlas with a development application management portal, but unfortunately, that's not, that's so granular, those two different things put together, that's not really something that I think the federal government can solve. That would take a ton of provincial involvement, a ton of coordination with municipalities and I just don't think Canada is quite there yet. But we can definitely do the second-best option, and doing that second-best option, the American option, does prepare us to then pick up the Australian method. So this isn't wasted work or unnecessary work. This is just one step towards the ideal system.

Sabrina Maddeaux: I'm wondering, besides a zoning atlas, let's say you get your wish, what else would be at the top of your list in terms of other planning tools that you think would be helpful that Canada or Ontario doesn't utilize?

Alex Beheshti: So, I mean, like the dream is one day the federal government or the provincial government can have an index or a number, the same way we have with interest rates, and people can understand their communities. And we can just pay municipalities, we can say ‘like okay, you're at a restrictive level of five, if you come down to four, here's some cash.’ So I think the zoning atlas would help create - I don't know if that's so much of a tool, but a policy mechanism.

In terms of a tool, like really the the ideal situation is the Australian model but really the two pieces that I think can really take Canada, and planning practice in this country, to the next level are digitizing our zoning and digitizing our development application process and then centralizing that into a database where everybody and anyone can analyze for whatever reason they may need.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, I think this is fantastic.

And in my mind one of the big benefits is it just shows how complicated this is where if we combine all of these different zones, across all of these municipalities, I think we learned that across Canada - we have tens of thousands of different zones and what that does is it eliminates the possibility of doing things like factory-built housing, right? Where, if you've got a factory-built housing producer, how are they going to build a product that works everywhere if there are tens of thousands of different regulations, right? We wouldn't be able to build cars if Mississauga, Brampton and Caledon all had different safety standards and so on. But that's essentially what we have to do in housing.

So I highly recommend that people read the piece. We're over 3,500 reads we'll probably get up to 5,000 or so. And Alex, try not to let that go to your head.

Alex Beheshti: I'll try boss.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, I think the key is we have a nationwide housing crisis and a province-wide housing crisis, and you can't continue to deal with this on a piecemeal by piecemeal basis, right? We need to look at this in a unified way and then we can approach it with unified solutions.

Thank you so much, Alex, for joining us today. And thank you, everyone, for watching and listening, and to our producer, Meredith Martin.

Mike Moffatt: And if you have any thoughts or questions about the complexity of zoning or Alex's wedding vows, please send us an email to [email protected]

Sabrina Maddeaux: And we'll see you next time.

Additional Reading that Helped Inform the Episode:

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