Kingston Missing Middle White Paper
To support the City of Kingston in meeting its target density and housing goals, Re:Public was engaged to author a research paper on Midding Middle housing.
“Missing Middle Housing” is a term that refers to housing forms which provide for multiple residential units on a single lot that are low-rise, or human scale, such as duplexes, side-by-side duplexes, triplexes, townhouses, and smaller low-rise apartments. The term “middle” refers both to the location of these housing types on the spectrum of housing types between low-rise single-detached housing and high-rise apartment buildings, while the term “missing” refers to trends of the past several decades that have seen the development industry and municipal governments focused on the creation of either very low-rise single family or semi-detached dwellings or high-rise apartment buildings leading to a housing inventory that does not meet the needs of many households.
The paper begins by defining what missing middle housing is and is not, and identifies 4 main typologies of missing middle housing in the Kingston context: Additional Dwelling Units, Multiplexes, Rowhouses/Townhouses, Low-Rise Apartments.
The paper reviews the breakdown of the housing stock in Kingston and how the City compares to similarly sized cities across the province and country. This review seeks to understand the current state of missing middle housing in Kingston and identify the types of missing middle housing that already exist, where they are located, and when they were constructed in order to identify trends and patterns and better tailor solutions to the issue of supplying missing middle housing.
Census 2021 Typologies
Location of the Missing Middle Housing
Missing Middle Housing and Year of Construction
The paper also presents several North American examples of cities where notable efforts have been made to encourage missing middle housing. These cities include Toronto, Edmonton, Victoria and Minneapolis. In addition, Montreal has been included as it is one of the few cities where missing middle housing forms a significant portion of the city’s housing stock. These examples have been analysed to assist in understanding different potential approaches to supporting missing middle housing and potentially understand key ingredients to helping Kingston find its own success in increasing the diversity of housing through the missing middle housing.
Census 2021 “Missing Middle Housing”
