Toronto wrangles with a simple question: What is a multiplex?

Globe and Mail

a day ago

Brendan Charters runs a 15-year-old design-build firm, Eurodale Developments, which specializes in custom homes. He is diversifying, like a growing number of Greater Toronto Area home-building firms, into multiplexes due both to demand and planning reforms intended to enable more missing middle-type housing. –
But, like many contractors who have dipped their toes into this new (but actually old) market, he's come face-to-face with a slippery question: What, exactly, is a multiplex?
According to the City of Toronto, a multiplex built in neighbourhoods zoned for low-rise residential can have up to four units. Council's planning and housing committee next week [June 12] will begin considering whether to stretch that definition, so multiplexes can have up to six units, with apartment buildings re-defined as anything with seven or more.
However, as Mr. Charters and others – including city planning officials – have discovered, such calculations are anything but straightforward. Take the example of two semi-detached houses that could each become fourplexes. 'We're actually building one or two of these now,' he says. 'We slipped in before the City of Toronto started to say, 'Wait a second, these are duplexes. We can't fourplex them because they're semi-detached duplexes.''
In other cases, city planning examiners have deemed that such conjoined projects are actually small apartment buildings, which council has voted to allow in areas such as major streets but nonetheless run into opposition from neighbours and committees of adjustment.
To confront these ambiguities, city planning staff will also propose additional categories – e.g., 'detached houseplexes' or 'semi-detached houseplexes' – to capture anomalies in the original multiplex bylaw, based on in-depth analysis they carried out on the first 222 multiplex applications submitted for approval (as of last summer).
Yet another twist in this definitional maze focuses on the number of bedrooms in a given unit within a multiplex. At the same committee meeting, councillors will get their first look at a staff proposal to cap the number of bedrooms in a multiplex – a move that has left Mr. Charters wondering whether the city genuinely wants to enable more family-sized rental housing at smaller scales, per council's various missing-middle policies.
'When the planning department rolled this out to us as an industry, I said, 'What's the number?' They said there's a mathematical formula that's being devised. But I was also told one of our projects, that has a four-bedroom unit and two two-bedroom units, would be fine. The fear is that [such projects] would contravene the rooming house bylaw.'
The city's attempt to regulate the number of bedrooms touches some tricky planning questions. While council has been pushing the development industry for almost two decades to build more two- and three-bedroom apartments in order to allow families with children to live in high-rises, the market reality is that condos of that size tend to be very expensive and difficult for young families to afford. What's more, demand for apartments with several bedrooms includes older people who are downsizing as well as students or unrelated adults who need to share larger apartments in order to afford rent.
Yet when planning officials analyzed the first 222 multiplex proposals, they noticed a handful where each unit had six to nine bedrooms, which suggested that the builders weren't thinking about families. In effect, a single multiplex with four such apartments might have up to 20 to 30 bedrooms in total, making it for all intents and purposes a rooming house. The planning department's solution will be to impose a limit on the total number of bedrooms in a given multiplex, but allow the builder to decide how to distribute them among the units.
Mr. Charters says he understands the city's desire to avoid inadvertently the development of rooming houses when there's already a formal process for licensing them. But, he adds, the bedroom cap 'is confusing for the marketplace. It creates another wrinkle of unpredictability for us.'
The city's efforts to remove other obstacles to multiplex applications has also included a review of what happens with these kinds of proposals when they go to committees of adjustment. Since council began adopting more permissive zoning regulations in areas long set aside for detached houses, the committees have turned back missing-middle type projects, even if they generally conformed with council's goal of promoting 'gentle density.'
With multiplex projects that have to pass muster with the committee of adjustment, city planners will now be expected to submit their professional opinions to help the members understand how such proposals fit within council's broader policy aims.
Yet the roadblocks include perverse incentives created not by the planning bylaws but rather by development charges and the financial incentives council has adopted to encourage such projects. Development charges, which can run to tens of thousands of dollars, are waived for multiplexes, and deferred for garden suites and laneway houses.
Some builders have sought to maximize the density on a lot by applying to build a four-unit multiplex with a garden suite in the back. But, according to architect Craig Race, whose firm, Lanescape, specializes in such projects, contractors who want to build both simultaneously can find themselves on the receiving end of large development charge fees.
'You're allowed to do both as of right in the zoning by law,' he says. 'But the way staff are choosing to interpret the development charge bylaw, they're forcing you to build them out of sequence.' In other words, the contractor must first build the multiplex, and can only then begin with the garden or laneway suite, even though it makes sense, logistically and financially, to do both at the same time. As Mr. Race says, 'It's extremely inefficient.'
One small contractor, who asked not to be named for fear of jeopardizing an approval, found himself facing $400,000 in development charges because he'd tried to do both at once, thereby triggering levies on all five units – a financial burden that has made the project difficult to justify commercially. Mr. Race adds that there's a lack of consistency in how city officials deal with this problem. 'Some staff have been trained to watch out for that. Others have not.'