There are parts of Toronto that just feel off. You're walking what should be a lively main street but it's quiet, empty, with vacant storefronts and no foot traffic. We usually blame retail trends or the economy, but in neighborhoods like Queen Street East between Church and the DVP, the real culprit is invisible: zoning. These areas are zoned commercial or mixed-use, which means new developments must include ground-floor retail whether there's demand or not, and residential-only use or higher-density housing isn't permitted. The result is neighbourhoods stuck in a version of themselves that no longer works, unable to evolve even when there's demand to live there, all because the rules won't allow it.
Most of Queen East between Church and the DVP is zoned CR (Commercial Residential) with caps on both residential and commercial components. A real example at Queen and River: a vacant office building and Beer Store with a massive parking lot on a 50,000 sq ft site. Zoning allows 2.5x the site in total floor space (125,000 sq ft), but caps residential and commercial each at 2.0 FSI (100,000 sq ft each). So if you max out residential at 100,000 sq ft, you have 25,000 sq ft left that can't be housing but must be commercial or nothing. While the zoning technically doesn't require retail, it functionally does because no developer wants to leave density on the table. The result? A modest 5-storey building with one floor commercial, four floors residential, maybe 50 units, while half the lot stays empty, on a site near 3 streetcars and a future Ontario Line stop. Compare this to streets like Richmond and Adelaide just blocks south, zoned CR SS1, which controls form (height, setbacks, massing) instead of capping density, giving developers way more flexibility.
A recent attempt to restart the Queen East BIA failed. The area had one in the 2000s but too few commercial properties and too much institutional land made it financially unviable. Businesses didn't want the extra tax and major landholders like shelters and churches don't contribute to BIAs. Just west of Church, the same street tells a different story with high-end rental towers and Tridel projects. Both Fitzrovia's Elm-Ledbury and Tridel's Queen Church were originally zoned CR 3.0 and CR 5.0 with residential caps well below what was built. They got approved through Zoning By-law Amendments: expensive, multi-year processes requiring lawyers, consultants, architects, community consultations, and traffic studies. That process only works for big developers on big sites. You won't see a four-storey rental walk-up go through rezoning like that. It's too costly for small-scale builders.
Zoning was meant to create order, but in areas like Queen East, it's freezing neighborhoods in a version of the past that no longer works. When commercial requirements stay even with no demand, you get ghost streets. When zoning doesn't allow residential use as-of-right, you get empty lots or stalled development. As businesses leave and storefronts sit vacant, foot traffic falls, remaining businesses struggle, and people start avoiding the area entirely, choosing to walk on parallel streets rather than taking Queen St E to their destination. This creates a downward spiral where the neighborhood slowly declines not because there's no demand to live there, but because policy prevents adaptation. The structural barriers run deep: when zoning, land use, and economics all pull in different directions, even a BIA can't get off the ground. Meanwhile, you get this strange imbalance where massive towers appear wherever developers can afford to override the rules through expensive rezoning, and stagnation everywhere else where smaller projects can't make it work. The city tries to preserve commercial corridors for tax reasons but ignores the long-term cost of neighborhood decline. Neighborhoods are living ecosystems. When they stop evolving, they stagnate.
This isn't a call for aggressive gentrification or tearing everything down for condos. It's a call for flexibility so neighborhoods can adapt to reality. What if commercial spaces with vacancies for X years could be converted to housing automatically? What if small-scale apartment buildings could be built as-of-right in struggling corridors? What if mixed-use didn't mean "retail or nothing" but included community space, daycares, or live-work units? The current system creates absurd outcomes: a site near transit with a future Ontario Line stop gets a 5-storey building with half the lot empty because the zoning forces commercial space nobody wants.
Meanwhile, just blocks south, different zoning allows actual density. And big developers can push through amendments while small builders are locked out, creating this imbalance where you either get massive towers or nothing. Queen East isn't fundamentally undesirable. Look at the Tridel and Fitzrovia projects west of Church. The difference isn't the street, it's that those developers had the resources to fight through years of rezoning. But that path isn't available for the smaller-scale, incremental development that could actually revitalize struggling stretches. The next time you pass a stretch of Toronto that feels empty or forgotten, remember it's not just economics. It's policy. It's zoning. And it's within our power to change it. Zoning needs to help neighborhoods evolve, not hold them back.
