The Fate of Housing in Toronto: John Lorinc on New Essays, Ideas, and Hope for the City's Future

It's hard to imagine any topic more on Torontonians' minds these days than housing. As the city, like so many other cities around the world, becomes more and more unaffordable and both rent and property prices continue their decade-long skyrocketing trajectory, the future of Toronto itself seems up in the air. A certain fatalism about housing has overtaken many city dwellers, and many more have left the GTA altogether in search of affordability.

So Coach House's new essay collection, House Divided: How the Missing Middle Will Solve Toronto's Affordability Crisis, edited by John Lorinc, Alex Bozikovic, Cheryll Case, and Annabel Vaughan, feels downright revolutionary in many ways. Is there actually hope for housing in Toronto - or any large city? The editors posit potential solutions and innovative ideas for a housing landscape that includes everyone, and in doing so, unpack the future of big cities.

We're excited to welcome John Lorinc to Open Book today to discuss House Divided through our Lucky Seven interview series. He tells us about the past/present/future structure of the anthology, the problematic impact of Toronto's "leafy and pleasant neighbourhoods", and his upcoming projects for Coach House. 

Open Book:

Tell us about you’re the new book and how you became involved with it.

John Lorinc:

The book aims to unpack the origins of Toronto’s housing affordability crisis, which has become increasingly extreme, but also offers up solutions at a variety of scales. The co-editors see this volume as a way of provoking a long-overdue debate about the causes of this situation and the failings of our land use planning rules.

OB:

How did you select the pieces for this book? What were you looking for when assembling it?

JL:

The four co-editors drew on their respective professional networks and areas of expertise. We solicited ideas and also worked with the contributors to hone their ideas and eventually their drafts so they’d all hang together in a cohesive whole.

OB:

How do you view the pieces in the book as speaking to each other?

JL:

The book is divided into three sections: the origins of the problem (past), an analysis of the current situation (present) and proposals for reform (future). They come at their subjects in different voices and from many perspectives and scales, and not all agree with one another. We’ve created a book that allows for disagreements and reflects the extraordinary diversity of a city like Toronto.

OB:

What do you need when you're writing and editing – in terms of space, food, rituals, writing instruments?

JL:

I do almost all my work in coffee shops, and my needs are fairly basic: decent coffee, a table that doesn’t wobble, a comfortable chair, not too much noise, and reliable wifi.

OB:

What do you hope readers will take away from these pieces, after having read them all? Is there a question you set out to address or delve into through these works?

JL:

One of the core messages is that Toronto’s famously leafy and pleasant neighbourhoods have come to be imbued with an artificial sense of stability – change within these neighbourhoods is highly restricted, but the stability has created both unaffordability and a lack of stability for the very large and growing segment of the city’s population that didn’t have a chance to buy a detached or semi-detached home when this was still possible for people on ordinary incomes. Today, the neighbourhoods are for the rich, and the city’s planning rules effectively place enormous constraints on the development of affordable housing for everyone else. It’s a toxic problem and one that won’t end well.

OB:

What defines a great collection or anthology, in your opinion? Were there anthologies you looked to for inspiration in curating this project?

JL:

We didn’t have a model for this collection, but my view is that anthologies should offer a wide variety of views and voices and perspectives as a baseline. You want variety.

OB:

What are you working on next?

JL:

I am working as an editor for Coach House on a handful of books, on Toronto’s music scene, the social role of sports in the city, Toronto’s Indigenous history, and the lingering impact of the minstrel figure in contemporary racial politics. We’re also planning an anthology about parks and public spaces in the 21^st century city.

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