How MUCP Students Helped Reimagine Long-Term Care in Toronto’s Urban Core

Long-term care (LTC) is notoriously difficult to build in dense downtown locations. Traditional LTC facilities usually can’t achieve the height or density required to make these expensive sites viable. As a result, Toronto urgently needs 9,000 new long-term care beds.

Each year, the Multidisciplinary Urban Capstone Project (MUCP) at the University of Toronto challenges students to take on some of the city’s most pressing urban issues. These students, drawn from various programs, are placed into multidisciplinary teams, and each team is matched with community partners to develop practical, implementable interventions to address community-identified needs.

One of MUCP’s long-standing collaborators is HousingNowTO, a volunteer-driven advocacy group that explores how underused government-owned land can help meet Toronto’s housing and affordability needs.

Last year’s project stood out for its ambition and impact: a reimagining of long-term care to make it feasible in the downtown core, supported by contextual analysis and modelling using Ratio.City.

The Challenge: Unlocking Urban Land for Long-Term Care

Long-term care (LTC) is notoriously difficult to build in dense downtown locations. Traditional LTC facilities usually can’t achieve the height or density required to make these expensive sites viable. As a result, Toronto urgently needs 9,000 new long-term care beds.

The student team decided to explore a new model: placing long-term care on the podium levels of a mixed-use building, with residential housing above. This hybrid approach could unlock more sites for LTC development while supporting a mix of housing types, including affordable and workforce units.

A Multidisciplinary Team Tackles a Multidimensional Problem

HousingNowTO-MUCP projects begin with students designing according to current policy using official plan rules, height restrictions, setbacks, and other planning requirements. Almost every year, this reveals a hard truth: following today’s rules often makes building affordable units financially unattainable.

So students are pushed one step further.

David Roberts is an Associate Professor of Urban Studies in Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto, and acts as the academic director of the MUCP course.

He says, “We ask the team to start breaking the rules. Build a little bit higher, adjust the setbacks, rethink the parking requirements. Then they calculate what we lose when the rules stay the way they are.”

For example, a developer may reduce the number of affordable housing units because of the expense of parking requirements to make project math work.

This process helped the student team illustrate how enabling combined podium-level LTC and residential towers above – currently not allowed within various aspects of our land use guidelines - could unlock new development potential for sites that otherwise wouldn’t financially work.

Students calculated what they could achieve if current policy was relaxed

How Ratio.City Powered Evidence-Based Design

The students relied heavily on Ratio.City for portions of the project. They used it to:

• Model different building heights and configurations
• Analyze shadow impacts on surrounding streets and heritage sites
• Understand neighborhood context, including demographics and land use
• Iterate multiple massing scenarios quickly

Mark Richardson, the Senior Technical Lead at HousingNOWTO, is a long-time collaborator with MUCP. He noted how seamlessly the team took to the Ratio.City platform:

“We introduced them to the tool, gave them access and some training, and they were off. It was very self-serve and provided them with a communal workspace to iterate lots of variations of a site. And that’s exactly what students need on these tight timelines.”

The team used Ratio.City to understand neighbourhood context

A Model That Caught Policymakers’ Attention

MUCP aims for real-world impact, giving the student team an opportunity to have their idea come to life.

“Our goal,” Roberts says, “is not to have these be ephemeral test cases, but to actually get the ball rolling toward shovels in the ground.”

The team presented their case to the provincial government among other stakeholders. One of the biggest findings was that the model solves more than just a housing problem. It addresses employment requirements in major transit nodes, where provincial policy mandates certain job densities.

Long-term care generates more jobs than office space would in this case, especially given post-COVID work-from-home policies.

As Mark puts it:

“Long-term care allows for a lot more jobs than a regular office. And we didn’t change any exterior massing. We simply repurposed the floor plates internally.”

This makes the model significantly easier to implement.

A Design That Supports Health and Policy Reality

A major barrier in Ontario is that LTC and residential uses typically cannot share a building envelope under current rules. But the students were able to come up with a creative solution.

They explored post-COVID LTC regulations and developed a design with separate HVAC systems, elevators, and entrances, effectively creating a building on top of a building. The separation ensures health and safety standards are uncompromised.

The result is a practical, policy-informed concept that could easily be implemented.

Learning by Doing

MUCP’s success comes from its interdisciplinary format. Students trained in design, policy, and data analysis work side-by-side, mirroring how real urban development teams operate.
Roberts emphasizes the value of these experiences:

“We challenge them to take on issues that don't have easy answers. Tools like Ratio.City help them understand the challenges deeply, and that makes their creative solutions that much stronger.”

Students also present their completed work to actual developers, planners, and public-sector partners. The feedback they provide fine-tunes the final project, before it becomes public.

The Final Project

MUCP and HousingNowTO’s final report is available to the public. As in past years, the team makes their findings publicly available so that other students and city builders across Canada can learn from their work. The more research and solutions that become available, the more housing gets built.

As Richardson says, “We want people to steal our homework.”

The full report can be read here

A Promising Path Forward

With Toronto facing massive demand for long-term care and scarce land in transit-connected neighbourhoods, the concept developed by the students is gaining traction.

Mark is optimistic:

“I’m pretty sure some version of it will move forward. The demand is there, and the model solves more than one problem at once.”

For MUCP students, that’s the ultimate reward: seeing a Capstone project gain traction with the people who can turn it into reality.