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According to its sales listing history, there used to be a five-plex in its place. But the structure, purchased in 2020 for $1.9 million, was flipped into a single-family home that’s now on the market for $4.7 million.

Across Toronto, homeowners are swapping multi-unit houses with tenants for polished and palatial single-family homes.

According to an ��published��by University of Toronto’s School of Cities in January, pc28����lost at least 200 units from 2017 to 2023 when multiplexes were converted into single-family homes. Most of��the “reno-ductions”��took place��in the west end, clustering around Roncesvalles, Parkdale and Davenport, with some extending south of the Danforth. This��“south-central”��part of the city, historically zoned for multiplexes,��is being gentrified and losing residents, the authors wrote.

The loss of older multiplexes comes at a cost for the city and for individuals living in those units. While the individuals lose rent-controlled, affordable housing and are left to face unaffordable market prices, the city loses the “gentle density” and the affordable housing that it’s working in other ways to create.

In 2023, pc28����legalized duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes citywide, allowing the multiplexes to be built without special permissions across the city. Previously, roughly 70 per cent of pc28����had been zoned exclusively for single-family homes. (Multiplexes with five or more units still require special permissions in most parts of the city.)

The change was meant to increase housing supply, but experts say those new units will be expensive because building or converting a house into a multiplex is a complex, lengthy and pricey process — one that cannot currently create affordable housing.

“(Building or adapting a multiplex) is actually very hard to do and quite expensive,” said Karen Chapple, director of the University of Toronto’s School of Cities. “So in some ways, the multiplex solution may not be the solution for housing affordability, except in terms of preserving the older ones.”

If that’s the case, why isn’t the city protecting them?

Why multiplexes are being razed for single-family homes

There are generally no barriers for homeowners to turn duplexes, triplexes or fourplexes��into megahouses.��

pc28����doesn’t require any special permissions��to convert as-of-right��multiplexes — which have a maximum of four units — into single-family homes, even though it does for the demolition of rental buildings with six or more units.

If a building with six or more rental units is slated for demolition or redevelopment, the owner must��comply with Toronto’s residential rental property demolition and conversion control bylaw, and provide tenants with replacement units at similar rents and assistance packages.

The only case in which replacements are not required is if all units have “above mid-range” rent; for example, if a one-bedroom unit costs more than $2,563.

Gord Perks, chair of Toronto’s planning and housing committee, told the Star the provincial government has given the city a “very clear signal” that it shouldn’t push harder on rental protections.

Recent amendments to Ontario’s Planning Act gave the minister of municipal affairs and housing the authority to regulate the tools municipalities use to control rental replacement,��Perks said.

And��when the��Ontario government signalled the rental replacement bylaw was under review, it sent a message that the city should “be careful” because it could lose its authority on the matter.

Plus, any provisions the city wants to change in its official plan have to be approved by Ontario’s minister of municipal affairs and housing, Perks said.

“We’re not being encouraged to expand our authority, we’re actually being legislated to diminish it,” Perks said. “So there’s a hard calculation you have to make about whether the planning environment is such that the province is going to grant you more room, or whether we’re in a position where they’re going to keep taking it away.”

Doug Ford’s government has already diminished some of the city’s powers, Perks said, for instance by changing rules around development charges and heritage designations.

Still, the Parkdale—High Park��councillor said Toronto��is ahead of any��other Ontario municipality��in protecting renters. It has taken steps in recent years to expand rental replacement rules, legalized multi-tenant housing (also known as rooming houses) citywide, and is developing a ��to prevent bad-faith evictions related to renovations, he added.

The office of the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Paul Calandra did not respond to the Star’s request for comment.

‘The issue is the loss of affordability’

Although new multiplexes provide lowrise housing options, environmental benefits and gentle density in areas with shrinking populations,��they don’t provide the same level of affordability that old multiplexes do, Chapple explained.

“The issue is the loss of affordability, more than even the loss of density,” Chapple said about the conversion of multiplexes into single-family homes.

According to a 2022 by the Urban Land Institute (ULI) for the City of Toronto, the costs of building a multiplex are so high that a typical homeowner would need to charge market rent in order for the conversion to be financially feasible. Conversions where the units compete directly with condos would more likely be feasible, and conversions in areas with higher rents would be more attractive to homeowners, the report found.

The study provided examples of budgets for multiplex conversions, laying out scenarios in which a $2-million house cost $2.6 million to convert and a $1.5-million house costs another $1.5 million to convert.

Richard Joy, the executive director of ULI, Toronto, agreed new multiplexes would be good for density, but not necessarily for affordability.

“Not only is it the case that the market would probably drive the units up to a level that is not affordable, but even if you wanted to make them affordable, very generously, the cost of doing a multiplex is, unfortunately, a lot more expensive than I think a lot of people imagine,” he said.

How pc28����can preserve density and affordability

Given that new multiplexes are so expensive to build, Chapple said the city should try to preserve the existing stock.

She said the only scenario in which homeowners face an “onerous process” to convert a multiplex into a single-family-home is if the property is on the Heritage Register.

“What other cities have been doing, which I think works pretty well, is in certain zones to limit the total square footage that a single-family home can have,” Chapple said.

Limiting the size of a single-family home to 3,000 square feet, for example, could prevent conversions of duplexes into “McMansions” while also preventing teardowns of smaller, more affordable homes, she explained.

pc28����could also apply rental replacement rules to multiplexes, Chapple said.

“From 2018 to 2022, the city approved nearly 2,500 replacement units at below-market rents, so it’s a fairly successful program,” she added.��

While experts agree that new multiplexes can’t provide affordable housing yet, they said governments can loosen requirements around development to make them more affordable to build and can provide incentives for developers to rent them out at affordable rates.

In Joy’s view, there are many “archaic” building code and fire code barriers that the city could change��to reduce costs. Simplifying requirements could reduce the costs of building a multiplex unit from $500,000, for example, to maybe $150,000, he said.

“There’s huge potential in our single-family neighbourhoods across the GTA and Toronto,” Joy said. “Literally hundreds and hundreds of condominiums worth of units that could be built without building condominiums.”

Chapple pointed out that��British Columbia��recently allowed buildings of up to six storeys to have only one exit stairwell��rather than two, something she said pc28����could do.

Michael Piper, an associate professor of urban design and architecture at the University of Toronto, said governments can make the process for these developments faster and cheaper by simplifying the approvals process.

He added that a recent, positive change is the removal of development charges for multiplexes.

Governments must also provide financial incentives to build multiplexes tied to affordability requirements, he said. For instance, they could provide a grant to builders with the requirement that recipients rent out the units at below-market rent.

It’s particularly important to incentivize “citizen developers,”��he added,��because they would be more likely��than large developers to provide��affordable prices.

“Owner-occupants have a different kind of economic pressure,” Piper said. “They’re just trying to make buying and owning a house more affordable.”