Zoning before zoning: the regulation of apartment housing in early twentieth century Winnipeg and Toronto

ʹResidential restrictionsʹ were widely used in North American cities prior to the development of more comprehensive zoning schemes. This paper examines the use of restrictive by-laws to control the spread of apartment housing in two Canadian cities, Toronto and Winnipeg, prior to World War II. In both cities apartment-house booms in the early 1910s and late 1920s were perceived as threatening the growth of suburban homeownership. Drawing on newspaper reports, council records and correspondence, as well as more quantitative local government records, it is argued that the apparently ʹpopulistʹ anti-apartment regulations in Toronto were actually more flexible and more favourable to developers than less extensive, but more rigid by-laws in Winnipeg. In both cities, the application of regulations both reflected and created distinctive social geographies. The paper indicates the need to focus on how residential restrictions were implemented on the ground as much as on debates surrounding the formulation of policy or the passage of legislation.