As part of the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design’s Fall 2025 Public Programming, Janna Levitt, Samantha Eby and Michael Piper introduced the work of ReHousing and our catalogue-based approach to housing design.

With:
LGA Architectural Partners and The University of Toronto

Date:
November 13, 2025

Event Team
Michael Piper, Samantha Eby, Janna Levitt

Overview

The lecture presented key research findings, highlighting LGA’s commissioned National Housing Catalogue, and introduced ReHousing’s new web platform for citizen-developers. Together, these initiatives demonstrate how systemic, replicable design strategies can accelerate the delivery of much-needed housing across Canadian cities.

What’s actually missing? 

The "missing middle" is not just a middle in building scale, but it also exists in a feasibility gap. Small buildings and large buildings in Toronto tend to be built as part of large-scale developments. This history of building big makes it difficult to build small - but we're exploring carefully-calibrated design and policy that can unlock the possibilities of medium, ground-oriented development in Toronto.

Catalogue Housing

From the fourplex to the sixplex to the small apartment, our research highlights both the potential and the challenges of building small. We explore how evolving policy frameworks can translate into design opportunities—and how design research, in turn, can inform policy.

While the design of a single small building on a single site may seem incremental, when understood as part of a replicable framework, their collective impact becomes significant.

At ReHousing, we are constantly trying to navigate these two scales—the urban and the human—linking technical, quantitative analysis with the lived experience of housing.

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