Fraternities, sororities not bending to city's order to get rooming house licences

More than five months after being ordered to apply for rooming house licences, not one of the city's fraternities and sororities has done so, city staff say.

And next week, licensing staff will meet with Toronto Fire Service officials to decide what their next steps will be.

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"This isn't some covert operation to shut down fraternities," said Coun. Joe Cressy, who represents the Annex neighbourhood where most of the city's 26 frats and sororities are located.

"Rather it's to ensure that they're safe places and I fully expect and anticipate that they will become licensed."

After years of exemptions, council voted in May to require frats and sororities to apply annually for rooming house licences. 

Fines for operating a rooming house without a licence can be as high as $5,000, city staff say.

By bringing frats under the rooming house umbrella, city inspectors will be able to enter the premises for annual inspections "to address issues of noise, waste, and behaviour," a staff report last spring notes.

At present, inspectors only respond to individual complaints of frat house misdeeds.

According to the May report, the city has received 166 complaints from residents about frat houses and sororities in the Annex since 2013, most of them related to excess noise and garbage.

Frat members and alumni approached by CBC Toronto Tuesday wouldn't talk about the new rules. But stats in the May report show the number of complaints against the houses has been dwindling year by year, from 49 in 2014 to just five by March 2018.

The application process will give community groups the right to have their say before a house's licence is renewed — a right that the Annex Residents Association (ARA) says it will be exercising.

"We will be around to ensure that those that don't play by the rules are going to be shut down," said David Sterns, chair of the ARA's fraternity liaison committee.

"That's going to be our intention."

He said there have been no problems with sororities, and the majority of frat houses in the neighbourhood have also been co-operative.

But he also said "five or six" frats are guilty of "loud, drunken disorderly conduct; hundreds of people attending parties, and then you had the usual mayhem in the streets around 2 o'clock in the morning."

CBC Toronto contacted two of the fraternities that had been identified by Sterns as troublesome — Phi Kappa Sigma and Delta Kappa Epsilon — both on St. George Street. Representatives from both fraternities refused to comment.

Cressy emphasized that it's not the city's intention to shut down any of the houses, and that he's confident they'll all comply with the new regimen.

"In my experience at the city things are never as quick as they should be," he said. "That's why we have to keep pushing."