[URBAN NOTE] "Why Toronto needs to use open data to improve apartment safety"

[rfmcdonald]

Spacing Toronto's John Lorinc talks about how open data can improve apartment safety in Toronto.

When I went on Kijiji Thursday morning, I quickly found the following listing: a basement apartment in a bungalow for $515 a month, to share with two other male tenants. It is located in a part of the city (North York) where so-called “secondary suites” are legal, but rooming houses are not (for now).

Less clear is whether this unit, like thousands of others across Toronto and the GTA, complies with the existing fire, health, and building code regulations that ostensibly exist to protect tenants, but are routinely flouted by landlords trying to cut corners. The price suggests a compliance challenged environment, to say the least.

Anecdotally, there’s been a huge increase in the number of such grey-zone apartments — sort of legal, sort of not — for reasons that have everything to do with the lunacy of Toronto’s housing market. Real estate prices are skyrocketing and buyers are betting the farm on outrageously expensive homes or condos in the hopes that their investment will deliver some kind of future pay-off.

At the same time, rents in the private market are soaring, largely because of the dearth of new rental units and gentrification in downtown neighbourhoods that once had plenty of rooming houses. But if you’re up to your earlobes in a mortgage you’ll never pay off, there’s a powerful incentive to do a quick-and-dirty basement conversion and defray some of those crushing monthly costs with rental income.

But while basement units and illegal or semi-legal rooming houses represent a substantial and indeed important segment of the affordable housing sector, the City can’t really say how many Torontonians are living in such dwellings; existing statistics show that about 50% of the city’s residents live in detached or semi-detached houses, but they don’t reveal the proportion of owners versus tenants.