Could the housing revolution transform Canadian cities?

Anji Jiang said she is much happier since moving out of the high-rise apartment.

She once lived on the 68th floor of a condo building in downtown Toronto, but five years ago she moved to a four-unit residential building called a “fourplex” in the city’s lower-rise downtown area.

Whether a new build or a conversion of an existing single dwelling, a quadruplex is a building, usually self-contained, divided into four separate apartments.

“I really like the residential atmosphere of this community. I don’t need an elevator at all, and the large balcony allows me to enjoy so much light,” said Ms. Jiang, who works in an investment bank.

Proponents of four-storey apartments, including the Canadian government, want them spread across the country. They hope they will provide the “missing middle” between large apartment complexes and single-family homes.

Quadruple condos make headlines in Canada this year after prime minister Justin Trudeau announced The federal government will provide C$6 billion ($4.4 billion; £3.4 billion) in new funding to help provinces deal with the national housing crisis – a lack of affordable housing.

Federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser has called for quadruplexes to be allowed as a condition for municipalities receiving their share of federal housing funding.

This is welcomed by some provinces, such as British Columbia (BC). The BC government has passed legislation requiring any city with a population of more than 5,000 people to allow four-storey apartments, and even five- and six-storey apartments.

However, both the Ontario and Alberta governments have said they oppose forcing municipalities in their provinces to allow four-unit apartments. “We know local municipalities know their communities best and don’t believe in forcing them to build where it doesn’t make sense,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford told the BBC.

At the heart of this opposition is the fear that if imposed on longstanding single-family homes in Canadian suburbs, their character would be irrevocably changed.

While Toronto is now pushing for four-story condominiums, its housing history can provide a useful guide to solving the problem. In short, from 1929 to 2023, the city banned new four-story apartment buildings.

Instead, under previous zoning laws, large tracts of residential areas in Toronto were set aside for single-family detached and semi-detached homes.

The situation is similar in other English-speaking Canadian cities. In Montreal, by contrast, four-storey condos and other small apartment buildings have always been more common.

“Toronto has specific bylaws to protect single-family neighborhoods,” said Alex Bozikovic, author of “Housing Divided: How the Missing Middle Class Will Solve Toronto’s Affordability Crisis.” explained.

“There was class discrimination here because of 1910s policies that separated where homes and apartments were built because it was believed apartments would bring the ‘wrong’ people into the community, such as immigrants.”

Bozikovich added that the situation is changing due to pressure from the federal government. “Minister Fraser is using funding and a powerful pulpit to push municipalities to make necessary changes because the government believes quadruplexes are a viable, immediate solution to the affordable housing crisis,” he said.

“The question for Canada is, ‘Is this the answer?’, or ‘Is this the only first step to greater reform?'”

But just because the Canadian government is pushing to build more four-storey apartments, that doesn’t mean developers and architects will seek to build them.

“If you’re an experienced, well-capitalized developer, you have a strong incentive to do bigger projects on the land you own,” said Bu, managing director of development at Slate Asset Management, a Toronto-based real estate market investment company. Brandon Donnelly said. “Why spend time and resources focusing on a 4-unit project when you can complete a 150-unit project?”

At the same time, Canadian newspaper columnist Francis Bra Recently written Financing courtyard houses will also be challenging as banks are not used to it yet.

“Banks need to develop a new financing product to service this new missing middle form of development, which is not the detached homes or concrete towers that banks have lent for decades,” she said.

“Indeed, increasing mass production of four-storey apartments may require the development of new, niche types of developers.”

Tom Knezic, a Toronto architect and co-founder of Solares Architecture, designed a four-storey condominium currently for rent in the city, as well as four more under construction.

He said there was a misconception that four floors must be architecturally boring, and instead architects could be creative with layout and design. For example, he added, four units can vary greatly in size, so one might fit one person and another might fit a family.

Mr. Knezic said he hopes Toronto will follow Vancouver’s “great model” of converting many large single-family homes into self-contained apartments. “I think quadruplexes can be one of the tools to make housing more affordable.”

However, while four-story apartments are attractive to some, the craze has yet to really take off. As of last month, authorities in Toronto and Vancouver had received only about 100 construction applications. According to media reports.