Nineteenth century and earlier Few structures survive from the earliest period of Toronto's history. The oldest residence, and structure still standing, in Toronto is
Scadding Cabin. Completed in 1794, Scadding Cabin is presently used as a heritage museum after it was relocated to
Exhibition Place next to the
Fort Rouillé site. Finished in 1807,
John Cox Cottage, on Broadview Avenue, just north of East Chinatown, is the oldest known house in the city still used as a residence. is an example of
Georgian architecture popular with Toronto's elite during the early 19th century and the house was later moved to its present site. Two of Toronto's oldest surviving brick houses are
Campbell House and
The Grange. Both are brick structures built in the
Georgian style during the first half of the 19th century, reflecting the tastes of Toronto's elite in that era. Although the Georgian style had long been out of favour in the United States, it remained popular in Toronto, with residents hesitant to adopt
early American architectural styles. In
Loyalist-dominated
Upper Canada, the style was embraced with fervour in part because of its British connections. Incongruously, it had also fallen out of fashion in Britain by this time, where it was considered outmoded, but in Toronto, it remained popular until the 1850s. When the
Colonial revival was embraced in the United States in the 1890s, Georgian architecture also returned to Toronto. Structures continue to be built in the style today. It has been especially popular with the city's elite and many Georgian manors can be found in wealthy neighbourhoods such as
Rosedale and the
Bridle Path. style is a Victorian residential design unique to Toronto. The late nineteenth century Torontonians embraced
Victorian architecture and all of its diverse revival styles. Victorian-style housing dominates a number of the city's older neighbourhoods, most notably
Cabbagetown,
Trinity-Bellwoods,
Parkdale,
Rosedale, and
The Annex. These neighbourhoods hold some of the largest collections of Victorian houses in North America. During this period Toronto also developed some unique styles of housing. The
bay-and-gable house was a simple and cost effective design that also aped the elegance of Victorian mansions. Built of the abundant red brick, the design was also well suited to the narrow lots of Toronto. Mostly built in lower and middle class areas the style could be used both for town houses, semi-detached, and stand alone buildings. Hundreds of examples still survive in neighbourhoods such as Cabbagetown and Parkdale. A residential architectural style unique to Toronto is the
Annex style house. Built by the city's wealthy and mostly found in the neighbourhood they are named after, these houses contain diverse and eclectic elements borrowed from dozens of different styles. These houses are built of a mix of brick and sandstone,
turrets,
domes, and other ornamentation abound.
Rise of the suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s, many suburban neighbourhoods of Toronto encouraged high-density populations by mixing housing lots with apartment buildings far from the downtown core. The post war years and the rise of the personal automobile saw the rapid rise of the suburbs, as occurred across North America. The most important suburban development was that of
Don Mills in
North York. Begun in 1952, it was the first planned community in Canada, and it initiated many practices that would become standard in Toronto suburbs. The Don Mills project put into practice many of the ideas of the
Garden city movement, based on the ideas developed by Sir
Ebenezer Howard, creating a multi-use community focused on distinct neighbourhoods. The earliest suburbs in North York, Scarborough, and Etobicoke mostly consisted of small single family homes often
bungalows. Over time suburban houses have grown in size and moved away from the simplistic post-war designs embracing the
neo-eclectic style. Toronto suburbs are different in character than those of other North American cities. During the 1960s and 1970s, city planners tried to curb sprawl by encouraging high population density in the suburbs, with many modernist "Tower in the Park" style apartment complexes scattered across the suburbs, with several Toronto boroughs working to build their own central business districts and move beyond being bedroom suburbs to being centres of business and industry as well. This has had mixed results; this policy has made Toronto overall denser than most other North American cities, which has reduced sprawl and made it easier to provide city services such as mass transit. At the same time, planners avoided creating
mixed-use areas, forcing suburban residents to work and shop elsewhere.
Apartments and high-rise condominium , based on
Le Corbusier's "
towers in the park" concept. The postwar years also saw the rise of apartment-style housing. In the 1960s and 1970s, this kind of housing was mostly focused on low to middle income residents. Beginning in the 1950s, the city bulldozed older lower-income neighbourhoods, replacing them with housing projects, ultimately destroying large sections of Victorian housing. The earliest and most notorious example of such projects was
Regent Park. It replaced a large portion of Cabbagetown with a series of low-rise and high-rise buildings that quickly became crime-ridden and even more depressed than the neighbourhood it replaced. In later years, similar projects such as
Moss Park and
Alexandra Park were less disastrous, but also far from successful. Canada's densest community,
St. James Town, was built in this era as a high-rise community of private and public housing in separate towers, also replacing a Victorian neighbourhood. These patterns changed dramatically beginning in the 1970s and
gentrification began transforming once poor neighbourhoods, such as Cabbagetown, into some of the city's most popular and expensive real estate. and completed in 1969. Outside of the core, even new neighbourhoods experienced significant high-rise apartment building construction, as builders embraced the "
towers in the park" design, invented by
Le Corbusier. The towers were built further from the sidewalk, leaving room on the property around the edifice for parking, lawns, trees, and other landscaping. They are typically simple, brick-clad high-rise buildings with rectangular footprints and little ornamentation other than repeating series of
balconies for each apartment. However, some apartment buildings from this era utilize less conventional designs in the "tower in the park" format, such as the Prince Arthur Towers, Jane-Exbury Towers and 44 Walmer Road designed by
Uno Prii. In 1972, the Canadian tax code was radically altered making rental housing much less attractive to investors. At the same time,
deindustrialization opened a number of new areas to residential development. The new projects took the form of high-rise
condominiums. This form of housing was introduced in the province's Condominium Act in the 1960s, but it was not until the 1980s that condos become very popular. An initial condo boom started in 1986, but the market collapsed in the
late 1980s and early 1990s recession, and many investors were badly mauled. In 1995, condo prices were still 30 percent below the earlier highs. That year,
a new boom began in Toronto that has continued to this day. An unprecedented number of new projects have been built in Toronto. In 2000,
Condo Life magazine listed 152 separate projects underway within the city of Toronto. By 2007, the number of projects in the
Greater Toronto Area had reached 247. This development has led to some observers, such as Natalie Alcoba of the
National Post, calling the
Manhattanization of Toronto in reference to
the densely built-up island borough of New York City. , made up of high-rises built during the early 21st century. This development has been concentrated in the downtown core, especially in the former industrial areas just outside the central business district. The largest such project is
CityPlace, a cluster of condo towers on former railway lands by the lake shore. This $2 billion project will eventually consist of 20 different towers housing some 12,000 people.
Transit-oriented developments are also common in Toronto, such as at
North York Centre and Sheppard Avenue East along the
namesake subway line and Sheppard West along the subway line's future westward extension to
Sheppard West station.
Secondary suites Secondary suites have been permitted in Toronto since 2012 with laneway housing being permitted since 2018 and garden suites being permitted since 2020. ==Commercial architecture==