Last year, Andrea Adams and Evan Van Dyk struck an unusual bargain: She would build a house in her backyard near Toronto's Dufferin Grove park, and he and his family would get a contract to live there till 2037. It's an example of 'gentle density,' in which new housing grows alongside existing stock.Laura Proctor/The Globe and Mail
Andrea Adams is getting new neighbours in her backyard. This month, the Torontonian will finish building a 1,400-square-foot house at the end of her long, skinny lot. “It’s nice to have a big backyard, but it’s a little hard to justify when the pressure on housing is so great,” said Ms. Adams, who is executive director at the social housing organization St. Clare’s.
Instead, she will share the garden with Evan Van Dyk, Stasia Rossinsky and their five-year-old son as they settle into the new house. Mr. Van Dyk’s family has a contract to rent the house until 2037, when their son will likely graduate high school. The unorthodox arrangement, Mr. Van Dyk said, allows them to live on the edge of downtown, near the lively Dufferin Grove Park and a subway station.
“This is a location we love,” he explained, standing in the red-tiled kitchen as morning sun poured through large wood-framed windows. “And this lets us find a way to live here.”
The couple and Ms. Adams joined forces in early 2023. She already had plans from architects Denegri Bessai Studio to build the laneway house. The three reached a financial arrangement and then broke ground that summer. They expect the house to cost roughly $575,000 to build.
In the end, a property that housed only one family will now house two. This is the promise of “gentle density,” which is frequently cited as a response to Canada’s housing shortage. The term refers to backyard houses and small apartment buildings known as multiplexes.
Laneway houses, like the Dufferin Park project, and multiplexes, like this development across town in the Annex, are ways to add density to a neighbourhood.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
In recent years, governments across the country have re-examined their planning regulations to allow more homes to be constructed in existing neighbourhoods and at a modest scale that politicians and homeowners are likely to accept. The concept has taken on new urgency as the federal government has used billions in funding to push cities and, more recently, provincial governments to end single-family zoning and put multiunit buildings in urban neighbourhoods across the country.
The idea of mixing apartments and houses is being embraced by many Canadian cities and by the B.C. government. However, there remains strong opposition elsewhere, notably in Ontario. Last month, Ontario Premier Doug Ford said it would be “a massive mistake” to allow four-unit apartments by default.
Yet federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser has cast gentle density as a key strategy to address Canada’s worsening housing shortage, which has cut many people out of home ownership and caused rents to soar, while also imperilling the Liberal government.
“I think there’s the potential for this to create thousands of homes in individual municipalities,” Mr. Fraser said in a recent interview. “We’re creating a new opportunity for smaller builders to build more units than they currently are, and to bring more people into the homebuilding space.”
However, experts say transforming Canada’s housing market with such gentle solutions will be a heavy lift. Canada needs an estimated 5.8 million homes by 2030, according to a Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. analysis. While every new home helps, can three- or four-unit buildings make a meaningful impact on that problem? Or is gentle density a distraction from the larger changes that must come to Canada’s neighbourhoods?
From a distance, downtown Vancouver looks dense, but the city's overall land use is inefficient. Twelve per cent of the homes are spread out over 55 per cent of the total area.Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press
A central issue in Canada’s housing crisis has to do with space: where Canadian homes are, and how much room they take up. Houses sit on most of the residential land in Canada, and are in many cases not fully occupied. Baby boomers are opting to age in place, leaving empty bedrooms across the country.
Mr. Fraser sees this as an opportunity. “We need to build more homes and we need to build them by the millions, so we need to implement all feasible solutions,” he said. “But … there’s a giant opportunity staring us in the face. About half the households are in single-family housing, and they represent an overwhelming majority of the residentially zoned land.”
For instance, according to the City of Vancouver, 55 per cent of that city’s land area contains only 12 per cent of its homes. In Toronto, 31 per cent of the city, or roughly two-thirds of its residential land, was until recently zoned only for detached houses.
Mr. Fraser said his government is attempting to encourage the zoning and construction of small apartments in cities. He said these could be built in some cases by small entrepreneurs and homeowners; in others, by builders who specialize in such projects. Federal initiatives will include industrial policy to create prefabrication of housing components; the government announced $100-million in funding for this purpose on April 5. Other measures include a promised catalogue of standardized designs for small buildings; measures to ensure financing is available through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.; and advocating for changes to city planning to make these legal.
However, Mr. Fraser’s main agenda has been zoning reform, which the government has pursued using a carrot-and-stick combination of political pressure and money. Mr. Fraser has publicly communicated with mayors, demanding they change such policies – often to allow four homes on each lot – in exchange for support from the government’s Housing Acceleration Fund. Some cities, such as Windsor, Ont., have refused; others, including Vancouver and Toronto, have made deals.
With this effort, Mr. Fraser and the Trudeau government are wading into a years-long debate on planning reform. Until earlier this decade, planning regulations favoured houses in many urban neighbourhoods and generally did not permit apartments. This single-family zoning has been heavily criticized over the past decade, both in the United States and Canada. Cities here including Vancouver, Edmonton and Toronto have altered their rules to legalize apartments in more places.
Such planning reform has many benefits. Generally, “infill” housing makes it significantly cheaper for cities to provide services than in car-dependent sprawl. A 2021 study from the City of Ottawa found that infill homes more than pay their share of services, while new subdivision houses are a fiscal drain. Infill also can use existing infrastructure; bring people into neighbourhoods where the population is shrinking and aging; and cut the amount of driving, reducing carbon emissions.
Apartment housing, like this complex under construction in Calgary, once had more room to thrive in Canadian cities until postwar policies favoured single- and multifamily houses.Louis Oliver/The Globe and Mail
Historically, Canadian cities included apartments almost everywhere. But in the postwar years, multifamily and single-family houses were segregated into different places: In most cities, apartments were generally allowed only on busy streets and in downtowns.
A reverse trend began 15 years ago, when Vancouver allowed laneway houses to be built in some city backyards. Today, architect Bryn Davidson runs a company, Lanefab, which specializes in designing and building these homes. He sees great potential for the model to grow. “For 15 years now, this has become part of Vancouver’s housing stock,” Mr. Davidson said. “If planning rules become looser, there’s potential for this to grow all over the city.”
The starting numbers are relatively small. So far in Vancouver, roughly 2,000 have been built, or about 150 a year. In Toronto, gentle-density zoning reform began later, and the effects have been more muted. The city legalized laneway suites in 2018 and then “garden suites,” on lots without a back lane, in 2022. According to a study by Jeff Allen and Ahmad Al-Musa of the University of Toronto School of Cities, just 192 rear-yard suites have been built in Toronto from January, 2013, to December, 2023.
But there is precedent for a wider application of this approach – in California. The state has a population comparable to Canada’s and an acute statewide housing crisis. Since 1982, successive bills in the state legislature have forced municipalities to allow accessory dwelling units, or ADUs. An ADU in some cases can be a separate building in a backyard; in others, a portion of a house – such as a garage – can be converted into a separate dwelling.
Karen Chapple, head of the University of Toronto’s School of Cities, noted that in some cities in California, ADUs account for one-fifth of all new homes. “That’s showing up now on the ground in real units.… It’s part of the vernacular there; it is in the mainstream‚” said Dr. Chapple, a former Californian who has extensively studied the state’s housing crisis. “That is realistic for Canada; I don’t see why not.”
On the other hand, it took decades for that change to materialize, said Shane Phillips, a researcher at the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. For 30 years, “almost no ADUs were getting built,” he said. Municipalities generally resisted ADUs by imposing fees and regulations that made them difficult or impossible to build. The state “played a game of Whac-a-Mole,” Mr. Phillips said, culminating with two bills in 2016 that standardized regulation. “At that point, the rules had changed enough so things broke through.”
Mr. Phillips said pro-housing efforts have consistently come up against pushback from local authorities who are influenced by homeowners opposed to change. “It shows the importance of a legislature or council sticking with it year after year, identifying problems you couldn’t have foreseen, and also closing loopholes that cities deliberately find to undermine the law,” Mr. Phillips said.
A drywall worker chats with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Housing Minister Sean Fraser, far left, at a condo tower under construction in Toronto. Pushing for more density in cities can sometimes be a source of friction between levels of government.Cole Burston/The Canadian Press
Mr. Fraser says his government is aware of tensions between different levels of government and is working to resolve them. “There are communities that are very excited to make these changes,” he said. “Others are worried about the local politics because communities sometimes reject change,” he said. “We want to make sure it’s possible to build these things and not just that they’re making changes on paper.”
He said the federal government is focusing specifically on fourplexes – a key zoning requirement for cities to access the Housing Accelerator Fund and for provinces to get money from a recently announced infrastructure fund – because four units is the “tipping point” when such gentle density makes financial sense to develop in many places in Canada. In other words, a four-unit redevelopment generates enough revenue to pay for the cost of a lot and construction, plus enough of a financial return to make redevelopment attractive.
Edmonton has led the way on multiplex zoning, which it has done in phases over the past five years. In 2024, the city enacted a new zoning designation that allows up to eight units across a wide swath of the city.
In the first three months under the new policy, the city received 24 applications for multiple-unit housing projects in these areas, totalling 180 units, said spokesperson Karen Burgess. All were for row houses, often with accessory units behind them; none were for apartment buildings.
This is “early indication that our new regulations are working as intended to support the development of multiunit housing,” Ms. Burgess said. “The majority of these approved developments represents a sevenfold increase in density where a single detached house previously existed, without the requirement to invest in new capital for infrastructure.”
However, in Toronto or Vancouver, where the housing crisis is most acute, multiplex zoning that has been put in place so far may not be enough to make redevelopment economical.
Toronto architect Jaegap Chung, a principal of Studio JCI, says there is strong potential for multiplex building in that city – but only at a larger scale and with specific conditions. He said multiplex development “absolutely can work, if we straighten out the zoning and show people what is possible.”
Mr. Chung also runs CLIP Homes, which aims to design and build multiplexes using factory-made components. These projects, of which two are complete using conventional construction and one is now in construction with CLIP’s technology, are four- and fiveplex buildings with apartments as large as 1,200 square feet. They are designed as “really livable, high-quality homes,” Mr. Chung said, “with a much better quality of life than you find in a high-rise at the same price point.”
He said that the recipe for successful projects will be predictable zoning and financing for at least five units, and the ability to construct at least 5,000 square feet of floor area. “The balancing act is between the approval process (of smaller projects) and financial viability (in favour of larger projects),” he said.
Mr. Davidson, in Vancouver, offered a similar formula. “I think the future is going to be a group of professional builders figuring out how to make this work,” he said.
This multiplex in the Annex is one of the projects Leonid Kotov and his firm, Greenstreet Flats, are working on to add gentle density to Toronto.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Builder Leonid Kotov is already solving the puzzle of multiplex construction in Toronto. His company Greenstreet Flats is building three multiplex projects.
“There’s a real opportunity here,” he said recently, sitting at the white quartz countertop of a bright new apartment in a Greenstreet development. “There’s a ton of houses in the city, and some people are going to try it, and more power to them.”
A 10-unit project his company built north of the city’s downtown, near Casa Loma, replaced a single house. Because of the tighter planning laws still in place when he began the project in 2019, the new units are broken up into two separate fourplex buildings, each with a laneway suite in the backyard. The apartments are fully rented, Mr. Kotov said, and he described the project as meeting financial expectations.
And yet, his ambition has limits. His firm, one of very few in this market niche right now, aims to finish five buildings a year. That is a significant change, given that Toronto has built almost no apartments at this scale since the 1970s. On the other hand, the current housing shortage is orders of magnitude larger. Toronto had roughly 30,000 housing starts last year, according to CMHC data, and housing analysts agree that number must increase dramatically. To reach the targets set by Ottawa in this month’s budget, homebuilding would need to double.
Much of the discourse around gentle density both in the U.S. and in some Canadian cities suggests homeowners can become developers and builders themselves. Mayor Olivia Chow, in an interview last October, pointed to this path: “We need to turn houses into triplexes, and we can create thousands of units that way,” she told The Globe. “Many of these single-family homes used to be multigenerational. Now if you add different units, you can rent out part of your house, make some money, and also maybe live together with a grandmother or grandfather.”
Mayor Olivia Chow sees multiplexes as a promising way to add new housing stock in Toronto.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Craig Race, a Toronto architect who specializes in laneway homes and multiplexes, argues that it’s possible for some homeowners to take on this type of development themselves.
“At the smaller end, these are projects that ordinary people can do,” said Mr. Race, whose office is now working on several multiplex projects. To construct a multiplex from the ground up is a $3-million to $5-million project including the land costs, he said. But financing from CMHC’s MLI Select program, which supports multifamily buildings, can narrow the gap. If an individual owns a property that can be developed, it is possible for them to put down “a few hundred thousand dollars in equity,” he said, and end up as the landlord of a four- or five-unit building.
But not many “ordinary people” own a lot in Toronto and can access the capital to do such work. “Even if you can, it’s a complicated process,” Dr. Chapple said. While she believes that garden suites or laneway suites could become a popular option, she questions the potential for amateur developers to build multiplexes. “If it’s your home, you have to move out and in many cases demolish your home,” she pointed out. “I don’t think it’s likely that many people will do that.”
Even for Mr. Kotov, the logic of development points to larger buildings. He plans to grow his business by moving into apartment buildings up to six storeys, which Toronto plans to make legal in some select places. “The next step for us is to go bigger,” he said.
Ms. Adams, meanwhile, acknowledges that her one-house development project is not for everyone. “This is a niche life hack,” she said with a laugh. “But until we solve the housing crisis at a greater scale, we need to look for all these little solutions.”
Ms. Adams and Mr. Van Dyk, soon to be neighbours, are happy with their arrangement but realistic about how many other homeowners might try something like it.Laura Proctor/The Globe and Mail
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