Another NIMBY profile came out in Toronto Life this week on the opposition to a three-story apartment building on Palmerston in Toronto. It’s a great feature about a recurring story of people in secure, stable housing rejecting secure, stable housing for others. It’s seen regularly in the news, and it was one of the biggest barriers to building affordable housing identified by developers, non-profits, and planners in our workshop report.
Palmerston Boulevard is like Rosedale in Toronto, Upper Mount Royal in Calgary, or Shaughnessy in Vancouver – established enclaves of single-family homes in the heart of major cities, where residents enjoy the full benefits of urban life: walkable streets, abundant transit, shops, community spaces, and publicly funded infrastructure. It is precisely because these neighbourhoods are so well-resourced that opposition to new housing there is so consequential. Many residents in these communities have concerns about change, but the patterns that emerge across cities and decades are access to street parking, backyard quiet, and property values consistently outweigh the housing needs of people who would very much like to live nearby. The voices of those residents tend to be amplified in public engagement processes, while the voices of people struggling with housing costs, displacement, or homelessness are largely absent from the table and the decision.
What makes this dynamic so difficult is that existing residents have both the legal standing and the practical means (time, resources, familiarity with planning processes) to shape outcomes in ways that prospective residents simply do not. The needs and aspirations of people who are currently priced out, pushed out, or simply hoping to build a life in the city are just as real, and arguably more urgent, yet they rarely carry the same weight in municipal decision-making. This raises questions worth sitting with: at what point does preserving a neighbourhood’s character come at too great a cost to the people who cannot access it? And how do we design engagement processes that reflect the full community — including the one that doesn’t yet exist there?
In Vancouver’s First Shaughnessy neighbourhood, dozens of single-family homes sit on lots as much as ten times the size of the average Vancouver plot. These are not edge-of-city estates — they sit a block away from what is destined to be one of the densest areas of the city, the Broadway Corridor. One such estate was recently listed for $33 million. Many of these properties are shielded from public view behind hedges, iron fences, and rows of trees. This raises a genuine question about heritage designation: if the character being preserved is largely private and inaccessible, who does that preservation actually serve? It’s almost certainly not for the people living in the predominantly rental neighbourhood a block away.
In HART’s workshop series, we interviewed dozens of senior leaders in government, development, non-profit housing, and the broader sector to understand why more housing isn’t being built on government land. Heritage designations emerged as a significant barrier, but community opposition appeared consistently across all four cities and nearly every interview. Notably, the most organized and effective opposition tends to come from homeowners with the time and resources to engage deeply in planning processes — a group that skews toward older, wealthier residents. Municipalities often provide significant platforms for this input, while the concerns raised can range from thoughtful design feedback to characterizations of future residents that are at best unsupported by evidence, and at worst deeply prejudiced and vitriolic. The result is a process that is formally open but functionally unequal.
To live in a city — and to benefit from its transit, infrastructure, retail, and public amenities — is to share space with others. That is, in many ways, the point. Some trade-offs are inherent: a slightly longer commute by transit rather than a solo drive, a smaller private footprint in exchange for a richer public one. These are reasonable expectations of urban life, not grievances. What is harder to justify, particularly when cities are facing concurrent crises of affordability, housing, and climate, is treating on-street parking or unobstructed backyard privacy as rights that supersede the housing needs of others. Green space matters, and good design matters — but how we balance private comfort against shared need is a question cities can no longer defer.
There are many promising approaches to reimagining community engagement in housing decisions, and our report on barriers to building housing on public land outlines several. But before we can reform the process, it’s worth reflecting on first principles: what does living in a city mean? What does it ask of us, and what does it offer in return? Cities work when people plan with their neighbours in mind; sharing streets, infrastructure, and the compromises that come with density. A city that reserves its most central, well-serviced neighbourhoods for those who already have the most is not meeting that standard. Finding ways to make room (literally and procedurally) for a wider range of residents is not just a housing question. It’s a question about what kind of cities we want to be.
Sam Roberts is the Policy and Communications Manager for the Housing Assessment Resource Tools (HART) Project at the University of British Columbia.
