Toronto’s hidden network of rooming houses: In pictures

1.1 million people rely on Toronto’s thousands of housing associations to find a home. Twenty thousand live in rooming houses, two per cent of them above four beds. Previously, this massive reliance on the roughly 5,000 homes to find the necessary shelter demanded an emergency room to manage their influx in October 2014. But that same year, Toronto city council demanded action, and in February 2015, they asked the city’s planning staff to study the matter, inviting input from every agency and platform that matters. After several months of consultation and study, the staff concluded that regulating rooming houses is not feasible under present zoning laws and presented their findings to council on March 18 2015.

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