House Divided: How the Missing Middle Will Solve Toronto's Housing Crisis

Housing is increasingly unattainable in successful global cities, and Toronto is no exception -- in part because of zoning that protects “stable” residential neighborhoods with high property values. House Divided is a citizen’s guide for changing the way housing can work in big cities. Using Toronto as a case study, this anthology unpacks the affordability crisis and offers innovative ideas for creating housing for all ages and demographic groups. With charts, maps, data, and policy prescriptions, House Divided poses tough questions about the issue that will make or break the global city of the future.

Alex Bozikovic is the Globe and Mail’s architecture critic, covering architecture and urbanism. He has won a National Magazine Award and has also written for Architectural Record, Azure, Dwell, and Toronto Life. Alex is an author of Toronto Architecture: A City Guide (2017). In 2019, he served as a jury member for the City of Edmonton’s Missing Middle Design Competition. He currently lives in Toronto.

Cheryll Case is the founding principal of CP Planning, a groundbreaking urban planning firm that digs deep into addressing the urban conditions that affect access to housing, work, and play. She specializes in designing inclusive conversations that build relationships between various stakeholders within the non-profit, private, and public sectors. To facilitate conversation, Cheryll uses research, data analysis, and storytelling to describe community relationships with land. Since graduating from Ryerson University’s Bachelor of Urban and Regional Planning program in 2017, Cheryll has been a driving force in public discourse about community planning and belonging. She currently lives in Toronto.

John Lorinc is a journalist and editor. He reports on urban affairs, politics, business, technology, and local history for a range of media, including The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Corporate Knights and Spacing, where he is senior editor. John is the author of five books, including No Jews Live Here: A Memoir (Coach House Books, 2024), and has co-edited eight anthologies for Coach House, including The Ward (2015), Any Other Way (2017), and Messy Cities (2025). John is the recipient of the 2019/2020 Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy and was the winner of the Writers' Trust Balsillie Prize for Public Policy, for Dream States: Smart Cities, Technology and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias (2022). He lives in Toronto.

Annabel Vaughan is an Architect and Project Manager at era Architects Inc. Her recent interest lies in the intersection between architecture as a spatial practice reflected in a single built work and the broader role of architecture as an agent for cultural production in the city. She writes, teaches and participates regularly in discussions concerning the role that architecture and public art can play as agents of political change in the city. Her professional work includes small-scale landscape architecture insertions, civic and residential building design, urban design and research, performance art lectures, and curatorial projects. She currently lives in Toronto.