How Cities Keep Screwing up Multiplex Housing

Even when cities say “Yes” to housing they sabotage It

Meredith Martin

Mike Moffatt

, and

Sabrina Maddeaux

Jul 02, 2025

Why aren’t we seeing more multiplexes in Canadian cities, even after zoning reforms have been implemented? In this episode of The Missing Middle, Sabrina Maddeaux and Mike Moffatt delve into the surprising roadblocks hindering infill housing.

From bizarre bedroom caps to height limits that make 10-plexes impossible, they unpack how cities say "yes" to housing... and then quietly say "no." They call out the red tape, NIMBY politics, and why it might be time for provinces to take the wheel. If you're wondering why the housing crisis isn’t getting better, this one’s for you. (Full disclosure: This episode was recorded on Friday June 18th, before the Toronto city council watered down sixplex legalization, but the conversation remains entirely relevant.)

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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, which has been lightly edited.

Sabrina Maddeaux: So Mike, here's what's happening. Cities across Canada have been patting themselves on the back for reforming their zoning laws to allow more low-rise density.

Edmonton was actually pretty bold about this. They did this massive zoning overhaul that came into effect at the start of 2024. But now, as we're coming up on a review of how it's all going, we're hearing they might make some rollbacks, and we're also hearing from listeners like Justin Carter that there's some serious pushback brewing.

So Justin wrote to us and he said, I'm quoting here:

“Council members are now putting forward motions to start restricting some types of multi-unit [building] by reducing both the number of allowed units and building size. We're possibly at the start of seeing the most ambitious missing middle zoning law in a Canadian city get slowly chopped up.”

What do you make of this?

Mike Moffatt: First of all, I'd like to thank the listener for the question, because this is something that we talk about a lot in our group chat.

This is an issue where I'm going to go Gen X. It's the Empire Strikes Back. The rebels are getting some victories, but there's pushback here. And sometimes that pushback is direct, where they are trying to get fourplexes, sixplexes, whatever, as-of-right and some of the opposition is just towards that. But a lot of times it's [about] finding other ways to water these things down. And that could be about parking. Say, “Okay, yeah, you can have 10 units as-of-right, but each one needs a parking spot or two.”

Okay, well, that's not going to work.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, good luck.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, well, good luck with that. Exactly. So it's, in theory, legalized but in practice, there are just so many rules around it. And it could be things like setbacks or height restrictions, or you name it, where all of these additional conditions are being put on these things.

Another one I think we'll talk about is bedroom limits. So I think this is happening where we're getting more as-of-right, at least on paper, but very loud individuals and communities are pushing back and often having the ears of either municipal planners or politicians.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Right. So, Toronto, at least in theory, approved citywide fourplexes back in 2023. And they started testing sixplexes in Scarborough earlier this year. On paper, this seems amazing. But I've been seeing a lot of complaints on Reddit about bedroom limits, which honestly sounds like the kind of bureaucratic nonsense that makes my head hurt. Can you break down why this is actually a big deal?

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, it really kind of nerfs the value of these things.

Like, why we want missing middle housing is for families. We're pretty good, as a society, at building small apartment units. Could we use more of them? Absolutely. But we're pretty good at that. And we're pretty good at building family homes in the suburbs. What's missing is those downtown locations, three and four-bedroom homes that you could actually raise a family with kids in.

And what these communities are now doing is limiting it by saying that, “Oh, well, you can have a sixplex, but all the units combined can only have 12 bedrooms.

Well, what you're going to get is shoebox condos, or dog-crate condos, as friend of the pod Ron Butler calls them, that don't really work for families. And the reason why cities are doing this is because they're worried that if you put in too many bedrooms, this is going to turn into either a frat house, a rooming house - a place where dozens of international students might live. But we need to deal with those issues in other ways. We need to find other forms of housing for those folks because they're already here.

So this is a real problem in my mind, because we are eliminating the very thing we want. And again, they're not doing it because they're trying to chase away families. They're doing it because they don't want rooming houses or they don't want these to turn into big student rentals. But it's going to have the same impact. It's going to chase away families.

So I'm very, very concerned about this. If we make these units so lousy it is going to undermine all of this progress because two, three, four years from now, people will say, “Well, we don't want to legalize any more of these because we did that and we got some terrible homes. So this whole process is a failure.” And my fear is they won't be entirely wrong.

Sabrina Maddeaux: For sure. And yet we're living in this weird, contradictory moment right now. And anyone who wants more information on this should go back and listen to our episode with Ron Butler about how we've oversupplied these dog-crate condos and micro condos and even one bedrooms. And yet there's still this massive undersupply on anything that's the right size for couples or families. And if we want people to have families and maybe help with those birth rates, everyone's so worried about cramming people into one-bedroom units isn't going to cut it. But cities seem so worried about accidentally creating rooming houses. Is there any way to thread that needle?

Mike Moffatt: Well, I think how we thread that needle is by creating more of that supply as well. Right?

So we need municipalities that solve problems by doing things, not solve problems by preventing things. Right? This is the mindset that we've been in for generations.

And we could do an entire series on this, because this goes from everything from like energy projects to what-have-you. Where we view the role of government to say “No, no, no.” Not “Okay. Yes. And here's how you do it.”

So I think how you do it is; if you are worried that these neighbourhoods will get taken over by university and college students, you build more residences. You're worried that this is going to turn into rooming houses, so you build more social housing. But you get there through saying “Yes,” not saying, “Oh no, we have to prevent this very useful form of housing from being built,” and recognizing well, that's just going to chase more families in the suburbs. Or, in Toronto's case, you're going to get more drive till you qualify. So you're going to lose all those families to Brantford, or Tilsonburg, or Peterborough, or Belleville, or wherever. So I think this is a huge problem. And I think we need to address it by having cities figure out how to facilitate things rather than trying to always prevent things.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, that goes right to the heart of so much of our state capacity issues right now, whether it's housing, whether it's pipelines, the government's always finding ways to say “no” and have other people say “no”, versus let's build, let's move things forward.

Now, speaking of ways to say no, I've also been hearing complaints about height restrictions being a problem. What's the deal with that?

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, this is more an Ottawa issue.

So Ottawa is going through a similar rezoning. And I'm going to say some negative things about it. But overall, I think I need to couch it by saying I mostly like what they're doing. I think they're showing ambition.

And part of what they're doing is taking hundreds of different residential zones and trying to streamline them into a few dozen. I think that's still a couple of dozen too many, but their hearts are in the right place. And as part of this process, they are really trying to allow for more fourplexes, sixplexes, and in some cases, 10-plexes.

That sounds fantastic. Okay, yeah, if you've got a big piece of land, you can have 10 units on it. That sounds amazing. But what they've done is, in much of the city, there's a three-story height limit. And in parts of the city, like the Glebe, where I live - where all the rich jerks are - the rich jerks have gotten their way and have put on a two-story height limit.

We've really - and this is a topic for another time - we've got these urban planners at City Hall who are baking inequality into our regulations and going, “Yeah, there's one rule for the top 1%.” (And to be fair, I think I'm only in the top 3%.) But the one-percenters get their zoning, and everybody else gets a different set. And we're going to bake that inequality right into the regulations, which is just complete nonsense.

But anyhow, they are limiting these units to three or, in many cases, two stories. Well, the geometry just doesn't work there. You can't build a 10-plex that way. There are a couple ways you could build a 10-plex. One is by having a lot of really tall and skinny homes where you might have 1400 square feet, but it's over four stories. The other way you can do it is by having things like stacked townhouses. Where you might have, let's say, four units that take up two stories. Story one and two, and then another four that take up floors three and four. You get eight units that way. But you can't do that, right? The geometry doesn't work. Like so much with municipal planning, it becomes a math problem.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Well, and then you end up with these really terrible layouts. I mean, that's another theme for another episode, but so many of these restrictions lead to even if they technically have the square footage, like these really unlivable spaces.

Mike Moffatt: Well, absolutely, absolutely. And that's our friend Zoe Combs of the Neptis Foundation - and full Disclosure Neptis funds this podcast - I mean, this is something that she's always talking about.

That all of these rules and restrictions limit the ability of architects to actually create nice homes that people want to live in, right? It basically nurfs the architectural industry and puts all those architectural decisions into the hands of planners who aren't trained as architects.

So absolutely, that's the other problem is like the first problem is, many times you just can't build anything. But the second problem - which sometimes is even worse - is that you actually can build things, but the regulations basically require you to build things that are just objectively terrible and make nobody happy. The people who live in them don't like them and the neighbours don't like them either.

Sabrina Maddeaux: So we've got height limits, we've got bedroom limits, it's like cities are playing whack-a-mole with housing solutions. And every new limit is just another hurdle to getting new housing actually built. And so this has to explain why we're not actually seeing many of these multiplexes built, right? Like, I mean, these were supposed to be the big solution to the housing crisis - the missing middle - but the numbers aren't exactly inspiring here.

Mike Moffatt: They really aren't. And this is always going to be a more difficult…A lot of these multiplexes are designed to be built as infill. Infill is just inherently more difficult, right? Because you're not starting with a clean sheet, you're knocking something down. The lot size is what it is. And you're having to work around all of these restrictions. If you're building greenfield at the edge of a city, that gives you a lot more opportunity to be creative. So because these were designed, in many cases, to be infill, that was always going to be a challenge.

But when something is a challenge, you have to find other ways to make it easier. And we've gone the other way. We've gone out of our way to make this more difficult. So absolutely, this is a big problem.

And layered on top of that is that we've got cities that keep claiming, “we want infill, we want missing middle” and that kind of thing. And then if you build a 10-plex, well, that's 10 units, they charge you 10 development charges on that, and are often charging you the same development charges that they're charging greenfield. So that's a problem as well.

It's like, well, we want this infill because it allows us to use infrastructure that's already there, it costs the city less. Then, we go, okay, “Can you give us a discount on those development charges since you're spending less?” And it's like, “Well, no.”

And to be fair, some municipalities are trying to do this. But they’re just taxing the heck out of the very things that municipalities claim they want.

Sabrina Maddeaux: So this brings me to my big picture question: Why are municipalities just so crazy bad at this? And more importantly: What is the actual solution here?

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, I've picked on municipal planners and urban planners here, and we are going to get some notes on this. So you can contact us at [email protected] and you can send all your complaints to Meredith. But in their defense, I do think many of them are genuinely trying. And they get pushback from city councilors, they get pushback from neighborhood associations and loud voices at NIMBY meetings, and so on.

So I think many of them are genuinely trying, but they're just taking the position of, “Is this a hill I want to die on?” In many cases, it's “No.”

So it's like, “Okay, I'd rather have a half loaf than no loaf at all. So I'm going to make all of these compromises just to be able to put the ball forward a couple of yards.” And yeah, I'm using every metaphor possible here.

I think the solution, to be honest, is that we need to take it out of the hands of municipalities. I think we need to see the provinces set minimum standards.

Give municipalities a kind of box of Lego to play with and go, “Okay, here are your options and you can play from this set of options.”

But right now, there's just so much choice. There's so much ability for municipalities to legalize something on paper, then put all of these other restrictions in place that will cause these things to never get built. I think that's a problem. And I really think that the solution is going to come from a higher order of government, which can make rules that apply to the entire province. So it takes localism out of the debate.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, the piecemeal approach - municipality by municipality - clearly isn't working. And, there was an argument I could see for keeping that when the housing crisis was just centralized in Toronto and surrounding suburbs, but when it's province-wide and going beyond Ontario to countrywide, those decisions need to be uploaded so we can actually move forward.

Thank you, everyone for watching and listening, and to our producer, Meredith Martin.

Mike Moffatt: And if you have any thoughts or questions about building things from pieces of Lego, please send us an email to [email protected]

Sabrina Maddeaux: We'll see you next time.