Toronto's long push to regulate rooming houses starts Sunday
Multi-unit dwellings become legal across Toronto
Toronto's push to bring its illegal rooming houses into the light takes a major step forward Sunday, as rules legalizing the multi-unit dwellings across the city come into effect.
The long-debated, and controversial, licensing regime starts a three-year rollout by making six-unit rooming houses legal in every part of Toronto. It also requires all owners of the homes to register with the city and follow a number of new rules.
In December 2022, city council adopted a plan to make the multi-unit dwellings legal in every part of the city, where previously they'd only been permitted in the old city of Toronto, East York and York. But in reality, the council vote just acknowledged a truth most in the city knew, that rooming houses have been quietly operating across the city for decades.
"There have been rooming houses in Toronto as long as there has been a Toronto," said Housing Committee chair Coun. Gord Perks.
"When they're illegal, we don't know where they are, we don't know if they meet the fire code, we don't know if the tenants are being treated well."
The new regime requires rooming house owners to have a licence as of March 31. They'll be subject to inspections, need to have a property maintenance plan and have a process for tenants to request service.
Since at least 2008, city council and staff have explored how to get rid of the patchwork of rules that made rooming houses legal in some parts of Toronto and illegal in others. During the council debate that resulted in their legalization, former mayor John Tory stressed that the move would save lives.
He said that since 2011, at least 14 people have died in rooming house fires in the city. He contrasted that with the two people who have died in fires in legal and regulated rooming houses.
Rooming house tenants are 'hidden people': advocate
Bee Lee Soh is all too familiar with the dangers of Toronto's unregulated rooming houses. She said many rooming house tenants feel like "hidden people" in the city, with few rights and little recourse if they run into a bad situation.
She has lived in many rooming houses over the decades since arriving in Canada as a student. They were always the most affordable place she could find, but as a tenant she never knew if a landlord would properly maintain the house or if she'd suddenly find herself the target of mental or physical abuse.
She's lived in a rooming house basement where mould made her sick and forced her out. In another, she endured a flood, leaving that home behind. And in another, a landlord removed the refrigerator and locked her out of her space to force her to leave.
It created an endless cycle of instability where moving and hoping the next place would be better than the last. Now, Soh is in a city run shelter and advocating for better regulation of rooming houses.
"I was able to work, but at that time, even though I had a job I had a low income," she said. "For low income people, the only place you can afford is a rooming house, again. And that's where I lived."
Soh said she is happy the city is regulating rooming houses, but worries that landlords may pass on the cost of renovations to tenants. Or they may just evict people to come into compliance, she said.
"I'm thinking right, OK, you help the landlord, but can you do something to help the tenants?" she said, adding that a city subsidy for tenants displaced during the new transition period could help.
"We are fighting for that," she said.
Shutting down rooming houses not the answer: advocate
Affordable housing advocate Joy Connelly said Soh's experiences are precisely what Toronto's new licensing regime should try to prevent. She credits city staff for phasing in the new rules.
"They're taking a very thoughtful approach to enforcing provincial codes," she said. "So, more of a working together kind of approach, working with landlords, instead of zipping in and shutting houses down because they don't comply."
But Connelly worries the city's six-room cap on rooming houses in Scarborough, Etobicoke and North York is a problem. The policy could have a number of unintended consequences including forcing landlords to simply keep their houses out of the regime, continuing to run them underground, she said.
"Right now, the existing rooming houses are the most affordable housing available for single people," she said. "So that's students, that's newcomers, that's seniors. People who just have low incomes, this has been the place for them."
The executive director of the city's Municipal Licensing and Standards division, Carleton Grant, said a team of 29 people will bring the new rules into place by working with landlords and tenants.
"The impact is really about providing safe, viable options for the residents of our city," he said. "We have a diverse city and we need a diversity of housing needs."
Grant says the city's housing secretariat has a fund which will help landlords renovate their properties and bring them up to code. The city will also work closely with landlords who have rooming houses in the suburbs with more than six units to ensure they're not shut down and brought into compliance, he added.
"We will look at this address-by-address, property-by-property," he said. "There is no one size fits all."
New rules are not 'radical' or 'onerous': lawyer
Karen Andrews has practiced landlord and tenant law with the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario for over 30 years. She's seen rooming house tenants living in terrible conditions because some landlords refuse to comply with even basic property standards or fire code regulations.
"This is not radical. This is not onerous," she said of the new regulations. "This is just asking landlords in the private sector to follow the rules."
Andrews said that the amalgamation in 1998 that created the City of Toronto created a schism when it came to regulating rooming houses. The old city had done it for years and the suburbs resisted, she said.
And with the housing crisis now affecting every corner of the city, the suburbs can no longer turn a blind eye to the existence of rooming houses in their communities, she said.
"All the research is now indicating that there's a lot of poverty in the suburbs, and there's a lot of housing issues in the suburbs," she said. "(Rooming houses) are a part of the housing solution."
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