Fourplexes on every lot, as of right?

A fourplex is not a tower. It is a house-sized building with four homes in it, the sort of thing built all over this region before 1950 and made illegal almost everywhere after it.

Toronto allowed them on any residential lot in May 2023, and in June 2025 went to six units as of right in the Toronto and East York district and in Scarborough North: nine wards, with the rest able to opt in. As of this summer none has.

Outside the city the floor is the province’s: since 2022 every serviced residential lot in Ontario can carry three units. Beyond that it is patchy. Mississauga voted fourplexes down on a tie in 2023 with $120 million of federal housing money on the line, and now pays grants to anyone who builds one. The province has been asked repeatedly to set four everywhere and has declined.

The argument you hear at council is rarely about the buildings. It is about parking, about who ends up living there, and about whether a council elected by the people already on the street should be allowed to decide who gets to move onto it.

The counter-argument is that the region needs somewhere in the order of a million and a half homes, and that four-storey towers on arterials plus untouched detached neighbourhoods behind them is not a plan, it is an avoidance of one.

Sources: Plexora, Toronto’s multiplex rules in 2026 · PreBuildIQ, the nine sixplex wards · CBC, Mississauga council decides against fourplexes