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Get My Free Estimate →The ten things buyers in Parkdale are least often told, all of them documented: there is a definition of a rooming house written into Toronto Municipal Code Chapter 575, § 575-1.1(2) that applies inside one box of streets in Parkdale and to no other part of Toronto, and it catches a converted house with more than three self-contained units averaging under 65 square metres; the licence that follows cannot be transferred — § 575-2.2 G says “No licence shall be transferred,” requires 90 days’ notice before the operator changes, and keeps the vendor licensed and responsible until the buyer’s own licence issues; 112 of the 403 licensed multi-tenant house records in the City’s file are in Parkdale on my count; the “1991 rule” for rent control was repealed on 30 May 2017 and the live date is 15 November 2018, under a section that permanently excludes any house that ever had more than two units; the Residential Tenancies Act bars a vendor from serving an own-use notice for a complex with more than three residential units and bars a corporate owner from serving one at all; the rental demolition by-law is made under section 111 of the City of Toronto Act, 2006, not the Planning Act, and its six-unit floor is provincial law, not a Council policy; the north side of Queen Street West through Parkdale is officially Roncesvalles; 21 buildings the City studied and listed in December 2020 sit outside the heritage district and lose Register status on 1 January 2027, one of them a 1919 theatre building at 1605 Queen St W with a rezoning application filed 27 April 2026; the Gardiner section from the Humber River to Dufferin Street — exactly Parkdale — is the only one of six with no scope, no schedule and no budget; and the King-Liberty Protected Major Transit Station Area reaches Dufferin with 30-storey, 8.0 FSI permissions that cannot be appealed, while design work on the station itself is paused for lack of funding.
None of that is an argument against buying here. Parkdale has a heritage district registered on title along its main street, a real laneway grid, fiveplex and sixplex permissions most of Toronto did not get, and a development pipeline that is mostly rental and affordable rental rather than towers. It is an argument for buying here with the documents open.
Every item on this page is traced to a primary source — a Municipal Code chapter, a by-law PDF, a Council item, a statute as consolidated on e-Laws, a City open dataset with its refresh date, a tribunal publication — and each is listed at the bottom with the date I read it. What is my own calculation, and not a published statistic: the Queen Street West boundary scan and its heritage-point corroboration; the count of 112 Parkdale multi-tenant house licence records out of 403 citywide, and the 27.8 per cent share, from a street-name filter I describe in the item, counting records rather than buildings and including 13 marked Inactive; the licence-fee arithmetic and the rental-demolition fee arithmetic, with the City’s own per-room and per-unit inputs shown beside them; the eight-to-ten-month range from closing to a Landlord and Tenant Board order, built from the statutory notice period and the Board’s own published hearing timelines; the Committee of Adjustment approval rate; the share of the neighbourhood carrying a height overlay; the land transfer tax comparison; and every percentage drawn from the City’s published 2021 Census counts. Verify independently before you rely on any of it: the zoning and licence status of a specific address, through a preliminary zoning review and the City’s zoning map rather than this page; the Heritage Register entry for a specific property, through the City’s Heritage Property Search Tool, because the register data here is a snapshot refreshed 4 June 2026; the live status of any development application or tribunal appeal; and the classification of a converted house for land transfer tax, with a solicitor. If you have an actual tenancy question — as an owner or as a tenant — it belongs with a lawyer or with the Landlord and Tenant Board, not with a real estate agent and not with a blog post. Nine things I deliberately left off because I could not source them properly: the 2026 rent-increase guideline percentage, which I did not retrieve from a Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing or Ontario Gazette source; O. Reg. 516/06 and the prescribed period in the new Residential Tenancies Act s. 57(6.1), both unread, so no number of days appears here; the provincial Land Transfer Tax, unverified, so my land transfer arithmetic is municipal only; how many rooms are permitted on any given Parkdale block, because Diagram 1 of By-law 156-2023 is a map image inside the by-law PDF rather than a table and the answer needs a parcel-level check; any Gardiner setback or glazing requirement, because I looked for one and found none; anything about the Toronto Catholic District School Board, the 501 and 504 streetcars or short-term rentals, none of which were researched for this page; which basement flooding study area contains a given address, because the City says the boundaries follow sewersheds rather than wards; the flow-type definitions Toronto Water uses to distinguish SCSO from CSO outfalls; and the Official Plan land-use designation for any named Parkdale block. I will publish those when I can cite them.
Parkdale is the neighbourhood people describe with a restaurant and a rumour. What is actually here is a piece of ground with its own clause in the Toronto Municipal Code, its own licensing regime, a main street that legally belongs to the neighbourhood next door, a heritage deadline four months away, an expressway on a list of six sections that skipped it, and transit permissions that are already final for a station that has no money. All of it is written down. Almost none of it is in the listing.
Two notes before the list, because they change every number that follows. First, “Parkdale” is not one City neighbourhood. The City’s 158-neighbourhood model has South Parkdale, neighbourhood 85; the north side of Queen Street West through Parkdale is in Roncesvalles, neighbourhood 86. Where I quote a census figure below it is for neighbourhood 85, and I say so. Second, the licensing by-law in items one and two uses a different boundary again — a box of four streets that is larger than either neighbourhood. Read each boundary as the document that draws it, not as the word “Parkdale.”
The political unit is Wards 4 Parkdale-High Park and 10 Spadina-Fort York, both inside the Toronto and East York community council district. That last detail is what unlocks the fiveplex and sixplex permissions here, and it is also what puts Parkdale on the collision course between two by-laws that item one is about.
1There is a rooming-house rule written into the Municipal Code that applies to Parkdale and to nowhere else in Toronto
This is the single most under-reported fact about buying a converted house in Parkdale, and it is one subsection of a licensing by-law.
Toronto Municipal Code Chapter 575, Multi-Tenant Houses, consolidation stamped 31 March 2024, defines MULTI-TENANT HOUSE in two limbs. Limb (1) is the ordinary citywide test: four or more rented dwelling rooms, occupants not living as a single housekeeping unit. Limb (2) applies to one geography only, and here it is verbatim:
| § 575-1.1(2) — the Parkdale limb | The test |
|---|---|
| The box | “A building located within the area bounded on the north by Dundas Street West, on the east by Dufferin Street and the rail lines, on the south by Lake Shore Boulevard West and on the west by Roncesvalles Avenue” |
| (a) | “The building is a converted house as defined in former City of Toronto Zoning By-law 438-86” |
| (b) | “The building contains more than three dwelling units” |
| (c) | “The average floor area of the dwelling units is less than 65 square metres” |
| (d) | “One or more dwelling units are intended to be used in return for remuneration” |
Now read the definition the chapter attaches to that limb. A “dwelling unit” there is “living accommodation for persons living together as a single housekeeping unit, in which both food preparation and sanitary facilities are provided for the exclusive use of the occupants of the unit.” In other words: the units can be entirely self-contained and the building is still a licensed multi-tenant house. Everywhere else in Toronto, self-contained units make a building a multiplex and nothing more.
65 square metres is about 700 square feet. A Parkdale house divided into four self-contained units averaging 690 square feet is a multi-tenant house requiring a licence. The same building at Bathurst and Dupont is a fourplex requiring no licence at all. This is the old “bachelorette” rule, carried forward into the licensing regime that took effect on 31 March 2024, and the City’s own historic planning files show the fact pattern it was written for: 1267 King St W, file 13 269687 STE 14 OZ, is described in the City’s development data as a zoning amendment to bring “the existing three-storey semi-detached building containing nine under-sized bachelor units (ranging in size from 12 m² to 23 m²) and one one-bedroom unit into conformity.”
Do not confuse the box with the neighbourhood. The limb-(2) boundary runs north to Dundas Street West, which is materially larger than the City’s South Parkdale (85) polygon — it captures all of what people call North Parkdale and much of what the City calls Roncesvalles (86). If you are testing whether a building is inside it, test it against those four streets, not against a neighbourhood map.
There is no Official Plan policy sitting above any of this. I text-searched all nine of the City’s Chapter 7 Site and Area Specific Policy consolidations (policies 0 to 899) for “converted house,” “bachelorette,” “rooming house” and “multi-tenant.” There is no Parkdale-specific Official Plan policy on any of them. The only Parkdale hit is SASP 284, which permits one existing converted house of three units at 57 and 59 Elm Grove Avenue. The regime lives entirely in the zoning by-law and the licensing by-law, which means it can be changed without an Official Plan Amendment.
On room counts, I am going to be careful, and you should be too. By-law 156-2023 — authority Council item CC2.1 of 14 and 15 December 2022, voted 8 February 2023, written approval by Mayoral Decision 2-2023, passed under s. 34 of the Planning Act — inserted § 150.25 into Zoning By-law 569-2013 and set maximum dwelling rooms by zone, with a parking minimum of zero spaces per dwelling room. The City’s own plain-language formulation, on its Multi-Tenant House Owners & Operators page modified 16 June 2026, is that in Toronto, East York and York “a maximum of 6, 12 or 25 rooms is permitted depending on the location and zone type,” and that “properties must have at least one bathroom per four rooms.” The higher room counts in § 150.25 turn on shaded areas shown on Diagram 1 of By-law 156-2023, which is a map image on page 72 of the 74-page by-law PDF, not a table. I rendered it and I still cannot tell you at that resolution whether a given Parkdale block is shaded. So this page does not tell you how many rooms are permitted on any Parkdale property. Run the address through the City’s zoning by-law map or a preliminary zoning review.
How to read this as a buyer. If you are looking at a converted house inside that box — Dundas to Lake Shore, Dufferin and the rail lines to Roncesvalles — the question “is this a multiplex or a multi-tenant house?” is not academic and is not answered by the number of kitchens. It is answered by the four tests above, and the answer determines whether the building needs an annual City licence. Before you waive conditions, get a zoning review and a Chapter 575 analysis, and have your solicitor ask the vendor in writing whether a licence exists, what type it is, and what its status is.
2The licence does not transfer, and the by-law wants 90 days you have almost certainly not built into the closing
Here is the sentence that ought to be in every Parkdale agreement of purchase and sale and almost never is. Chapter 575, § 575-2.2 G, Change of operator:
“(1) No licence shall be transferred. (2)(a) If a new operator is replacing an existing operator, at least 90 days in advance of the change: [1] The existing operator shall give notice to the Executive Director; and [2] The new operator shall apply for an initial licence. (b) The existing operator shall maintain their licence in good standing including remaining responsible for the operation of the multi-tenant house in compliance with this chapter at all times until the new operator is issued a licence.”
Read what that does to a transaction. You are not buying a licensed rooming house. You are buying a building, and then applying from scratch for a licence you may not get. The 90-day notice has to be given before the change of operator. The vendor has to stay licensed and responsible until your licence issues — which is an obligation on a person who has by then been paid and left. A 60-day closing on a licensed multi-tenant house is arithmetically incompatible with the by-law.
| Chapter 575 requirement | Section | What it means on a purchase |
|---|---|---|
| No licence shall be transferred; 90 days’ advance notice; new operator applies for an initial licence | § 575-2.2 G | The clock starts before closing, not after. Build it into the timeline or the deal breaks the by-law |
| Vendor keeps the licence in good standing and stays responsible until your licence issues | § 575-2.2 G(2)(b) | A post-closing obligation on the vendor. Paper it in the agreement, because the by-law will not do it for you |
| An initial licence requires a preliminary project review (use only) from Toronto Building | § 575-2.2 A(1)(e) | This is where an unlawful conversion surfaces. Renewals only need a statement of no change in use |
| Houses with 10 or more rooms or units must produce an Electrical Safety Authority evaluation, service logs and/or certificate of inspection on first application | § 575-2.2 A(1)(d) | A first-application cost the vendor never had to incur |
| Required plans: an Ontario Fire Code fire safety plan, a site plan, a floor plan showing each room and the maximum number of tenants per room, and a waste management plan | § 575-2.2 A(1)(f) | Ask for the vendor’s set. If it does not exist, that is information |
| Licences run 12 months and must be renewed annually | § 575-2.2 A(1) | There is no such thing as a licence that just carries on |
| “Every owner of property where a multi-tenant house is located shall ensure their property and the operation… are in compliance” | § 575-2.1 D | The owner is on the hook, not only the operator. Buying and handing it to a manager does not move the liability |
And there is a 30-day trapdoor. If the application is refused, § 575-2.2 F(4) gives you 30 days to request a hearing before the Multi-Tenant House Licensing Tribunal with the applicable fee. F(5): if you do not request one within 30 days, “any further application with respect to those premises or hearing with respect to that licence shall be not considered for one year from the date of notice of refusal.” A missed deadline freezes the property’s licensability for twelve months — and it is the property that is frozen, not just the applicant.
The annual City fee is trivial and the compliance cost is not. From the City’s page of 16 June 2026: application and renewal $27.04 per room per application, inspection $162.24 per house, with Toronto Community Housing and non-profit social housing providers exempt. My arithmetic, inputs shown: a six-room house pays 6 × $27.04 = $162.24, plus the $162.24 inspection, so $324.48 a year. That is not the cost of compliance. The cost is the fire safety plan, the Electrical Safety Authority evidence at ten rooms or more, the Toronto Building use review, and the annual inspection.
The enforcement side is where the money is. § 575-5.1: contravening any provision, or failing to comply with a licence, a condition or an order — a fine of not more than $100,000. Every person who “gains an economic advantage” from contravening the chapter is liable to “a special fine in an amount equal to the fair market value of the economic advantage” — disgorgement of the rent roll. Directors and officers of a contravening corporation are individually liable to the same maximum. Each offence is “designated as a continuing offence” at up to $10,000 for each day, and “the total of all of the daily fines imposed for each offence may exceed $100,000.” Operating without a licence draws a $600 ticket on the City’s own page.
Subsection H reverses the onus, and it is worth quoting because most buyers assume the opposite: “(1) the holding out, for example by advertising by any means, that a multi-tenant house… is available for rent is, when entered as evidence, proof, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that the building is a multi-tenant house; and (2) when a building otherwise meets the definition of a multi-tenant house, the burden of proving that the persons using the building are living together as a single housekeeping unit is on the person charged.” Alongside that, § 575-5.2 gives officers and public health inspectors entry at any reasonable time under s. 376 of the City of Toronto Act, 2006, power to compel and remove documents for copying, and to take tests, samples and photographs; § 575-5.3 allows orders to comply, and where service is impractical or delay would endanger health or safety a placard on the property is deemed sufficient notice; § 575-5.4 lets the City do the work itself at the owner’s expense.
One transitional point. § 575-5.5: licences granted before 31 March 2024 under the repealed former City of Toronto Chapter 285, Rooming Houses, continue until replaced, provided the holder keeps complying with the repealed chapter and the licence is not revoked, terminated or expired. So a vendor may hold something that is not a Chapter 575 licence at all. Ask which one it is.
How to read this as a buyer. This is a closing risk, not a trivia item, and it is the one I see missed most often. If the building is or may be a multi-tenant house, the 90-day notice and initial-application sequence has to be in the agreement, the vendor’s post-closing obligation has to be papered, and the closing date has to be long enough to survive the by-law. Get a licensing search, get the fire safety plan and floor plan, and get a Toronto Building preliminary project review before the conditions come off — not after.
3Parkdale holds 112 of the 403 licensed multi-tenant house records in the City’s file
The City publishes a Multi Tenant House Licences open dataset, last modified 30 August 2026, with site address, district, ward and status. Citywide it holds 403 records: 224 Active, 92 In Progress, 87 Inactive. By district: Toronto and East York 392, Etobicoke York 6, Scarborough 5, and no North York record in the file at all. By ward, the top of the table is Ward 4 Parkdale-High Park with 138, ahead of Ward 13 Toronto Centre at 101 and Ward 11 University-Rosedale at 76.
My filter, so you can reproduce or reject it. The dataset has no neighbourhood field, so I selected records whose street name is one of the core South Parkdale residential streets — Jameson, Cowan, Dunn, Close, Dowling, Springhurst, Tyndall, Spencer, Beaty, Gwynne, Elm Grove, Melbourne, Wilson Park, Maynard, Leopold, Triller, Temple, Machells, Laxton, West Lodge, Thorburn, Glenavon, Trenton, O’Hara, Mowat and Jefferson — plus Queen St W and King St W addresses numbered 1150 to 1700.
Result, and this is my calculation rather than a City statistic: 112 licence records in Parkdale — 67 Active, 32 In Progress, 13 Inactive. 112 ÷ 403 = 27.8 per cent of every licensed multi-tenant house record in Toronto, from a neighbourhood polygon of roughly 2.3 square kilometres.
| Street | Licence records | Street | Licence records |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spencer Ave | 15 | Springhurst Ave | 4 |
| Dowling Ave | 15 | Tyndall Ave | 3 |
| Dunn Ave | 15 | Elm Grove Ave | 3 |
| King St W | 14 | Laxton Ave | 3 |
| Beaty Ave | 7 | Close Ave | 3 |
| Cowan Ave | 6 | Thorburn Ave | 3 |
| Maynard Ave | 5 | Melbourne Ave | 3 |
| Wilson Park Rd | 4 | Temple, Triller | 2 each |
| Glenavon, Gwynne, West Lodge, O’Hara and Queen St W: one each | |||
Four caveats I want on the page rather than in a footnote. These are licence records, not buildings — “116 Spencer Ave” and “116-118 Spencer Ave” appear separately. A few of the streets I matched (Mowat, Jefferson, O’Hara) sit on Parkdale’s Liberty Village edge. The 112 includes 13 records marked Inactive. And street-name matching will miss records filed under a spelling or ward label I did not anticipate. If you want the number that cannot be argued with, use 67 Active licences in Parkdale, and say that it comes from the same filter.
What that concentration means for a buyer is narrow and practical: the licensing questions in items one and two are not an exotic scenario in this neighbourhood, they are ordinary diligence. On several streets the records cluster tightly — the file shows 179, 180, 181, 182 and 185 Dowling Ave; 187 through 216 Dunn Ave; 1501 to 1554 King St W; and 61 through 124 Spencer Ave. If you are buying on one of those blocks, assume the question applies until the search says otherwise.
How to read this as a buyer. A licence record is a fact about a building’s regulatory status, not about the people in it, and nothing on this page should be read the other way round. What it tells you commercially is that Parkdale is the part of Toronto where the multi-tenant house regime is most likely to touch your file, that the City has an address-level dataset you can check before you offer, and that the 90-day licensing sequence needs to be in your timeline from the first draft of the agreement.
4The “1991 rule” everyone still repeats was repealed nine years ago
You will still be told, in listings and in pro formas, that a building is exempt from rent control because it was not occupied for residential purposes before 1 November 1991. That sentence has been wrong since 30 May 2017.
The provision people are quoting is Residential Tenancies Act, 2006, s. 6(2), and here it is from the historical consolidation that was in force to 29 May 2017: sections 104, 111, 112, 120, 121, 122, 126 to 133, 165 and 167 do not apply to a rental unit if “(a) it was not occupied for any purpose before June 17, 1998; (b) it is a rental unit no part of which has been previously rented since July 29, 1975; or (c) no part of the building, mobile home park or land lease community was occupied for residential purposes before November 1, 1991.”
It was repealed outright. Rental Fairness Act, 2017, S.O. 2017, c. 13, s. 3(2): “Subsection 6 (2) of the Act is repealed.” In force 30 May 2017. The Act also added a transition section, s. 120.1, keyed to 20 April 2017: notices given before that date stood; notices given on or after it that took effect before the repeal had the rent rolled back to the old rent plus the guideline, with the excess a debt owed by the landlord and refundable within 60 days.
The live exemption is s. 6.1, and its date is 15 November 2018. It was added by the Restoring Trust, Transparency and Accountability Act, 2018, Sched. 36, s. 1, in force 6 December 2018, and it has two limbs that matter here:
| RTA s. 6.1 | What it exempts | Why it almost never applies in Parkdale |
|---|---|---|
| (2) Buildings not occupied on or before 15 November 2018 | Sections 120, 121, 122, 126, 127, 129, 131, 132, 133, 165 and 167 do not apply where no part of the building — or no part of an addition the unit is entirely located in — was occupied for residential purposes on or before that date | On the City’s published 2021 Census counts for South Parkdale, 4,195 occupied dwellings were built in 1960 or before and 3,635 between 1961 and 1980, out of 11,285. That is 69.4 per cent pre-1981 on my arithmetic, and only 315 dwellings, 2.8 per cent, were built 2016 to 2021 |
| (3) Units in detached, semi-detached or row houses | Requires all of: the house contained not more than two residential units on or at any time before 15 November 2018; the unit has its own bathroom and kitchen, entrances with doors securable from inside and at least one lockable from outside; the unit became such a unit after that date; and either the owner lived in another unit in the house when it was first occupied, or the unit is in space that was unfinished immediately before | This is the one that looks promising and is not. A house cut into four units in 1975 fails the “not more than two residential units at any time before” test permanently. For a neighbourhood whose defining building type is the converted house, that is the whole question |
| (4)–(5) | The exemption does not apply to a tenancy whose agreement was entered into on or before 15 November 2018 — but that carve-out “applies only with respect to that tenancy and does not apply with respect to any subsequent tenancy” | — |
| (6) Burden of proof | “For greater certainty, in an application to the Board in which the application of subsection (2) or (3) is at issue, the onus is on the landlord to prove that the subsection applies” | If you are relying on an exemption, you are the one who has to prove it |
A converted house is not rescued by re-converting it. That is the practical consequence, and it is why the 2018 date does more work in Parkdale than anywhere else in the city. Assume the guideline applies to the units in an older Parkdale building unless a lawyer tells you otherwise on the specific facts.
What is not constrained is the rent for a new tenancy. RTA s. 113: “Subject to section 111, the lawful rent for the first rental period for a new tenant under a new tenancy agreement is the rent first charged to the tenant.” And s. 111(1): “No landlord shall charge rent for a rental unit in an amount that is greater than the lawful rent permitted under this Part.” So the binding constraint on a Parkdale rental purchase is not the rent you can charge a new tenant — it is whether and when a unit lawfully becomes vacant, which is item five.
Penalties under the Act were raised two months before this page was written. RTA s. 238: a person other than a corporation is liable on conviction to a fine of not more than $100,000; a corporation not more than $500,000. Both figures were set by 2023, c. 10, Sched. 7, s. 9(1) and (2), in force 1 July 2026.
One thing I am not printing: the 2026 rent-increase guideline percentage. I did not retrieve it from a Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing or Ontario Gazette source for this page, and a guideline figure is exactly the sort of number that gets copied forward from a stale article. Check it on ontario.ca. I also did not read O. Reg. 516/06, the Act’s general regulation, which carries prescribed rules referenced throughout Part VII — so nothing on this page turns on it.
How to read this as a buyer. If a rent roll or a listing tells you the building is exempt from rent control on the 1991 rule, that is a statement about a repealed subsection and everything built on it needs re-checking. The live test is 15 November 2018, and for a house that has ever had more than two units it fails permanently. Price the building on the rents that exist and the guideline that applies, not on a decontrol story.
5The vacant-possession timeline you are inheriting, and why the statute usually will not deliver it
Buyers ask whether an occupied Parkdale house can be delivered empty on closing. The answer is set out in the Residential Tenancies Act, it is mostly no, and it is better to know that before you price the building than after. I am setting it out here as the legal timeline a purchaser inherits — nothing on this page is a method for removing anyone, and the sections below exist because the people living in these buildings have rights that come with the property.
First limit: the vendor usually cannot serve the notice at all. RTA s. 49(1) lets “a landlord of a residential complex that contains no more than three residential units who has entered into an agreement of purchase and sale” give a tenant notice on the purchaser’s behalf where the purchaser in good faith requires possession for residential occupation by the purchaser, a spouse, a child or parent of either, or a care-services provider. Section 49(2) extends the same power to the owner of a condominium unit. A Parkdale house with four, five or six units — which is most of the converted stock, and by definition every limb-(2) multi-tenant house — cannot be delivered vacant on closing by a vendor-served notice.
Second limit: how you take title decides whether you ever have the notice. RTA s. 48(5): this section “does not authorize a landlord to give a notice of termination… unless, (a) the rental unit is owned in whole or in part by an individual; and (b) the landlord is an individual.” In force 1 September 2017. Buy in a numbered company and the own-use notice is gone permanently. s. 72(2) narrows it again: the Board shall not order eviction on an s. 48 or s. 49 notice where the claim rests on an agreement purporting to entitle the landlord to reside in the unit unless the premises are in a building containing not more than four residential units, or a listed person has previously been a genuine occupant.
Third: the compensation is the vendor’s, unless you agree otherwise. s. 49.1(1) requires one month’s rent, or another acceptable unit, where an s. 49 notice is given, and s. 49.1(2) says the obligation “remains an obligation of the landlord who gives the notice… and does not become an obligation of the purchaser.” s. 48.1 imposes the same one-month obligation on a landlord’s own s. 48 notice; s. 55.1 requires payment no later than the termination date in the notice; and s. 83(4) says the Board “shall not issue an eviction order” in a proceeding for residential occupation, demolition or conversion until the landlord has complied with s. 48.1, 49.1, 52, 54 or 55.
Fourth: the clock, from the Board’s own published timelines. Tribunals Ontario’s Application and hearing process page, updated 6 July 2026, states that L1 and L9 applications are heard approximately three months from receipt, that most other application types — which is where an L2 own-use application sits — take five to seven months, and that most orders are issued within a service timeline of 30 days or less after the hearing, with a suggestion to contact the Board if nothing arrives 60 days after. For scale, the Tribunals Ontario 2024-25 Annual Report records 87,993 applications received in the year to 31 March 2025 and an active caseload reduced to 41,465, a 26 per cent reduction since the December 2023 peak.
| Step | Statutory or published basis | Elapsed |
|---|---|---|
| Notice given, ending on the last day of a rental period | RTA s. 48(2) / s. 49(3): at least 60 days | about 2 months |
| Tenant does not leave; L2 application filed | — | day zero of the Board’s clock |
| Hearing | Landlord and Tenant Board: 5 to 7 months for “most other application types” | +5 to 7 months |
| Order issued | Board service timeline: 30 days or less after the hearing | +1 month |
| Closing to an order — my arithmetic on those inputs, not a published figure | — | roughly 8 to 10 months |
Then add enforcement through the Court Enforcement Office if the order is not complied with, and the Board’s discretion under s. 83, which it must consider whenever a hearing is held (s. 83(2)). s. 83(3) lists circumstances in which the Board shall refuse an eviction application altogether: where the landlord is in serious breach of its obligations or a material covenant; where the application is brought because the tenant complained to a governmental authority about health, safety, housing or maintenance standards; because the tenant tried to enforce legal rights; because the tenant is a member of, or is organising, a tenants’ association; or where the unit is occupied by children and that does not constitute overcrowding.
Fifth: bad faith is presumed, and one of the triggers is listing the house. Under s. 57 a former tenant may apply within one year of vacating. The orders available include increased-rent compensation for a one-year period; “general compensation in an amount not exceeding the equivalent of 12 months of the last rent charged” “regardless of whether the former tenant has incurred any actual expenses”; out-of-pocket moving and storage; an abatement of rent; and an administrative fine “not exceeding the greater of $10,000 and the monetary jurisdiction of the Small Claims Court.” Sections 57(5) and (6) presume bad faith, rebuttable on a balance of probabilities, if at any time between the notice and one year after the tenant vacates the landlord advertises the unit for rent, rents to someone else, advertises the unit or the building containing it for sale, demolishes it, or takes any step to convert it to non-residential use. s. 72(1)(a) also requires an affidavit sworn by the person who personally requires the unit certifying good-faith personal use for at least one year (as amended in force 1 July 2026), and s. 72(3) lets the Board consider a landlord’s or purchaser’s previous use of s. 48, 49 or 50 notices on any unit.
One change is dated three weeks after this page. The e-Laws consolidation carries forward-dated notes timed to 21 September 2026, the day named by order of the Lieutenant Governor in Council, under the Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, 2025: a new s. 48.1(2) under which the requirement to compensate a tenant does not apply where an s. 48 notice is given on or after that day, specifies a termination date at least 120 days after the notice, and ends on the last day of a period or fixed term. Two other notes land the same day: s. 83(1)(b) gains “subject to any prescribed limitations or conditions,” narrowing the Board’s power to postpone enforcement, and a new s. 57(6.1) presumes bad faith where no person named in s. 48(1)(a) to (d) occupied the unit within a prescribed period after the former tenant vacated. That period is set by regulation and I did not verify it, so no number for it appears here — and because these are forward-dated notes tied to an order in council, confirm they actually came into force before anyone relies on them.
How to read this as a buyer. The honest conclusion is that most of Parkdale’s converted stock should be bought as tenanted rental property, priced on the rents that exist, with the statutory timeline treated as a fact about the asset rather than an obstacle to plan around. If your model only works on vacant possession, the model is the problem. And if you have an actual tenancy question — whether you are the owner or the tenant — take it to a lawyer or to the Landlord and Tenant Board. I am a broker; on this subject my job is to tell you what the statute says and then get out of the way.
6The rental demolition by-law is made under the City of Toronto Act, not the Planning Act — and the six-unit floor is provincial law
This is the error I see most often in Toronto real estate writing, and it changes the analysis. Toronto Municipal Code Chapter 667, Residential and Rental Property Demolition and Conversion Control, adopted by Council on 19 July 2007 by By-law 885-2007 and substantially amended on 15 December 2023 by By-law 1331-2023, carries an editor’s note that says it plainly: “This by-law was passed under the authority of section 111 of the City of Toronto Act, 2006.” The Planning Act s. 33 demolition-control permit is a different instrument entirely — and Chapter 667 expressly lists it as something an owner cannot claim until the s. 111 conditions are met.
The statute, from the e-Laws consolidation dated from 2 June 2026:
| City of Toronto Act, 2006, s. 111 | What it does |
|---|---|
| (1) | The City may prohibit and regulate the demolition of residential rental properties and prohibit and regulate their conversion to another purpose |
| (2) | Includes the power to prohibit demolition or conversion without a permit and to impose conditions as a requirement of obtaining a permit |
| (2.1) | Where a condition requires an agreement with the City, the City may register the agreement against title and enforce it against the owner and any subsequent owners of the land |
| (3) Restriction | “The City cannot prohibit or regulate the demolition or conversion of a residential rental property that contains less than six dwelling units” |
| (5) | Where a demolition permit is issued under this section, no permit is required under s. 8 of the Building Code Act, 1992 |
| (7)–(8) | The Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing may make regulations governing the City’s powers, including prescribing conditions the City must impose and authorising required payments; such a regulation prevails over any conflicting Act or regulation. Added by 2023, c. 10, Sched. 2, s. 1(2), in force 8 June 2023 |
Two points to take from that. First, the six-unit floor is a limit on Council’s power, not a policy choice — Council could not extend the by-law to five-unit buildings if it wanted to, because the province has not given it the power. In Parkdale, where five- and six-unit converted houses are ordinary, that line runs straight through the housing stock. Second, s. 111(2.1) makes the conditions run with the land: a purchaser inherits a registered rental-replacement agreement and the obligations in it.
And then there is the definition that catches people who were not planning to demolish anything. § 667-1 defines DEMOLITION as “the demolition of all or part of a building, including interior renovations or alterations that will result in a change to the number of dwelling units by bedroom type.” Merging two one-bedroom units into a three-bedroom in a seven-unit Parkdale building is a “demolition” requiring a s. 111 permit. No wrecking ball is involved. The chapter’s DWELLING UNIT is “a self-contained set of rooms… operated as a single housekeeping unit… and contains kitchen and bathroom facilities that are intended for the use of the unit only.”
Chapter 667 does not apply to a property that contains fewer than six dwelling units, forms part of a condominium under the Condominium Act, 1998, or is organised as a life lease (§ 667-2). Conversion under § 667-4 expressly includes conversion resulting from a consent to sever under s. 53 of the Planning Act, and conversion to a non-residential use, to living accommodation other than dwelling units, to co-ownership, condominium or life lease, or to freehold or other forms of ownership of dwelling units.
§ 667-15 B is the leverage, and it is worth reading before you plan any permit strategy. Until the conditions are satisfied or secured by an agreement registered on title, the applicant may not claim or act under a Building Code Act s. 8(1) or s. 10 permit; a demolition permit under s. 33 of the Planning Act; a consent or permit under Ontario Heritage Act ss. 34, 34.5 or 42; approval or registration of a condominium description under Planning Act s. 51 or an exemption under Condominium Act s. 9; or a Planning Act s. 53 consent. The conditions Council or the Chief Planner may attach include tenant notification; on demolition, “requirements to replace the rental units with rental units at similar rents, and for tenant relocation and other assistance, including the right to return to the replacement rental housing”; an access plan for replacement units “including the use of a City-managed centralized housing access system and income eligibility”; and on condominium conversion, conditions “relating to the cost impacts on tenants.” § 667-15 D requires the applicant and successive owners to provide regular verification that the agreement is being met. § 667-6 separately prohibits an owner or anyone acting for the owner from interfering with a tenant’s reasonable enjoyment “with the intent of discouraging the participation of the tenant in the application or approval process.”
The 2026 fee schedule comes from the City’s own application form, version stamp V26FEB2026, “Effective January 1, 2026”:
| Application type | Base fee | Per unit |
|---|---|---|
| Demolition, including interior renovations or alterations | $6,227.90 | $249.64 |
| Demolition — delegated approval | $1,246.02 | $62.14 |
| Conversion to condominium, or to freehold, or other consents | $3,736.96 | $62.14 |
| Conversion to co-ownership or life lease | $14,947.84 | $62.14 |
| Delegated versions of the conversion streams | $1,246.02 | $62.14 |
My arithmetic, inputs shown: a rental-housing demolition application for a ten-unit Parkdale building is $6,227.90 + (10 × $249.64) = $8,724.30 in City fees alone — before any Official Plan Amendment or rezoning fee, before the notice costs, and before the replacement-housing obligation. The form also records that fees are adjusted every 1 January for the applicable annual wage adjustment, that surcharges apply for the City Clerk’s public-notice costs, and that “the applicant is required to give notice of the application to the tenants of the residential rental property, at their own expense.” It requires a unit-by-unit table of existing and proposed rental units by bedroom count and a completed Rental Housing Declaration of Use and Screening Form — a document I did not retrieve for this page, so nothing here describes its contents.
What this looks like in Parkdale right now, from the City’s development applications dataset refreshed 31 August 2026: 1497 and 1501 Queen St W with 89 and 91 Beaty Ave, file 26 118047 STE 04 OZ, Council Approved, a 10- and 7-storey mixed-use building with 141 affordable rental units including 54 rental replacement units, retaining and reconstructing the historic façade; 1337, 1339 and 1355 King St W, file 25 165309 STE 04 SA, notice of approval conditions issued, a 10-storey infill with 92 affordable rental units and the existing “Phoenix Place” apartment building fully retained; and Site and Area Specific Policy 873 at 1354-1364 Queen St W and 2-14 Brock Ave, which requires that “in accordance with Official Plan policy 3.2.1.12, a tenant relocation and assistance plan will be provided… for tenants of the existing rental units that will be demolished.” On the penalties: §§ 667-19 to 667-21 set a maximum fine of $100,000, make directors and officers who knowingly concur guilty, and allow the court to increase a fine by an amount equal to the monetary benefit acquired, “despite… any maximum fine elsewhere provided.”
How to read this as a buyer. If the building has six or more dwelling units, Chapter 667 is live before you touch a wall, and the conditions attached to any earlier approval may already be registered against the title you are taking. Ask the solicitor to search title for a s. 111 agreement, ask the vendor for the Rental Housing Declaration of Use and Screening Form, and get the unit-by-unit bedroom table straight before you budget a renovation — because on the City’s definition, changing that table is the demolition.
7The north side of Queen Street West is not, officially, in Parkdale
Every statistic anyone has ever quoted you about Parkdale rests on a boundary, and the boundary is not where you think it is. In the City’s 158-neighbourhood model, the area south of Queen Street West is South Parkdale, neighbourhood 85. The north side of Queen Street West through Parkdale is Roncesvalles, neighbourhood 86. East of Dufferin both sides are Little Portugal (84), and the Queen and Roncesvalles corner is High Park-Swansea (87).
My method, so you can reproduce it. I merged every Toronto Centreline segment named Queen St W west of longitude −79.452 into a single line — 2,280 metres of continuous centreline through Parkdale — sampled it at 0.5 per cent intervals, and tested points offset about 39 metres north and south of the centreline against the neighbourhood polygons. Both datasets are City of Toronto open data; the centreline file was modified 31 August 2026.
| Moving west along Queen St W | North side | South side |
|---|---|---|
| −79.42236 to −79.42260 (Shaw and Ossington area) | Trinity-Bellwoods (081) | Little Portugal (084) |
| −79.42260 to −79.42787 (Dufferin St) | Little Portugal (084) | Little Portugal (084) |
| −79.42787 to −79.42883 | Little Portugal (084) | South Parkdale (085) |
| −79.42883 west to the Roncesvalles terminus | Roncesvalles (086) | South Parkdale (085) |
For essentially the entire length of Parkdale’s main street, the two sides of Queen Street West are in two different City neighbourhoods — and most of the Parkdale Main Street Heritage Conservation District is officially in Roncesvalles.
An independent dataset corroborates it. Of the 145 Heritage Register point records citywide flagged with the conservation district name “Parkdale Main Street,” 95 fall inside Roncesvalles (86) and only 50 inside South Parkdale (85). Split by house-number parity, 90 even-numbered Queen St W records — the north side — land in neighbourhood 86, and 40 odd-numbered records land in 85. That is my analysis of the Heritage Register shapefile refreshed 4 June 2026, and it was done without reference to the centreline test, which is why I trust the answer.
The polygon also goes places you would not call Parkdale. Point-in-polygon tests put Palais Royale, the Sunnyside Bathing Pavilion area, Sir Casimir Gzowski Park and Marilyn Bell Park all inside neighbourhood 85, which runs west along the lake almost to the Humber. It also runs east past Dufferin into the western end of Liberty Village — Liberty St, Mowat, Fraser, Jefferson, Atlantic, Pardee, Joe Shuster Way and Lamport Stadium are inside 85, with the line to Fort York-Liberty Village (163) sitting at roughly longitude −79.421, around Atlantic Avenue. The consequence is concrete: on the City’s own geography, the 50-storey proposal at 58 Atlantic Ave (file 25 269806 STE 10 OZ) and the 55-storey proposal at 54-68 Fraser Ave and 151 Liberty St (file 25 108662 STE 10 OZ, recorded under a legacy tribunal appeal status) are “South Parkdale” applications. West of Dufferin, the tallest live proposals are 16 storeys at 1325 and 1337 Queen St W and at 2-24 Temple Ave, 14 at 138 Dowling Ave, 13 at 1464 King St W and 12 at 1437-1451 Queen St W.
So when a census figure is quoted at you, ask which polygon it describes. Here is the comparison, from the City’s 2021 Census Neighbourhood Profiles workbook for the 158-model, modified 27 May 2026. The percentages are my arithmetic on the published counts, which Statistics Canada rounds, so treat them as approximate to a tenth of a point.
| Occupied private dwellings and households | South Parkdale (85) | Roncesvalles (86) |
|---|---|---|
| Private households | 11,285 | 6,785 |
| Apartment, 5 or more storeys | 7,275 — 64.5% | 1,640 — 24.2% |
| Apartment, under 5 storeys | 3,110 — 27.6% | 2,725 — 40.2% |
| Single-detached and semi-detached houses | 375 — 3.3% | 1,705 — 25.2% |
| Houses of any kind, including rows and flats in a duplex | about 8.0% | about 29.4% |
| Bachelor or one-bedroom households | 7,330 — 65.0% | 2,765 — 40.8% |
| Three or more bedrooms | 925 — 8.2% | 2,545 — 37.5% |
| Built 1960 or before / 1961 to 1980 | 37.2% / 32.2% | 66.6% / 17.9% |
| Owner / renter households | 1,710 — 15.2% / 9,580 — 84.9% | 3,155 — 46.5% / 3,625 — 53.4% |
| Median value of dwellings | $800,000 | $1,300,000 |
| Median monthly shelter cost, owned | $2,080 | $2,000 |
Two of those rows are worth pausing on. The median dwelling value in South Parkdale is 61.5 per cent of the Roncesvalles figure — for two neighbourhoods that share a street. And the median monthly shelter cost for owners is higher in South Parkdale ($2,080) than in Roncesvalles ($2,000) on a dwelling worth half a million dollars less, which is what an apartment-and-maintenance-fee stock looks like next to a freehold-house stock. 92.1 per cent of South Parkdale’s occupied dwellings are apartments on my arithmetic. These are not one housing market and they should not be discussed as one.
One formal designation, stated once and without a total: South Parkdale is designated a Neighbourhood Improvement Area under the City’s Toronto Strong Neighbourhoods Strategy 2020, and Roncesvalles is not. It is in the City’s own Neighbourhood Profiles workbook. I am not printing a count of how many such neighbourhoods there are, because the City’s workbook, its NIA Profiles page and the 2022 split from 140 to 158 neighbourhoods do not give the same number.
How to read this as a buyer. Before you accept any “Parkdale” average — price, income, tenure, dwelling type — ask which polygon produced it, because the standard one excludes half the main street and includes both the Sunnyside waterfront and a slice of Liberty Village. And if you are comparing a building on Queen Street to the one across the road, you are comparing two neighbourhoods with a $500,000 gap in median dwelling value between them.
8Twenty-one buildings the City studied and listed sit outside the heritage district, and their Register status expires on 1 January 2027
The district itself is real and it is on title. By-law 1218-2022 designated the Parkdale Main Street Heritage Conservation District and adopted its plan under Part V of the Ontario Heritage Act. Authority: Toronto and East York Community Council item TE34.58, adopted by Council on 19 to 22 July 2022; “enacted and passed on 28 September 2022.” Section 5 authorises registration of the by-law against title to every property in Schedule B, and the Ontario Heritage Trust’s register, file 16264, records the date of registration as 21 October 2022. The City’s HCD plan page, modified 10 June 2024, records the plan as in force 5 June 2024 and notes that 110 heritage properties in the Parkdale Main Street area were added to the Register in 2020.
It is smaller than people assume. I parsed Schedule B of the by-law: 138 primary addresses, of which 129 are on Queen Street West, numbered 1205 to 1506, five on Cowan Avenue and one each on Joe Shuster Way, Lansdowne Avenue, Macdonell Avenue and Noble Street. That is roughly 1.5 kilometres of Queen Street frontage plus a handful of flanking properties. It is not a residential district: nothing on Jameson, Dunn, Dowling, Beaty, Spencer, Springhurst or Wilson Park is in it.
Now the deadline. Ontario Heritage Act s. 27, as consolidated from 1 April 2026, subsection (16): “In the case of a property included in the register under a predecessor of subsection (3), as of December 31, 2022, the council of a municipality shall remove the property from the register if the council… does not give a notice of intention to designate the property under subsection 29 (1) on or before January 1, 2027 or such later date as may be prescribed.” Subsection (18) then bars council from re-listing a removed property for five years. Subsection (15) gives properties listed on or after 1 January 2023 two years from listing. Subsection (17) says council need not consult its municipal heritage committee before removing. The City’s own Heritage Register Review page states that Council “is required to state its intention by January 1, 2027 or a later date prescribed by the Minister,” that approximately 4,000 properties are currently listed, and that “only a portion… will be able to be designated within this time frame.”
Here is the Parkdale number. On 16 December 2020 Council listed a block of Queen Street West properties carrying an identical Register description: “Identified through the West Queen West Planning Study (2020) and part of the Parkdale Main Street Historic Context.” In the Heritage Register shapefile refreshed 4 June 2026 there are 109 such records inside neighbourhoods 85 and 86. Eighty-seven carry the conservation district flag — they ended up inside the district. Twenty-two do not. One of those 22, 1497 Queen St W, was subsequently designated under Part IV by By-law 245-2026 on 26 March 2026. The remaining 21 are still merely Listed:
| Still Listed only, outside the district boundary | What the Register records |
|---|---|
| 1479 Queen St W | Residential, 1919 |
| 1526, 1528, 1558, 1616, 1618 Queen St W | Part of the same December 2020 listing group |
| 1533 Queen St W | Commercial, about 1924 to 1930 |
| 1605 Queen St W | “Built in 1919. theatre building type.” |
| 1609, 1621 Queen St W | Residential, 1920 |
| 1704, 1706, 1708, 1710, 1712, 1714, 1716, 1718, 1730, 1734 Queen St W | Same December 2020 listing group |
| 85 Wilson Park Rd | Residential, 1910 |
The story, stated precisely. The City’s own study identified these buildings as part of the Parkdale Main Street historic context. Council listed them in December 2020. The district boundary was then drawn to end at 1506 Queen St W and Macdonell Avenue. Everything west of that line got the study, got the listing, and got no district — and all 21 hit the 1 January 2027 expiry. (Several of them — 1526, 1528, 1558, 1616, 1618 and the 1704 to 1734 group — plot inside Roncesvalles (86) because they are on the north side of Queen. See item seven. They are still Parkdale Main Street context properties.)
And 1605 Queen St W has a live application on it. The City’s development applications dataset records file 26 150790 STE 04 OZ, an Official Plan and Zoning By-law Amendment application, status Application Received, received 27 April 2026. The dataset’s description field and application URL are both blank, so this page does not characterise the proposal and neither should anyone else without the file. What is fully sourced from two independent City records is this: a rezoning application was received on 27 April 2026 on a Listed 1919 theatre building that the City’s own study called part of the Parkdale Main Street historic context and that the district boundary left out.
The 2020 group is not the whole exposure. In Parkdale proper — neighbourhood 85 west of Dufferin — the register carries 117 records: 57 Listed, 45 Part V and 15 Part IV. The 57 Listed-only properties are what s. 27(16) reaches, and their listing dates are old. My count of the listing-date profile: 1973 (1), 1976 (19), 1977 (1), 1980 (12), 1981 (7), 1984 (2), 1989 (3), 1993 (2), 1994 (1), 1995 (3), 2020 (6) — so 51 of the 57 were listed between 20 June 1973 and 7 November 1995. Among them: the nine-house row at 6 to 22 Trenton Terrace, described in the Register as “Part of row housing… 1883,” listed on 18 August 1976; the seven houses at 1 to 7 Melbourne Place, “1889 / 1891, Alvary Beecroft, Builder”; the King Street West semis at 1516 to 1536, “1894, J.H. King” and “1894, Richard West”; and single properties including 1457 Queen St W, the Parkdale Substation, 1928, and 1633 Queen St W, the Scholes Hotel, later Ocean House, about 1885.
Two caveats before anyone acts on this. The register file I analysed is a Q2 2026 snapshot refreshed 4 June 2026; Council may have stated intentions to designate since, so check the City’s Heritage Property Search Tool by address before treating any specific property as facing the deadline. And do not use the register file as a count of the district: Schedule B lists 138 primary addresses while the register carries 145 records flagged “Parkdale Main Street,” only 50 of which plot inside South Parkdale. On appeal status, the City’s master list of districts updated 22 July 2026 shows Parkdale Main Street in force and West Queen West as the district under appeal.
How to read this as a buyer. Listing is thin protection — 60 days’ notice before demolition under s. 27(9), a heritage impact assessment triggered in a planning application, and no restriction on alterations. But it is the difference between a study finding and nothing, and for 21 Queen Street West properties it now has a date on it, with a five-year bar on re-listing behind that date. If the value in your model depends on either heritage status or the absence of it, check the Register entry and the Council agenda in the same week you sign.
9Parkdale’s entire Gardiner frontage is the one section of the rehabilitation strategy with no scope, no schedule and no budget
The City publishes a Gardiner Expressway Rehabilitation Strategy page, last modified 14 August 2026, which divides the expressway into six sections. Five of them have a status. One does not.
| Section | Extent | Status on the City’s page |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jarvis St to Cherry St | Complete (2021), using pre-fabricated accelerated bridge construction |
| 2 | Dufferin St to Strachan Ave | Complete (2026) — elevated portion replaced |
| 3 | Hwy 427 to Humber River | In progress — 6.5 km of at-grade expressway reconstructed, 15 bridges rehabilitated |
| 4 | Grand Magazine St to York St | Planned — replace 2 km of elevated section |
| 5 | Cherry St to the Don Valley Parkway | Planned — Hybrid Design, coordinated with the Ontario Line and Port Lands work |
| 6 | Humber River to Dufferin Street | “The scope of work for this section of the Gardiner Expressway is pending an engineering evaluation.” |
Section 6 is Parkdale, exactly and entirely. Humber River to Dufferin Street is the whole of the neighbourhood’s southern edge, and it is the only section of the six with no scope, no schedule and no budget — and it did not get one in the page’s 14 August 2026 update. Section 2, one block east, was completed in 2026: the elevated structure over the Liberty Village and Exhibition edge is new; the structure over Parkdale is not. No cost figure appears anywhere on that page and I am not printing one.
Now the part where I have to report a negative, because the alternative is inventing something. I could not find a documented, City-imposed setback or glazing requirement for new residential development next to the Gardiner Expressway. What the City’s Application Support Material: Terms of Reference page, modified 28 August 2026, actually contains is an Air Quality and Odour Study terms of reference keyed to industrial compatibility, not expressways: assessment is triggered where nearby industrial land uses fall within the influence distances in MOECC Guideline D-6, “Compatibility between Industrial Land Uses” — 70, 300 and 1,000 metres for Class I, II and III industrial uses respectively, with required content including classification of nearby industrial uses, air sampling and odour community surveys where needed, and recommendations for “air emission mitigation, including both potential emission control upgrades at sources and any adjustments to the site plan.” That terms of reference mandates no glazing and no ventilation specification. The page’s Noise Impact Study terms of reference did not render to direct retrieval, and I did not obtain the provincial noise publication that would actually set indoor and outdoor sound-level limits and the ventilation, glazing and warning-clause triggers.
So there is no metre figure and no glazing specification on this page. If someone tells you the City requires a fixed setback or a particular window assembly because of the expressway, ask them which document says so, and read it. What is defensible is narrower: the City requires noise and air-quality studies as application support material, and mitigation is determined study by study rather than by a fixed rule.
There is one documented noise-and-emissions policy near Parkdale, and it is about the railway rather than the expressway. Site and Area Specific Policy 154 covers a list of lands including “lands generally adjacent to the south side of the tracks between Brock Avenue and Queen Street West,” permits a mix of employment and residential uses, and requires either a satisfactory living environment compatible with employment uses, or employment uses restricted to those compatible with residential “in terms of emissions, odour, noise and generation of traffic.” SASP 98 is worth knowing too if you are on that block: it allows part of 9 to 17 Close Avenue to be used for “parking, loading and access” serving 130, 160 and 162 Dunn Avenue.
How to read this as a buyer. The expressway between Parkdale and the lake is the one segment of six that the City has not scoped, scheduled or costed, and the segment immediately east of it finished this year. That is a fact about future disruption and future works you cannot date. It is not, on any document I could find, a fact about a construction standard your house has to meet — and I would rather tell you that I looked and found nothing than hand you a number I cannot cite.
10Your eastern boundary carries unappealable 30-storey permissions keyed to a station whose design work is paused
In August 2025 the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing approved Official Plan Amendments for 120 major transit station areas in Toronto. The City’s Zoning for Major Transit Station Areas page, modified 30 June 2026, records the consequence in seven words: “The Minister’s decision is final and cannot be appealed.”
One of the 120 reaches Parkdale. I loaded the Minister-approved station area shapefile (120 features, 95 Protected MTSAs and 25 MTSAs, dataset modified 3 February 2026), reprojected it and tested it against the neighbourhood polygons. The King-Liberty Protected MTSA, Site and Area Specific Policy 687, has a western boundary at longitude −79.42884 — Dufferin Street — and 19.5 per cent of the station area falls inside South Parkdale (85) on my calculation. Parkdale’s eastern edge is inside a protected station area.
| What a Protected MTSA requires the City to permit | Within 200 m | 200 to 500 m |
|---|---|---|
| Mixed Use Areas, Apartment Neighbourhoods, Regeneration Areas — height | up to 30 storeys | up to 20 storeys |
| The same designations — density | 8.0 FSI | 6.0 FSI |
| Neighbourhoods-designated sites | 6 storeys within 200 m on Major Streets, 4 storeys elsewhere in the station area | |
| Parking | “As of August 15, 2025, the City is not allowed to require that developments in P/MTSAs provide parking.” Accessible parking remains required to AODA standards | |
| Inclusionary zoning | Applies in 89 PMTSAs from 15 August 2025, up to 5 per cent of units affordable for 25 years — but Ontario Regulation 15/26, filed 29 January 2026, pauses implementation until 1 July 2027, while the City must still complete its zoning updates | |
The implementing zoning is not written yet. On 11 June 2026 the Planning and Housing Committee directed City Planning to assess the implications of Bill 98, which received Royal Assent on 2 June 2026, before finalising the MTSA zoning; the City states that “a timeline for bringing the implementing zoning to Council for approval will be determined once staff have finalized an updated workplan,” and that draft zoning by-laws and maps are not yet available.
And the station is paused. The City’s SmartTrack Stations Program page, modified 19 August 2026: “Design work for Finch-Kennedy and King-Liberty GO Stations is paused until sufficient intergovernmental funding is secured,” with the reason given as construction cost increases from material, labour and supply-chain pressures. King-Liberty would sit on the Kitchener corridor between Union and Bloor with pedestrian bridges to King Street. The three SmartTrack stations still proceeding — East Harbour (construction contract awarded March 2025), Junction Triangle / Bloor-Lansdowne (contract awarded July 2023) and Stockyards — carry a combined budget of $1.689 billion: Toronto $878 million (52 per cent), Canada $585 million (34.6 per cent), Ontario $226 million (13.4 per cent). Note also that the Minister withheld decisions on 14 station areas including Exhibition, so those policies are inactive — I confirmed directly that there is no Exhibition feature in the 120-feature approved shapefile.
What has arrived instead is the construction traffic. The City’s staff report “Ontario Line — Construction Update, Fourth Quarter 2025,” dated 18 December 2025, to Toronto and East York Community Council, reporting authority Council item TE4.70, records that Metrolinx updated the haul route so that “trucks now primarily use Dufferin Street to enter and exit the Exhibition work site”; that Metrolinx ran “a structural steel inspection and fatigue analysis on the Dufferin Street Bridge” over the GO corridor and found it “safe for Metrolinx to use for hauling,” subject to future maintenance and assessments; that tunnel boring machines were “anticipated to launch in the spring of 2026” and would tunnel about 20 metres per day; and — read this one twice — that “to minimize congestion from haul trucks, Ontario Line construction vehicles have been granted permission to use the lanes between Dundas Street West and Lake Shore Boulevard West.” That is Parkdale’s eastern boundary, and the corridor a Parkdale resident uses to reach the Gardiner.
The City’s RapidTO programme page, modified 12 June 2026, lists four priority corridors — Bathurst Street, Eglinton Avenue East, Jane Street and Dufferin Street — but that overview page carries no corridor-level status, extent, Council item or implementation date for Dufferin. So there is no Dufferin RapidTO date on this page. The transit-lane permission above is sourced to the 18 December 2025 report; the RapidTO project details are not sourced at all, and I am not going to guess at them.
How to read this as a buyer. The land-use consequence of a station has arrived at Parkdale’s eastern edge and the station has not. If you are buying near Dufferin, the permissions across the street are already final and cannot be appealed by anyone, the City cannot require parking there, the inclusionary zoning that was meant to come with them is paused to 1 July 2027, the implementing zoning is unwritten, and the GO station that justified the whole framework is unfunded. Every one of those facts comes from a City page dated within the last three months.
Four more, because they come up every week
Parkdale’s zoning label tells you almost nothing on its own. I loaded the City’s Zoning Area layer (dataset modified 20 February 2026) and selected polygons whose representative point falls inside South Parkdale: 76 polygons — R 40, CR 24, OR 6, O 4, I 1, EO 1. There is not a single RD, RS, RT, RM or RA polygon in the neighbourhood. Parkdale’s residential land is the old City of Toronto R zone, and the strings carry a density value and no unit value: R (d1.0) and R (d2.0) — one to two times the lot area in floor area, not the 0.35 to 0.6 of the Toronto “Neighbourhoods” cliché. Queen and King are mostly CR 2.5 (c1.0; r2.0) SS2, with CR 4.0 (c3.0; r2.0) SS2 at the Queen and Dufferin corner. Almost every polygon carries an exception number — (x304), (x313), (x318), (x324), (x346), (x439), (x811), (x812), (x821), (x823), (x987), (x988), (x991) and more, with (x988) alone appearing on at least 13 separate polygons — and the exception text in Chapter 900 governs. On height, the overlay gives HT 11.0 m across about 50 hectares and HT 23.0 m across about 21; my calculation is that only about 79 of the neighbourhood’s roughly 229 hectares carry any height overlay at all, about a third. Note the collision that creates: By-law 654-2025 (Council 26 June 2025, item 2025.PH22.4, Mayoral Decision 10-2025) extends fiveplex and sixplex permissions to the Toronto and East York district as it existed that day — which includes Wards 4 and 10 — permitting conversion of a detached house with the new units contained entirely within the building as it lawfully existed on 26 June 2025, expressly excluding semi-detached houses, semi-detached houseplexes and townhouses from conversion, and allowing height to rise to 10.5 m on stated conditions. Parkdale’s own overlay is already 11.0 m, half a metre above that uplift. And a converted Parkdale house with more than three self-contained units averaging under 65 m² is a multi-tenant house under Chapter 575 even where the sixplex by-law would call it a detached houseplex — the June 2025 package (item 2025.PH22.3, By-laws 648-2025 and 650-2025) added a maximum-bedroom limit precisely to draw that line. On whether the sixplex by-laws are in force: By-law 654-2025 keys off By-law 648-2025, which has no explicit in-force clause, and the City’s Multiplex Housing page modified 26 August 2026 says 648, 653 and 654 “are now in force.” That is a City statement, not a tribunal record; check the Ontario Land Tribunal case search if it matters to your file. Garden suites (By-laws 100-2022 and 101-2022, adopted 2 February 2022) and laneway suites (adopted for this district 28 June 2018, city-wide 16 July 2019) are both permitted in the R zone — and Parkdale has the lanes for it: my clip of the City centreline finds 34 laneway segments, 20 distinct named laneways and about 2.65 km of laneway inside the neighbourhood, including Foon Hay Lum Lane, Budapest Lane and Milky Way.
The basement flooding subsidy stops at a fourplex. The City’s subsidy page, modified 18 June 2026, records a programme expanded as of 1 May 2026 with the new amounts applying to eligible work completed on or after 12 November 2025: a plumbing assessment at 80 per cent to a maximum of $500, backwater valves at 80 per cent to $1,600 per device for up to two devices, sump pump installation to $2,250, battery backup to $300, weeping tile severance and capping to $400 — up to $6,650 per property. Eligibility is the “registered owner of a single-family, duplex, triplex, or fourplex residential property in Toronto,” with downspouts disconnected from the City sewer, application within two years of installation and a contractor holding a valid City business licence. A five- or six-unit converted house — precisely the stock the sixplex by-law now encourages and Chapter 575 regulates — gets nothing. Re-read the live eligibility wording before you rely on that, because it is the sort of line that gets amended. On the study areas: the City’s Basement Flooding Protection Program map, modified 13 May 2026, has 67 study areas whose boundaries “generally align with sanitary subsewersheds… not ward or neighbourhood lines,” and the three whose ward lists include Parkdale-High Park or Spadina-Fort York are 42 Downtown, 44 Mid-Toronto and 62 Downtown – Waterfront, all with environmental assessments completed in 2024. “Year Completed” means the study, not construction, and I found no published construction schedule for any of the three. Enter the specific address on the City’s map; a ward answer is too coarse. Mandatory downspout disconnection applies across the former City of Toronto, which includes all of Parkdale. On sewers: the City says its older areas, with systems built as long as a century ago, have combined sewers, but that page names no kilometres, no outfall count and does not name Parkdale — so this page does not say Parkdale is on combined sewers. The six sewer outfalls inside South Parkdale in the 31 August 2026 dataset are all classified “Storm,” and because I did not verify how Toronto Water distinguishes SCSO from CSO in that schema, nothing here characterises what discharges at Sunnyside.
The Committee of Adjustment approves almost everything here, and almost nobody is applying any more. From the City’s Committee of Adjustment dataset, closed applications since 2017, modified 29 August 2026, filtered to the core South Parkdale residential streets in Ward Parkdale-High Park: 86 closed applications — 76 minor variance, 10 consent. Decisions: 72 approved, 4 refused, 1 withdrawn, 9 blank. My derived approval rate is 93.5 per cent of the 77 decided, or 94.7 per cent counting only approvals and refusals. Only two tribunal outcomes are recorded across all 86 — one “OMB Approved” and one “Appeal Allowed — Variances approved” — and both appeals succeeded. On the Queen and King frontage numbered 1150 to 1650 in the same ward there are 25 closed applications: 20 approved, 1 withdrawn, 4 blank, and no refusals at all. The more interesting number is the trend: filings ran 15 in 2022, then 8 in 2023, 4 in 2024, 2 in 2025 and 1 so far in 2026, with zero active applications on those residential streets. Whether that is the multiplex by-laws removing the need to ask for variances or something else, the collapse is in the City’s own file. Caveat, stated plainly: street-name matching will miss applications filed under a different ward label or on streets I did not list, so treat these as a well-defined sample rather than a census.
Three tax facts, one of which cuts the other way from what you would expect. Municipal Land Transfer Tax: new brackets took effect 1 April 2026 on Council’s decision of 17 December 2025, and the graduated luxury bands — 2.5 per cent over $2 million, then 4.40, 5.45, 6.50, 7.55 and 8.60 per cent — apply only to “properties containing one or two single-family residences.” Everything else is 0.5 / 1.0 / 1.5 per cent and then a flat 2.0 per cent over $400,000. My arithmetic on those published brackets: at a $3.5 million purchase price the graduated table produces $83,475 against $66,475 on the flat table — a difference of about $17,000; at $5 million it is $159,975 against $96,475, about $63,500. The divergence opens above $2 million and widens fast, which means that above roughly $2 million the municipal land transfer tax on a multi-unit Parkdale building is lower than on a house at the same price. Have a solicitor confirm how a specific converted house is classified before relying on that; the City’s page does not define “single-family residence,” and it also carries a typo in the fourth row (“$400,000.01 to $2,000,00.00”) that should read $2,000,000.00 — re-read the live page. The municipal non-resident speculation tax is 10 per cent of the purchase amount, effective 1 January 2025, in addition. I am not printing a first-time buyer rebate figure, which is not on that page, and the provincial land transfer tax is a separate tax I did not verify for this page. Vacant Home Tax: 3 per cent of Current Value Assessment from the 2024 taxation year, where a property was vacant for six months or more, and a property is deemed vacant if the owner fails to declare. The City states that “like property taxes, the Vacant Home Tax is attached to the property, not the individual,” and that where undeclared it “forms a lien on the property, and the purchaser will be held responsible for the payment of the tax.” A unit sitting empty through a licensing dispute or a Chapter 667 renovation is exactly the fact pattern the six-month test catches. Assessment: MPAC states that the 2026 property tax year continues to be based on fully phased-in 1 January 2016 current values, the tenth consecutive year, with the postponement extended by a regulation filed 16 August 2023 and no announced date for the next province-wide reassessment. The 2026 Toronto residential rate totals 0.767311 per cent (City 0.605295, Education 0.153000, City Building Fund 0.009016). Properties are still reviewed in non-update years for new construction, renovations, demolitions or changes of use — so a Parkdale renovation that adds units is one of the few things that does trigger a reassessment.
What this list is not
It is not an argument against buying here, and it is not a portrait of the people who live here. Parkdale has a heritage conservation district registered on title along a kilometre and a half of its main street, a genuine laneway grid that puts both laneway and garden suites on the table, fiveplex and sixplex permissions that most of Toronto did not get, the Sunnyside waterfront and Sir Casimir Gzowski Park inside its own neighbourhood polygon, and a Committee of Adjustment that has approved about 94 per cent of decided applications since 2017. Its development pipeline is unusual for Toronto in that it is mostly rental: 141 affordable rental units including 54 replacement units approved at Queen and Beaty, 92 affordable rental units at King Street with the existing building fully retained, 54 supportive housing units approved at Springhurst and Close, a 14-storey purpose-built rental under review at Dowling, and a 16-storey mixed-use building with 175 rental units and about 2,482 square metres of community-serving space under review at Queen and Close.
What this page is written for is the person deciding what a building is and what obligations come with it. It is not a guide to emptying one. Parkdale’s rental stock is occupied by people whose rights under the Residential Tenancies Act are part of the asset you would be buying, and the statutory material in items four, five and six is here so you can price that honestly rather than discover it in month nine of a Board proceeding.
Every one of the ten items above is knowable before you sign. Most buyers find out afterwards. That is the entire difference between working with someone who has read the by-law and working with someone who has read the listing.
Thinking about a specific street in Parkdale?
A neighbourhood list is the right frame for understanding a market and the wrong frame for a decision. What a building is worth here depends on which side of Queen Street it sits on, whether it falls inside the Chapter 575 box, how many units it has and how many it has ever had, whether a section 111 agreement is registered on its title, and what has actually sold on that block. Send me the address and I will give you the comparable sales that apply to it, the live applications and heritage entries on that block, and a straight answer on whether to move now or wait.
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Frequently asked questions
Is there a special rooming-house rule for Parkdale?
Yes, and it applies to no other part of Toronto. Toronto Municipal Code Chapter 575, section 575-1.1(2), consolidation stamped 31 March 2024, defines a multi-tenant house to include a building inside the area bounded by Dundas Street West, Dufferin Street and the rail lines, Lake Shore Boulevard West and Roncesvalles Avenue where the building is a converted house as defined in former Zoning By-law 438-86, contains more than three dwelling units, the average floor area of those units is less than 65 square metres, and one or more units are intended to be used in return for remuneration. The chapter’s dwelling unit definition for that limb requires both food preparation and sanitary facilities for the exclusive use of the occupants, so the units can be fully self-contained and the building is still a licensed multi-tenant house.
Can I buy a licensed multi-tenant house in Parkdale and take over the licence?
No. Section 575-2.2 G states that no licence shall be transferred. At least 90 days in advance of a change of operator, the existing operator must give notice to the Executive Director and the new operator must apply for an initial licence, and the existing operator must maintain their licence in good standing and remain responsible for the operation until the new operator is issued a licence. An initial application also requires a preliminary project review (use only) from Toronto Building. A 60-day closing cannot accommodate that sequence. If an application is refused, section 575-2.2 F(4) allows 30 days to request a hearing before the Multi-Tenant House Licensing Tribunal, and F(5) provides that if no hearing is requested within 30 days, any further application for those premises will not be considered for one year.
How many licensed multi-tenant houses are there in Parkdale?
The City’s Multi Tenant House Licences dataset, modified 30 August 2026, holds 403 records citywide: 224 Active, 92 In Progress and 87 Inactive, with Ward 4 Parkdale-High Park carrying 138, more than any other ward. On my own street-name filter, described in item three, 112 of those records are in Parkdale: 67 Active, 32 In Progress and 13 Inactive, which is 27.8 per cent of the citywide total on my calculation. Those are licence records rather than buildings, a few matched streets sit on the Liberty Village edge, and the conservative figure to quote is the 67 Active licences.
Is Parkdale rent controlled, or does the 1991 rule apply?
The 1991 rule was repealed. Subsection 6(2) of the Residential Tenancies Act, 2006, which exempted buildings no part of which was occupied for residential purposes before 1 November 1991, was repealed by section 3(2) of the Rental Fairness Act, 2017, in force 30 May 2017. The live exemption is section 6.1 and its date is 15 November 2018. Subsection 6.1(3), the one that covers units in detached, semi-detached and row houses, requires that the house contained not more than two residential units on or at any time before that date, which permanently excludes a house that was already converted. Subsection 6.1(6) puts the onus on the landlord to prove an exemption applies. This page does not print the 2026 rent-increase guideline percentage, because I did not verify it from a provincial source.
Can a Parkdale house be sold with vacant possession?
Usually not by notice. Section 49(1) of the Residential Tenancies Act allows a vendor to serve an own-use notice on a purchaser’s behalf only for a residential complex containing no more than three residential units, or for a condominium unit under section 49(2). Section 48(5) provides that a landlord’s own such notice is not authorised unless the unit is owned in whole or in part by an individual and the landlord is an individual, so a corporate purchaser has none. Section 72(2) adds a four-unit limit in defined circumstances. Where a notice is available, the statutory period is at least 60 days, the Landlord and Tenant Board’s published timeline for most other application types is five to seven months to a hearing with orders usually within 30 days after, and section 83 discretion applies. If you have an actual tenancy question, take it to a lawyer or to the Landlord and Tenant Board.
Do I need a City permit to renovate a Parkdale rental building?
If it contains six or more dwelling units, quite possibly. Toronto Municipal Code Chapter 667 is made under section 111 of the City of Toronto Act, 2006, not the Planning Act, and it defines demolition to include interior renovations or alterations that will result in a change to the number of dwelling units by bedroom type. Section 111(3) provides that the City cannot prohibit or regulate demolition or conversion of a property containing less than six dwelling units, which is a provincial limit on Council’s power rather than a policy choice. Section 111(2.1) allows the City to register a required agreement against title and enforce it against subsequent owners. The 2026 fee for a demolition application is $6,227.90 plus $249.64 per unit.
Is the north side of Queen Street West in Parkdale?
Not in the City’s geography. In the 158-neighbourhood model the south side is South Parkdale, neighbourhood 85, and the north side through Parkdale is Roncesvalles, neighbourhood 86; east of Dufferin both sides are Little Portugal and the Queen and Roncesvalles corner is High Park-Swansea. My centreline sampling test produced that result, and an independent dataset corroborates it: of 145 Heritage Register records flagged Parkdale Main Street, 95 fall in neighbourhood 86 and 50 in 85. It matters because every Parkdale census statistic describes the south side plus the Sunnyside waterfront plus the western end of Liberty Village, and not the north side of the main street.
Which Parkdale heritage listings expire on 1 January 2027?
Section 27(16) of the Ontario Heritage Act requires council to remove a property listed under a predecessor of subsection 27(3) as of 31 December 2022 if it does not give a notice of intention to designate on or before 1 January 2027, and subsection 27(18) bars re-listing for five years. In Parkdale, 21 properties listed on 16 December 2020 through the West Queen West Planning Study sit outside the Parkdale Main Street district boundary and are still Listed only, including 1605 Queen Street West, recorded as built in 1919 and of theatre building type, which has a rezoning application received on 27 April 2026. A further 57 properties in Parkdale west of Dufferin are Listed only, 51 of them listed between 20 June 1973 and 7 November 1995. Check any specific address on the City’s Heritage Property Search Tool, because the register data here is a snapshot refreshed 4 June 2026.
Is the Gardiner Expressway being rebuilt through Parkdale?
There is no plan on the City’s page. The Gardiner Expressway Rehabilitation Strategy page, modified 14 August 2026, divides the expressway into six sections. Section 6, Humber River to Dufferin Street, which is precisely Parkdale, carries only the statement that the scope of work for this section is pending an engineering evaluation. Section 1 was completed in 2021, Section 2 from Dufferin to Strachan was completed in 2026, Section 3 is in progress and Sections 4 and 5 are planned. No cost figure appears on the page. Separately, I could not find any documented City-imposed setback or glazing requirement for residential development next to the expressway, so this page does not state one.
Is a GO station coming to Dufferin Street?
The permissions have arrived and the station has not. The King-Liberty Protected Major Transit Station Area, Site and Area Specific Policy 687, extends west to Dufferin Street, and 19.5 per cent of it falls inside South Parkdale on my calculation. The Minister approved the station area amendments in August 2025 and the City states that the Minister’s decision is final and cannot be appealed; the required permissions reach 30 storeys and 8.0 FSI within 200 metres on Mixed Use, Apartment Neighbourhoods and Regeneration Areas lands, and since 15 August 2025 the City is not allowed to require parking there. But the City’s SmartTrack page, modified 19 August 2026, states that design work for the King-Liberty GO station is paused until sufficient intergovernmental funding is secured.
Related reading
- Top 10 things no one will tell you about Roncesvalles, Toronto
- Top 10 things no one will tell you about Leslieville, Toronto
- Top 10 things no one will tell you about The Queensway and Stonegate-Queensway
- Top 10 things no one will tell you about Mimico and Humber Bay Shores
- Toronto Municipal Land Transfer Tax: the bracket table from 1 April 2026
- Toronto Vacant Home Tax: the buyer can be left holding it
- Toronto West market report, July 2026
Sources
Every figure on this page traces to one of these twenty-five, and each was read on 31 August 2026. Primary and official sources only — a Municipal Code chapter, a by-law PDF, a Council item, a statute as consolidated on e-Laws, a City open dataset with its refresh date, a tribunal publication, or the agency that administers the thing being described. Where a number is my own arithmetic on those sources it is labelled as such where it appears, with the inputs shown. Where I could not verify something from a primary source, it is not on the page.
- Toronto Municipal Code Chapter 575, Multi-Tenant Houses. City of Toronto, consolidation stamped 31 March 2024; adopted 8 February 2023 by By-law 157-2023, in force 31 March 2024, repealing former City of Toronto Chapter 285 and former City of Etobicoke Chapter 166. The two-limb definition in § 575-1.1 and the Parkdale-only limb (2) with its Dundas, Dufferin and rail lines, Lake Shore and Roncesvalles boundary, the converted house test, the more-than-three-units test, the 65 square metre average and the remuneration test; the dwelling unit definition requiring exclusive food preparation and sanitary facilities; § 575-2.1 A and D; § 575-2.2 A(1)(d), (e) and (f); § 575-2.2 F(4) and (5); § 575-2.2 G on change of operator; § 575-5.1 A to H including the special fine, director liability, continuing offence and reverse onus; §§ 575-5.2 to 575-5.4; and the § 575-5.5 transition. toronto.ca
- Multi-Tenant House Owners & Operators, and the Multi-Tenant House Licensing Tribunal. City of Toronto, page modified 16 June 2026, and the tribunal’s own page. The 31 March 2024 licensing start date, Type A and Type B licences, the $27.04 per room per application fee and $162.24 per house inspection fee, the exemption for Toronto Community Housing and non-profit social housing providers, the City’s own room-cap formulation of 6, 12 or 25 rooms depending on location and zone type in Toronto, East York and York, the one bathroom per four rooms requirement, the $600 ticket and the $100,000 and $10,000 daily maximums, and the tribunal that hears licence refusals, revocations and conditions. toronto.ca
- Multi Tenant House Licences open dataset. City of Toronto Open Data, dataset modified 30 August 2026; fields site address, district, ward and status. The 403 records citywide, the 224 Active, 92 In Progress and 87 Inactive split, the district counts of 392 Toronto and East York, 6 Etobicoke York and 5 Scarborough, and the ward counts led by Ward 4 Parkdale-High Park at 138. The Parkdale figures on this page — 112 records, 67 Active, and the 27.8 per cent share — are my own street-name filter on this file and are labelled as such. open.toronto.ca
- By-law 156-2023, to permit multi-tenant houses. City of Toronto. Authority Council item CC2.1 adopted as amended 14 and 15 December 2022, Council vote 8 February 2023, written approval by Mayoral Decision 2-2023, passed under s. 34 of the Planning Act. The new Zoning By-law 569-2013 definitions of multi-tenant house and of dwelling room, the deletion of the rooming house use from the R and RA zone tables, the specific-use regulations at § 150.25(3) to (5), the minimum parking rate of zero spaces per dwelling room, the former By-law 438-86 amendments at ss. 384 to 393, and Diagram 1, which is a map image on page 72 of the 74-page PDF rather than a table — the reason this page does not state a room count for any Parkdale block. toronto.ca
- Residential Tenancies Act, 2006, and the Rental Fairness Act, 2017. Government of Ontario e-Laws. RTA current consolidation with dateFrom 1 July 2026, plus historical version 25, in force 1 January to 29 May 2017, for the repealed s. 6(2). Sections 6(2) as repealed; 6.1(2) to (6); 48, 48.1, 48(5); 49, 49.1(1) and (2); 55.1; 57(1) to (6) including the 12-month general compensation and the administrative fine; 72(1)(a), (2) and (3); 83(2), (3) and (4); 111(1); 113; 120.1; 238 as amended in force 1 July 2026; and the forward-dated notes timed to 21 September 2026 under the Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, 2025 adding s. 48.1(2), amending s. 83(1)(b) and adding s. 57(6.1). The repeal itself is s. 3(2) of the Rental Fairness Act, 2017, S.O. 2017, c. 13, in force 30 May 2017. ontario.ca
- Landlord and Tenant Board — Application and hearing process, and the Tribunals Ontario 2024-25 Annual Report. Tribunals Ontario, page updated 6 July 2026, and the annual report for the fiscal year ended 31 March 2025. Approximately three months to a hearing for L1 and L9 applications, five to seven months for most other application types, five to six weeks for urgent matters, orders usually issued within a service timeline of 30 days or less after a hearing, and the suggestion to contact the Board 60 days after a hearing. The report records 87,993 applications received, 81,490 of them online, and an active caseload reduced to 41,465 as at 31 March 2025, a 26 per cent reduction since the December 2023 peak. tribunalsontario.ca
- City of Toronto Act, 2006, S.O. 2006, c. 11, Sched. A, section 111. Government of Ontario e-Laws, consolidation with dateFrom 2 June 2026. Subsection (1) on prohibiting and regulating demolition and conversion of residential rental properties as amended by 2023, c. 10, Sched. 2, s. 1(1); (2) on permit requirements and conditions; (2.1) on registering an agreement against title and enforcing it against the owner and any subsequent owners, added 2017, c. 10, Sched. 2, s. 12; (3), the restriction preventing the City from regulating a property containing less than six dwelling units; (5) on the Building Code Act permit; and (7) and (8) on the Minister’s regulation-making power and its paramountcy, added 2023, c. 10, Sched. 2, s. 1(2), in force 8 June 2023. ontario.ca
- Toronto Municipal Code Chapter 667, Residential and Rental Property Demolition and Conversion Control. City of Toronto, consolidation stamped 15 December 2023. Adopted 19 July 2007 by By-law 885-2007 with the editor’s note recording that it was passed under section 111 of the City of Toronto Act, 2006; Articles I to IV substantially amended 15 December 2023 by By-law 1331-2023. The § 667-1 definitions of demolition, including interior renovations or alterations changing the number of dwelling units by bedroom type, and of dwelling unit; § 667-2 on the fewer-than-six-units, condominium and life lease exclusions; §§ 667-3 and 667-4 on permits and what conversion includes; § 667-5; § 667-6 on harassment of tenants; § 667-15 conditions including rental replacement at similar rents, tenant relocation and assistance, the right to return, and § 667-15 B and D; and §§ 667-19 to 667-22 on offences, the $100,000 maximum, director liability, the monetary benefit penalty and the transition. toronto.ca
- 2026 Rental Housing Demolition and Conversion application form. City of Toronto City Planning, version stamp V26FEB2026, stated as effective 1 January 2026. The full fee schedule used on this page: demolition at a $6,227.90 base fee plus $249.64 per unit, delegated demolition at $1,246.02 plus $62.14, conversion to condominium or freehold and other consents at $3,736.96 plus $62.14, and conversion to co-ownership or life lease at $14,947.84 plus $62.14. Also the annual 1 January fee adjustment under Municipal Code §§ 441-4 and 442-9D, the City Clerk notice and meeting-service surcharges, the requirement that the applicant give notice to tenants at their own expense, the unit-by-unit table of existing and proposed rental units by bedroom count, and the required Rental Housing Declaration of Use and Screening Form, which I did not retrieve. toronto.ca
- Neighbourhoods and Toronto Centreline (TCL) open datasets. City of Toronto Open Data; the 158-neighbourhood polygon layer, and the centreline dataset modified 31 August 2026. Used for the boundary work in item seven: the South Parkdale (85) polygon and its bounding box and approximate 2.29 square kilometre area, the merged 2,280-metre Queen Street West centreline through Parkdale sampled at 0.5 per cent intervals with points tested about 39 metres north and south, the resulting neighbourhood assignments for each side of the street, the point-in-polygon results placing Palais Royale, the Sunnyside Bathing Pavilion area, Sir Casimir Gzowski Park and Marilyn Bell Park inside 85, the 85 and 163 line around Atlantic Avenue, and the laneway clip finding 34 segments, 20 named laneways and about 2.65 kilometres. All of that geometry work is mine and is labelled as such on the page. open.toronto.ca
- Neighbourhood Profiles, 2021 Census, 158-neighbourhood model. City of Toronto Open Data, workbook modified 27 May 2026; Statistics Canada 2021 Census 25 per cent sample data, rounded by Statistics Canada. South Parkdale is neighbourhood 85 and Roncesvalles is 86. Household counts, structural type, bedrooms, period of construction, tenure, median and average dwelling values and median monthly shelter costs for both neighbourhoods, and the Neighbourhood Improvement Area designation flag under the Toronto Strong Neighbourhoods Strategy 2020. Every percentage drawn from these counts on this page is my own arithmetic and is labelled as such; the workbook has no plain population row, and the totals quoted are persons in private households. open.toronto.ca
- Ontario Heritage Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. O.18, section 27. Government of Ontario e-Laws, consolidation with dateFrom 1 April 2026. Subsection (9), the 60 days’ written notice a listed property’s owner must give before demolishing or removing a building or structure, and (10) on when it applies; (15), the two-year rule for properties listed on or after 1 January 2023; (16), the requirement that council remove a property listed under a predecessor of subsection (3) as of 31 December 2022 unless it gives a notice of intention to designate on or before 1 January 2027 or a later prescribed date; (17); and (18), the five-year bar on re-listing. Section-amendment table entries 2022, c. 21, Sched. 6, s. 3(2) to (4) in force 1 January 2023 and 2024, c. 18, Sched. 2, s. 1(1) to (3) in force 6 June 2024. ontario.ca
- Heritage Register open dataset. City of Toronto Open Data, shapefile HRAPQ22026_OpenData, Q2 2026, last refreshed 4 June 2026; 12,328 records citywide, being 7,267 Part V, 3,504 Listed and 1,557 Part IV. Used for the property-level work in items seven and eight: the 135 records in South Parkdale and 117 in Parkdale west of Dufferin with their 57 Listed, 45 Part V and 15 Part IV split; the listing-date profile of those 57; the 145 records flagged with the Parkdale Main Street conservation district name and their 95 to 50 split between neighbourhoods 86 and 85; the 109 records carrying the 16 December 2020 West Queen West Planning Study description, of which 87 carry the district flag and 22 do not; and the individual Register descriptions quoted, including 1605 Queen St W. The counts and splits are my analysis of this file. open.toronto.ca
- By-law 1218-2022 designating the Parkdale Main Street Heritage Conservation District, with the Ontario Heritage Trust register and the City’s district and register-review pages. City of Toronto by-law, authority Toronto and East York Community Council item TE34.58 as adopted by Council on 19 to 22 July 2022, enacted and passed 28 September 2022; section 1 designating under Part V of the Ontario Heritage Act and section 5 authorising registration against title to the Schedule B properties. The Ontario Heritage Trust register, file 16264, records the by-law date of 28 September 2022, registration on 21 October 2022, the objection deadline of 21 November 2022 and the $1,100 appeal fee. The City’s Heritage Conservation Districts and Studies page, modified 22 July 2026, records Parkdale Main Street as designated and in force and West Queen West as under appeal; the Parkdale Main Street HCD Plan page, modified 10 June 2024, records the plan in force 5 June 2024 and 110 properties added to the Register in 2020; and the Heritage Register Review page records the 1 January 2027 deadline, approximately 4,000 listed properties and the five-year re-listing bar. The Schedule B parse — 138 primary addresses, 129 on Queen Street West between 1205 and 1506 — is mine. toronto.ca
- Development Applications open dataset. City of Toronto Open Data, 26,432 records, last refreshed 31 August 2026; public interface at the Application Information Centre. Files and statuses used on this page: 26 150790 STE 04 OZ at 1605 Queen St W, Application Received 27 April 2026, with a blank description and application URL, which is why this page does not characterise the proposal; 26 118047 STE 04 OZ at 1497 and 1501 Queen St W and 89 and 91 Beaty Ave; 25 165309 STE 04 SA at 1337, 1339 and 1355 King St W; 26 182820 STE 04 SA at 1325 and 1337 Queen St W; 26 213803 STE 04 SA and 26 143612 STE 04 OZ at 78 Springhurst Ave and 1 and 3 Close Ave; 26 127575 STE 04 SA at 138 Dowling Ave; 24 253913 STE 04 OZ at 1464 King St W; 23 147008 STE 04 OZ at 1437 to 1451 Queen St W; 21 231712 STE 04 CD at 2 to 24 Temple Ave; 25 269806 STE 10 OZ at 58 Atlantic Ave; 25 108662 STE 10 OZ at 54 to 68 Fraser Ave and 151 Liberty St; 13 269687 STE 14 OZ at 1267 King St W; and 15 130397 STE 14, a rental housing demolition file number recorded against 25 Liberty St. The 65 unique application numbers inside the South Parkdale polygon are my count after reprojecting the dataset coordinates. open.toronto.ca
- Gardiner Expressway Rehabilitation Strategy. City of Toronto, page modified 14 August 2026. The six-section structure and the status of each: Section 1 Jarvis to Cherry complete in 2021, Section 2 Dufferin to Strachan complete in 2026, Section 3 Highway 427 to the Humber River in progress with 6.5 kilometres of at-grade expressway and 15 bridges, Sections 4 and 5 planned, and Section 6 Humber River to Dufferin Street carrying only the statement that the scope of work for that section is pending an engineering evaluation. The page carries no cost figures, which is why none appear on this page. toronto.ca
- Application Support Material: Terms of Reference. City of Toronto, page modified 28 August 2026. The Air Quality and Odour Study terms of reference, which are keyed to industrial compatibility rather than expressways and trigger assessment where nearby industrial land uses fall within the MOECC Guideline D-6 influence distances of 70, 300 and 1,000 metres for Class I, II and III industrial uses, and which require classification of nearby industrial uses, air sampling and odour community surveys where needed and recommendations for air emission mitigation. The page’s Noise Impact Study terms of reference did not render to direct retrieval, and the Air Quality terms of reference mandate no glazing or ventilation specification — which is why this page states no Gardiner setback or glazing requirement. toronto.ca
- Zoning for Major Transit Station Areas, with the Minister-Approved Major Transit Station Areas dataset. City of Toronto, page modified 30 June 2026, and the open dataset MajorTransitStationAreaDelinations_Jan2026, 120 features, modified 3 February 2026. The August 2025 Ministerial approval of Official Plan Amendments for 120 station areas and the statement that the Minister’s decision is final and cannot be appealed; the required permissions of 30 storeys and 8.0 FSI within 200 metres and 20 storeys and 6.0 FSI at 200 to 500 metres on Mixed Use Areas, Apartment Neighbourhoods and Regeneration Areas, and 6 and 4 storeys on Neighbourhoods-designated sites; the 15 August 2025 prohibition on requiring parking, with accessible parking still required to AODA standards; inclusionary zoning in 89 PMTSAs and its pause to 1 July 2027 by Ontario Regulation 15/26 filed 29 January 2026; the 11 June 2026 Planning and Housing Committee direction on Bill 98, which received Royal Assent 2 June 2026, and the absence of draft implementing zoning; the 14 withheld station areas including Exhibition; and, from the shapefile, the King-Liberty Protected MTSA, SASP 687, its western boundary at Dufferin Street and the 19.5 per cent of it inside South Parkdale, which is my calculation. toronto.ca
- SmartTrack Stations Program. City of Toronto, page modified 19 August 2026. The statement that design work for the Finch-Kennedy and King-Liberty GO stations is paused until sufficient intergovernmental funding is secured, and the reason given as construction cost increases arising from material, labour and supply-chain pressures; the King-Liberty location on the Kitchener corridor between Union and Bloor with pedestrian bridges connecting King Street; and the three stations still proceeding — East Harbour, Junction Triangle or Bloor-Lansdowne and Stockyards — with their combined $1.689 billion budget split as Toronto $878 million or 52 per cent, Canada $585 million or 34.6 per cent and Ontario $226 million or 13.4 per cent. toronto.ca
- Ontario Line — Construction Update, Fourth Quarter 2025, staff report dated 18 December 2025. City of Toronto, Executive Director, Transit Expansion Division, to Toronto and East York Community Council; reporting authority Council item TE4.70. The updated haul route under which trucks now primarily use Dufferin Street to enter and exit the Exhibition work site; the structural steel inspection and fatigue analysis on the Dufferin Street Bridge over the Metrolinx GO corridor and the finding that it is safe for hauling subject to future maintenance and assessments; the statement that to minimise congestion, Ontario Line construction vehicles have been granted permission to use the lanes between Dundas Street West and Lake Shore Boulevard West; the completion of the tunnel launch shaft excavation in August 2025 and the anticipated spring 2026 launch of the tunnel boring machines at about 20 metres a day; and the Exhibition Station foundation and shared platform works. The City’s RapidTO page, modified 12 June 2026, lists Dufferin Street as one of four priority corridors but carries no status, extent, Council item or implementation date for it. toronto.ca
- Zoning By-law and Committee of Adjustment Applications open datasets. City of Toronto Open Data; the zoning package modified 20 February 2026, including the Zoning Area, Height Overlay and Rooming House Overlay layers, and the Committee of Adjustment closed applications file modified 29 August 2026 with 33,712 records. The 76 zoning polygons with a representative point in South Parkdale and their R, CR, OR, O, I and EO split; the R (d1.0) and R (d2.0) strings, the CR strings on Queen and King and the exception numbers; the height overlay values and areas; and the Committee of Adjustment sample of 86 closed applications with 72 approved, 4 refused and 1 withdrawn, the two tribunal outcomes, the filing-year trend and the 25 Queen and King frontage applications. The polygon selections, the approval rates and the height-overlay share are my calculations on these files, and the Rooming House Overlay layer references the pre-156-2023 geography and is used here for nothing. open.toronto.ca
- By-law 654-2025 on fiveplexes and sixplexes, with the City’s Multiplex Housing page. City of Toronto by-law and page modified 26 August 2026. The extension of fiveplex and sixplex permissions to the lands in the Toronto and East York Community Council boundaries as they existed on 26 June 2025 and the repeal of By-law 47-2025; Council vote 26 June 2025 with written approval by Mayoral Decision 10-2025, Council item 2025.PH22.4. The s. 600.60.40 regulations: a sixplex as a type of detached houseplex rather than an apartment building, the override of a lower unit value, the height increase to 10.5 metres on stated conditions, conversion of a detached house with new units contained entirely within the building as it lawfully existed on 26 June 2025, and the exclusion of semi-detached houses, semi-detached houseplexes and townhouses from conversion at s. 600.60.40(3)(D). The page states that By-laws 653, 654 and 648 of 2025 are now in force. Related: By-laws 473-2023 and 474-2023 and Council item 2023.PH3.16 for the citywide four-unit multiplex permissions, and item 2025.PH22.3 with By-laws 648-2025 and 650-2025 for the maximum-bedroom limit distinguishing a multiplex from a multi-tenant house. toronto.ca
- Basement Flooding Protection Subsidy Program, and the Basement Flooding Protection Program Map. City of Toronto, pages modified 18 June 2026 and 13 May 2026. The programme expanded as of 1 May 2026 with amounts applying to eligible work completed on or after 12 November 2025; the maximums of $500 for a plumbing assessment, $1,600 per backwater valve device for up to two devices, $2,250 for a sump pump, $300 for a battery backup and $400 for weeping tile severance and capping, all at 80 per cent of invoiced cost and totalling up to $6,650 per property; and the eligibility limited to the registered owner of a single-family, duplex, triplex or fourplex residential property, with downspouts disconnected, application within two years and a licensed contractor. The map page records 67 study areas whose boundaries generally align with sanitary subsewersheds rather than ward or neighbourhood lines, that the third column means the year the environmental assessment study was completed, and that study areas 42 Downtown, 44 Mid-Toronto and 62 Downtown-Waterfront list Parkdale-High Park or Spadina-Fort York among their wards, each completed in 2024. toronto.ca
- Municipal Land Transfer Tax rates and fees, Vacant Home Tax, and Property Tax Rates and Fees, with MPAC’s assessment cycle. City of Toronto, pages modified 7 April 2026, 22 July 2026 and 11 May 2026, and the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation. The land transfer tax brackets effective 1 April 2026 on Council’s decision of 17 December 2025, the graduated luxury bands applying only to properties containing one or two single-family residences, the flat 2.0 per cent over $400,000 for all other properties, the 10 per cent municipal non-resident speculation tax effective 1 January 2025, the $102.56 administration fee and the page’s own typographical error in the fourth bracket row; the Vacant Home Tax at 3 per cent of Current Value Assessment from the 2024 taxation year, the six-month vacancy test, the deeming rule where no declaration is made, the $10,000 fine and 1.25 per cent monthly interest, and the statements that the tax is attached to the property rather than the individual and that where undeclared it forms a lien for which the purchaser will be held responsible; the 2026 residential rate of 0.767311 per cent in total; and MPAC’s statement that the 2026 property tax year continues to be based on fully phased-in 1 January 2016 current values, with the postponement extended by a regulation filed 16 August 2023. The bracket comparison arithmetic on this page is mine, and the provincial land transfer tax was not verified. toronto.ca
- Official Plan Chapter 6, Secondary Plans, and Chapter 7, Site and Area Specific Policies. City of Toronto; Chapter 6 index modified 6 July 2026, and the nine Chapter 7 office consolidations covering policies 0 to 899, dated December 2024 for the 0-99 through 400s ranges and June 2025 for the 500s through 800s. The Chapter 6 index lists 51 secondary plans and none covers Parkdale, South Parkdale or Queen Street West in Parkdale, the nearest being Secondary Plan 14, Garrison Common North, whose western limit is the Dufferin Street area. From Chapter 7: SASP 98 on part of 9 to 17 Close Avenue; SASP 153 and SASP 154, including the emissions, odour, noise and traffic compatibility test on lands generally adjacent to the south side of the tracks between Brock Avenue and Queen Street West; SASP 284 on 57 and 59 Elm Grove Avenue; SASP 305, which makes funding a heritage conservation district study an eligible Section 37 community benefit and lists Parkdale at item 75, together with its verbatim description of Parkdale’s development between 1875 and 1895; and SASP 873 at 1354-1364 Queen Street West and 2-14 Brock Avenue, requiring a tenant relocation and assistance plan in accordance with Official Plan policy 3.2.1.12. My text search of all nine consolidations for converted house, bachelorette, rooming house and multi-tenant found no Parkdale-specific policy on any of them. toronto.ca
What this page is and is not. This is general information about public documents affecting a Toronto neighbourhood, not legal, tax, planning, engineering or financial advice, and not an opinion on the value, condition, zoning or licence status of any particular property. It is not tenancy advice to anyone, owner or tenant: the Residential Tenancies Act material here describes the legal framework a purchaser inherits, and any actual tenancy question belongs with a lawyer or with the Landlord and Tenant Board. Statutes, by-laws, tax rates, fees, construction schedules and municipal policies change; every figure here is dated to 31 August 2026 and should be re-checked against the source before you rely on it. Several figures on this page are my own arithmetic on published counts, fee schedules and open data rather than published statistics — the Parkdale multi-tenant house licence count and its 27.8 per cent share, the licence-fee and rental-demolition fee calculations, the eight-to-ten-month Landlord and Tenant Board range, the Committee of Adjustment approval rate, the height-overlay share, the land transfer tax comparison, the boundary scan along Queen Street West and every census percentage — and each is labelled where it appears. Development applications described here are proposals or decisions as recorded on the dates stated and may since have changed; the City’s open dataset uses legacy Ontario Municipal Board labels for what are now Ontario Land Tribunal matters, records internal review statuses that lag Council, and an approved application is not a built building. The Heritage Register data used here is a snapshot refreshed 4 June 2026 and nothing on this page asserts the current heritage, zoning or licence status of any individual address. For advice on a specific transaction, consult a lawyer, an accountant and a qualified professional as applicable. Jatin Dua is a Broker of Record with RE/MAX Quantum Realty Inc., Brokerage. Not intended to solicit buyers or sellers currently under contract with another brokerage.
About the author — Jatin Dua, Etobicoke and Toronto real estate expert
I am the Broker of Record and co-founder of RE/MAX Quantum Realty at 799 The Queensway in Etobicoke, with more than $100 million in GTA sales volume. I write these pages the same way I work a file: read the primary source, quote it, date it, show the arithmetic when the number is mine, and say plainly where the source is silent or where two documents disagree. If a figure on this page has no citation beside it, that is a mistake and I want to hear about it.
I work with buyers, sellers, renters and investors across Parkdale, Roncesvalles, High Park, Liberty Village and the west end, and across Mimico, Humber Bay Shores, The Kingsway, Islington, Stonegate-Queensway and Etobicoke. connect@jatindua.com or 437-987-1925.