Next city council should address differences in rooming house rules across Toronto: committee

City council has avoided settling on a single city-wide standard for years but, faced with rising numbers of complaints from residents, along with threats of a human-rights challenge by advocates, it has brought it up again.

The committee on Wednesday, Aug. 20, approved a plan promising extensive consultation, including "tailored and localized" meetings, "in areas identified by local councillors and city staff as having rooming house-related complaints, such as neighbourhoods near post-secondary institutions."

Councillors were told owners of rooming houses, both legal and illegal, will be asked to participate, so city officials can understand the "full sum of issues" involved.

North York Councillor Shelley Carroll said they had better be prepared to run those meetings in a"non-political and an upfront way" so that "everyone feels safe in the room."

The usual conversation on illegal rooming houses in her area "gets racist in about five minutes," she said, suggesting it’s fortunate the consultation would take place next year, after October’s municipal election, "when we can all be grown-ups."

To rush it, Carroll predicted, will provoke "an explosion."

You might be interested in

{{type}}

{{title}}

• Dec 31, 1969
• Comments

{{type}}

{{title}}

• Dec 31, 1969
• Comments

Such strong feelings are involved in North York, East York and in Scarborough – where it’s legal to rent two rooms and a separate apartment in a house, but not three rooms - that ¬sympathetic councillors from those former cities buried the issue and continued calling for better enforcement of existing bylaws to shut rooming houses down.

A report and consultations, promised for 2011, was not done, and in 2013, when a proposal for "dwelling room accommodation" in zones where multi-unit dwellings are already allowed, was delayed indefinitely.

"We made no progress on the issue this term, at all," Parkdale-High Park Councillor Gord Perks told the committee Wednesday.

"It’s worse than disappointing. It’s a failure of governance and leadership."

Programs offered to rooming house operators in Toronto helped them convert to inspected, licensed rooms, raising the quality of life for more than 1,000 tenants dramatically, Perks said. "It’s something you can do; it’s something council has chosen not to do."

Some residents and councillors seem to believe people who can’t afford a single-family home shouldn’t be allowed to live many Toronto neighbourhoods, which is discrimination, Parks charged.

Geordie Dent, executive director of the Federation of Metro Tenants’ Associations, said illegal rooming houses are one of the few affordable options for many in the city, though tenants often live in "very, very poor conditions," and cannot report violations to the city. "In cases such as Kensington Market, people can end up dead," said Dent, referring to a fire which killed two men in St. Andrew Street rooming house in March.

But illegal rooming houses aren’t going to disappear, he argued, and a crackdown will only add to the "housing nightmare" lower-income tenants face.

There should be a general amnesty for existing rooming houses, legal or otherwise, and a moratorium on kicking tenants out during the consultation, said Dent.

Studies done over the years have shown there’s a great need for licensed, regulated rooming houses across Toronto, said Phil Nazar, housing manager of the Toronto Christian Resource Centre, a non-profit group involved in founding and operating rooming houses.

He said he hoped new zoning will bring illegal rooming houses into the fold, but added it’s not clear why the consultation is needed.

The committee approved a four-phase plan, starting with research and moving to a discussion paper, after a consultation, for the executive committee by next June. A final report is expected by December after a second round of consultation.

Zoning that allows rooming houses, even licensed and inspected ones, will be difficult for many homeowners in the city’s inner suburbs to accept.

In a letter this month, Alice Stark from Scarborough’s Bridlewood area said she blames roomers in her neighbourhood for "run down houses, cars parked on lawns, illegal widening of driveways and overall poor maintenance of homes."

Deputy Mayor Norm Kelly said the consultation is just asking people what they think, not telling them what the city will do.

"It gives everybody a chance to proclaim on the issue," Kelly said before the meeting. "It’s not saying we’re going to have legal rooming houses."

Carroll said conditions for rooming houses and tenants are different north of Hwy. 401 then they are in the downtown core.

Though stressing she’s been concerned about the safety of young women in her ward, one of whom was murdered in a rooming house, Carroll said some legal rooming houses should exist in North York.

"But they have to be properly regulated," she added.