Family-Sized Homes in Canada: Rare, Expensive, and Out Of Reach
Exploring how building codes, zoning, and outdated regulations make family-sized homes scarce and what that means for families in Canadian cities.
In this episode, Mike Moffatt and Cara Stern dive into the challenge of finding family-sized homes in Canadian cities. They explore why options are so limited and why families often end up squeezed into spaces that don’t meet their needs.
They break down the structural reasons behind the shortage, from restrictive building codes and zoning laws to outdated fire safety regulations. Using examples from Europe, they explain how alternative approaches could make family-sized apartments more feasible, while highlighting the unintended consequences of Canada’s regulatory framework on families and urban life.
Finally, Mike and Cara discuss the broader implications for Canadian cities, from population dynamics to economic vitality. They explore what’s required to create a housing system that truly supports families, emphasizing that meaningful change will need both policy innovation and political will.
If you enjoy the show and would like to support our work, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. The pod is also available on various audio-only platforms, including:
Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.
Mike Moffatt: So, Cara, I heard you’re looking for a rental while you’re doing a big home reno. How exactly is that search going?
Cara Stern: Well, it’s tough out there. And the rental market for a family-sized unit is not great. And there’s four of us. Two adults, two kids and a do. So we need, at minimum, a two bedroom. And I know I’m privileged to be able to do this. I’m not complaining at all, but it did get me thinking. What if I wasn’t looking for a temporary home? We can find something small. We’d be considered under housed in a few years by the city.
If we wanted something that was a suitable size for our family structure, we would eventually need a three-bedroom unit. And whoa, does it look bleak, once you start trying to find a three-bedroom apartment at a reasonable price point.
Mike Moffatt: And I’ve got some bad news for you. That’s going to be a tough slog, because three-bedroom apartments don’t really exist in Canada at any scale.
If we look at Census 2021 data, there were roughly 9 million homes with three or more bedrooms, which I tend to refer to as family-sized homes. A full 85% of those homes are either single of detached, semi-detached or duplexes. An additional 8% were townhouses. Now there are some three bedroom apartment units with low rise apartments. That is an apartment with five or fewer stories, accounting for about 5% of all family-sized homes, and another 1% were high-rise apartments. So overall, you’re looking at about 6% of the family size housing stock is in apartment units.
Now, just to be clear, in much of Canada, family-sized apartment units aren’t really a thing. And people looking for three bedrooms or more often opt for townhouses rather than apartments.
Cara Stern: But if you go to cities like Paris, or if you go to cities in Germany, you’ll see families living in apartments in high density neighbourhoods. And that’s just normal. I did some research, and it looks like a lot of the unit sizes in Europe. They are getting smaller and rents are on the rise in places like Berlin. But what really stands out to me is that culturally, Europeans seem a lot more okay with the idea of raising a family in an apartment in a city versus the Canadian and American obsession with raising a family in a single family home. Why is that?
Mike Moffatt: So this is a bit of a hot take, but I actually don’t think that’s the case at all. We often hear that Canadians have a cultural bias against living in apartments, but I don’t really see that, because right now you’ve got a lot of families who are squeezed into tiny apartments, and you don’t think that they would love to have more space? You don’t think they would love to have a larger size apartment unit?
Instead, I think the answer is more straightforward: All of those great European style three-bedroom apartment units are illegal to build in Canada.
Cara Stern: How so?
Mike Moffatt: Well, the short answer is the building code. The European-style apartments most people think of are in those low-rise apartments that I talked about earlier. That’s already a problem, as zoning in much of Canada tends to favor building super tall high rises. And the project economics don’t really make larger units feasible in those high rise buildings. In Europe, low rise apartment buildings are typically built around a central staircase, known as a point access block.
This type of design allows for a bunch of larger corner units. This not only allows for larger units, but you can get things like cross breezes and so on.
Cara Stern: That’s much nicer to live in in a place where you can get that airflow. I’ve definitely thought about that when I’ve lived in those buildings that are just, one window on one side, that it’s not as comfortable.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, absolutely. But in North America, you traditionally can’t build that way. It violates the fire safety sections of various building codes. Instead, you get units that have a staircase on either side of the building, and you have this long hallway through the center.
If you want to have three bedrooms and you need each bedroom to have a window, you’re gonna have to build these massive units with strange layouts and wasted space. They don’t really work for families with kids. Instead, you get a lot of one- and two-bedroom units that are shaped like bowling alleys. And that’s even before you get into other issues like North America’s bespoke rules around elevators, which makes them far more expensive than in the rest of the world.
Cara Stern: I get why the rules were implemented in the first place. I know it came from a bunch of fires that happened in the 1800s, and this was a solution to lower the risk based on what they could do at the time. But we can now look and see that it has had some big consequences.
Mike Moffatt: Exactly. There’s been all kinds of unintended consequences. In North America, our building codes are very prescriptive: Do things this way. Don’t do things that way. In Europe, the building codes are in many cases more flexible and more outcomes-based. They want to make sure that people are safe, but they create more options on how to ensure that safety, such as sprinklers, the use of different materials and construction, and so on.
Cara Stern: Back in the early days of The Missing Middle podcast, we’ve talked about this with some experts. One was with Stephen Smith from the Center For Building In North America, and he has a great article on this that we’ll link to. We also did a really interesting interview with Conrad Speckert, an architectural designer, on how the building code makes it more expensive to build.
It seems to me, though, that changing the building code is almost like a third rail issue, because the code is based on safety standards. The argument I’ve always heard is that if we made it so that you only needed one set of staircases, that would impact people’s ability to escape during a fire. And no one wants to be someone advocating for less fire safety.
The thing that got me to change my mind on this issue is: having two staircases doesn’t actually give us a higher standard for fire safety. So when we look at which countries are the safest for fire safety, you’ll see places like South Korea, Germany, Switzerland. They all allow single staircases up to 6 or 8 storeys, whereas here it’s only up to three storeys.
And that’s because there’s much more effective ways to increase fire safety, by using different materials, sprinkler systems, those have a lot less of an impact on the layout and quantity of housing.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, absolutely. And we should recognize that most families live in a building with one staircase. It just happens to be a single-detached home or a semi-detached home. But we should be clear that this simply isn’t an issue of our rules being out of date. It’s actually deeper and a bit more structural. Building codes are regularly updated so stuff gets added to them all the time.
And when items get added to the building code, they’re often advanced by well-meaning advocates, but there’s a real lack of scientific rigor to the process. There’s a lack of any strong cost-benefit analysis to determine whether or not the new provisions make economic sense. And once a rule is in, there’s no review process to see whether or not it worked or if it had any unintended consequences or so on.
So you end up getting a building code that gets layered with more and more things on it, like barnacles. And to be clear, many or even most of those provisions are actually worthwhile and would, in retrospect, pass a cost-benefit analysis. But we don’t actually know which ones are and which ones aren’t useful because that analysis never takes place.
Cara Stern: That’s so annoying. They never look back at it. They just put new rules and they never look back to see if it was a good rule.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, absolutely. And the frustrating thing about this is that it connects directly to everything else we talk about on this show. These rules make it impossible, or at least cost prohibitive, to create family-sized apartments. So families with young kids flee cities, and our most dynamic local economies lack young people.
Cara Stern: Or they’re just not having kids at all. Which is pretty sad because it’s great for the economy. But it’s also a lot of fun and probably the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done — even if I’ve never been as tired as I am right now.
We did an episode on why seniors don’t downsize, and one of the answers we got is that there’s nothing worth moving into. But a ground-floor point-access unit in their current neighborhood, with windows on two sides, a bit of outdoor space — that sounds like a decent place for seniors to live. They might be willing to downsize if it was a good unit.
We need responsible government and leaders. They need to do hard things and make rational choices, because improvements in building materials have significantly decreased fires over many years. So it really is time to modify the code to make it easier to build places that families want to and can live.
Mike Moffatt: We really do need to, but honestly, fixing the building code isn’t enough. It needs to happen, but in most of the country, we don’t build low-rise apartments due to zoning restrictions, as the vast majority of land is either zoned for low-rise single-family homes or for high-rise apartments. Could say that the middle is missing and there’s nothing in between.
Now, we do have some cities like Toronto who are trying to create areas to build low-rise apartments, but they’re pushing all of them onto arterial roads, which is typically the last place that families with kids want to live.
Cara Stern: And even when you get zoning reform, there can still be problems. The City of Toronto voted to allow laneway houses ad garden suites even before the provincial government imposed it on the rest of Ontario. They voted to allow six-storey buildings on major roads. So you’d think that they’d be easy to build here, but there’s still pushback from city councilors — even ones that voted for the changes. They ask for amendments and carve outs, and they make it more complicated again.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, and while it’s true that we need to change the building code and zoning and elevator rules and what have you, the core problem here is larger and it’s more structural around how we regulate basically anything in our society. We layer on well-intentioned rule after rule after rule, and rarely analyze how those pieces fit together or examine any of those unintended consequences.
So we find ourselves in a situation where, as a society, we claim we want family-sized apartment units, but we have a whole regulatory structure that prevents that from happening. So while it is important we tweak this rule or that rule, we actually need to fundamentally change how we design and redesign regulations in this country. So unfortunately, I hate to be a pessimist — and we get a lot of emails and comments suggesting I am — point taken. But I really don’t see this happening anytime soon.
Cara Stern: I think I’m more optimistic. There are politicians out there who care about it. So if we can get some to be true leaders on this issue, we could see them change it. There’s a lot of people growing up now who maybe will be politicians who care about it. We just need people who can step up and really focus on changing it, harmonizing the different levels of governments and their building codes and trying to make sure that everyone’s on the same page to make it easier to build homes.
But I do know it will take a lot of time and a lot of political will.
I know that this has been a very deep-in-the-weeds conversation, so thank you to everyone for sticking with us. It’s so important that people understand how these rules are hurting our supply of family friendly units.
Thanks to two optimists on our team: producer Meredith Martin and our editor Sean Foreman.
Mike Moffatt: If you have any thoughts or questions about how tiring it is to be a mom of young children, please send Cara an email to [email protected].
Cara Stern: And we’ll see you next time.
Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:
Why we can’t build family-sized apartments in North America
Why Single Stairways are Heaven for Homebuilding
How Elevator Rules Cost Us Homes
North America’s Elevator Problem
Addressing the concerns around single-staircase apartments
Why We Don’t Build More Apartments for Families | Odd Lots
Broken Zoning: Why We Can’t Fix the Housing Crisis Without a Map
Single Stair Buildings for San Francisco: The Key to Building Small Scale Infill Housing
My family lives in a 3 bedroom family sized apartment. With it being a newer build (circa 2019), our family personally feels the strain of paying a premium (over 3200).
With such a constrained supply, the premium and no rent control in Ontario for new units. I think there may always be a premium unless government incentives the types of units described (low rise) and definitely only requiring one stairway!!