What the Thorncliffe Park Fire Teaches Us About Richmond Hill’s Housing Shortage.
The complexity of the recent five-alarm fire at 11 Thorncliffe Park Drive serves as a stark, smoky backdrop to one of Toronto’s most pressing urban debates: how to balance the desperate need for new housing with the non-negotiable demands of public safety.
The following opinion piece explores this tension, arguing that while the Thorncliffe incident underscores the necessity of rigorous fire codes, we must—and can—modernize our approval processes to build faster without cutting corners on safety.
The recent fire at 11 Thorncliffe Park Drive was not your typical high-rise blaze. It was, in the words of Toronto Fire Chief Jim Jessop, like a cigar burning slowly deep within the building’s bones. For days, smoke curled from the expansion joints—the narrow, inaccessible gaps between towers filled with combustible insulation—while over 400 residents were displaced, unsure if they would have a home to return to. The fire was stubborn, complex, and incredibly difficult to extinguish, requiring engineers and firefighters to collaborate on a strategy to surgically cut into the building’s structure.
This terrifying incident is a real-time stress test of our built environment. It is a visceral reminder of why building codes, and specifically fire codes, exist. They are not merely bureaucratic hurdles; they are the ghost in the machine that keeps a stubborn fire from becoming a tragedy. When we look at the charred expansion joints of Thorncliffe Park, we see exactly why inspectors are so meticulous.
However, this commitment to safety is currently colliding with another crisis: Toronto’s desperate shortage of housing.
Across the city, developers and housing advocates are sounding the alarm on approval times. It can take months, sometimes years, to get a shovel in the ground. A significant portion of this delay is attributed to the verification of codes, including the Ontario Building Code and Fire Code. City planners and inspectors are tasked with a monumental job: reviewing thousands of pages of technical drawings to ensure that every egress window, every sprinkler system, and every expansion joint meets the highest standards of safety.
Currently, this verification process acts as a bottleneck. As pressure mounts to build 1.5 million homes across Ontario, the red tape of safety inspections is increasingly scrutinized. The frustration is palpable. When a project is stalled for weeks waiting for a stamp of approval on a fire safety plan, it feels like the system is broken. In a city where rents are skyrocketing and vacancy rates are near zero, time is literally money, and more importantly, it is shelter denied to those who need it.
But here lies the trap: it is easy to frame this as a binary choice. We are told we must choose between the red tape of safety and the efficiency of construction. This is a false dichotomy.
No one—not the developers, not the city, and certainly not the future residents—is against enforcing safety codes. The memory of the Grenfell Tower fire in London, or the recent visuals from Thorncliffe Park, are enough to silence anyone suggesting we deregulate fire safety. We know that modern buildings are complex machines; they use new materials and denser designs that require rigorous oversight. The fire at Thorncliffe Park proved that even established buildings can harbor complex risks; new builds, with their focus on density, need even more scrutiny, not less.
Yet, we cannot accept the status quo where safety is a synonym for delay. There must be a compromise—not on the standards of safety, but on the efficiency of the process.
We can have both safe buildings and fast approvals. The solution lies in modernizing how we verify compliance.
First, we need to embrace technology. The days of rolling out physical blueprints should be behind us. Automated code-checking software, which uses Building Information Modeling (BIM), can instantly scan digital building plans to flag potential code violations before a human inspector even looks at them. This doesn’t replace the expert eye of a Fire Chief, but it clears the low-hanging fruit, allowing human experts to focus on complex, high-risk elements—like the unique structural gaps at Thorncliffe Park.
Second, we need to resource our approval departments like the emergency services they essentially are. If we treat the housing crisis as an emergency, then the department responsible for approving housing should be staffed accordingly. We need more qualified fire protection engineers and building inspectors working for the city, perhaps working in parallel rather than largely sequential workflows.
Third, we should look toward standardized, pre-approved designs for mid-rise buildings. If a fire safety plan for a specific building model has been approved once, it should not need to be re-litigated from scratch for every new site. This catalog approach could shave months off approval times for standard housing projects.
The fire at 11 Thorncliffe Park is a warning. It shows us that buildings are vulnerable and that fire is a patient, devious enemy. We must respect the code. But we must also respect the needs of the thousands of Ontarians including Richmond Hill residents waiting for a home. By investing in technology, staffing, and smarter processes, we can build a city that is both safe enough to sleep in and built fast enough to live in. We do not need to choose between a safe home and a new home; we just need the political will to build the system that delivers both.