The missing home
Community, culture, cost and the urgent case for multi-generational living
In this excerpt from House Divided: How the Missing Middle Can Solve Toronto’s
Housing Crisis (edited by Alex Bozikovic, Cheryll Case, John Lorinc and Annabel Vaughan), Fatima Syed examines an old concept to see how it can be reborn. My maternal grandfather’s house was one of the first to emerge in a new Karachi suburb in post-partition Pakistan. It was a white-walled, two-storey rectangular building flanked by a garden and a large backyard that served as servants’ quarters, water source and playground. To get there, you had to walk down a driveway lined with potted plants, a mini-courtyard elevated by five or so steps, and a chicken coop. There were three bedrooms inside, each with its own bathroom and one with a separate exit.
The property had two major gateways: sturdy, ironclad, ornate gates that required all your strength to open. One was for my grandfather’s family downstairs; the other, for whoever was renting the portion upstairs. Over the years, five generations lived in that house, rarely fewer than three at one time. My mother says she never saw the house empty. Nor was the main door ever locked in the two decades she lived there.
My sister and I were the youngest members of the fourth generation of the family that lived in that house, albeit temporarily. By the 1990s, half the family had become expats, scattered across the Middle East. But somehow, every summer, when we all descended on that unremarkable white house, we would all fit across three bedrooms and a very large living room that had its own exit to the garden — a favoured escape route for the kids who passed through.
Multi-generational living was all we knew growing up. But the progression of time has made that lifestyle less
prevalent. My grandparents passed away, leaving behind a house that holds generations of memories, and their kids all started moving away from their childhood neighbourhood — once so affluent and brimming with life, but now, without its founders, slowly rusting into disrepair. Their grandkids moved even farther away, in pursuit of education. Somewhere, somehow, multi-generational living became a distant, happy memory.
My grandfather’s multi-generational model is rare to find in North America. Some urban planning experts say the phenomenon first arrived in Toronto in the early to mid-20th century with the settlement of Italian, Portuguese and Greek immigrants who crossed the oceans with big families and built houses with character and grandeur. The early Southern European immigrants were able to plan for the growth of their families, says Robert Murdie, professor emeritus of geography at York University. They had the space to expand their houses to develop seniors’ apartments as they aged and create new living quarters to accommodate new generations.
Then came what Jack Jedwab, the president of the Association for Canadian Studies, calls “a very individualistic era.” Jedwab’s European parents lived with his grandparents before moving to Canada. “There used to be a sense of responsibility for your parents (among) second-generation kids,” he says. But that practice has become less common, as he found when he compiled, in 2016, the only statistical data available about multi-generational households in Canada.
“The family unit is more fragmented now,” he adds. Kids move away from their parents, many people increasingly prefer to live on their own, and our capacity to take care of senior members of our families has decreased.
“The Canadian culture is, ‘You leave home at 18 and you don’t come back,’ ” says Brea Mann-Lewis, a Torontobased intern architect who researched architecture that facilitates multi-generational living for her 2014 master’s thesis at Carleton University. “Independence and owning your house is considered so important today, so it’s almost taking a step back if you move in with your family and children.”
Mann-Lewis calls this an unfounded “stigma.” Life in the city has become less affordable, forcing family structures to increasingly evolve to more multi-generational models. Young adults are moving back in with their parents, and the population of senior citizens 65 and over — the largest it has ever been in Canadian history — is looking for ways to continue living on their own. “It seems like a stigma because you’re losing your independence. But it’s actually extending it,” she says.
While moving “back home” is seen as regressing, we also don’t have the urban planning or house prices to afford either separate homes for each generation or to afford big enough homes for many generations. For seniors, especially, the changing household structure has proven to be “a big transition,” Mann-Lewis says.
“It can be really scary if you’ve owned a house for 30 years and you suddenly live by yourself” because everyone has moved out, she explains. Choosing to move in with your kids — or into a retirement home for reasons of health or personal safety — comes with its own challenges. “I don’t think anyone enjoys relying on someone for every single thing,” she observes.
The confluence of increasing isolation, greater distances and an aging population poses pertinent problems. In the face of rising gentrification and booming condominium culture, the Greater Toronto Area does not yet have the capacity to properly house three or more generations under one roof.
“We don’t have the kind of rental accommodation that Southern European populations had,” Murdie says. Today, there’s a lack of affordable housing stock within the Toronto area for everyone — whether that is immigrants and refugees who come with more limited financial means, or for families already here looking to move back in together as a cost-saving measure. This lack of suitable housing, Murdie adds, “is a problem on the horizon.”
According to the 2016 Statistics Canada study conducted by Jedwab, there are more than 400,000 multi-generational households, with 2.2 million people, in Canada. About half of them can be found in Ontario. While immigration from countries like mine, where similar living arrangements are the norm, has greatly contributed to this rise, the phenomenon of multi-generational housing goes beyond newcomers.
There has been a 37.5-per-cent increase in these types of households since 2001, linked to “Canada’s changing ethno-cultural composition” and spurred in large part by a wave of immigration from Asian and Middle Eastern countries, according to Jedwab.
The subsequent boomerang effect of adult children returning home after living on their own because of the lack of affordable housing in the GTA has increased dramatically: over a third of young adults between the ages of 20 and 34 are living with at least one parent, even after forming unions or having children of their own. And for the first time in Canada’s census history, there are more seniors than children living in Canada, forcing a conversation about appropriate living arrangements. In Brampton, a municipality of 600,000, one in four residents lives in a multi-generational household. In Markham, 18 per cent of the population lives in multi-generational households. Within the city of Toronto, 14 per cent of Scarborough residents live in multigenerational households.
In Toronto, nearly half of young adults live with their parents. The few emerging architects and urban planning or geography experts who have explored this phenomenon have noted that our housing market isn’t dynamic enough to accommodate a population that is simultaneously aging and becoming more diverse. Drive around any Ontario suburb and you can see the rise of megasized retirement complexes and blocks of shiny, glass apartments towering over sprawl.
If you’re a large family, your options are threefold: 1) spend more money to buy a bigger house in the heart of suburban sprawl; 2) either retrofit your home as the makeup of your family changes or buy a lower-cost home you can afford and tear it down; or 3) find innovative living solutions in a two-bedroom-plusden apartment.
Our society has not worked to create a fluid and adaptable housing stock — one capable of housing every kind of family, including those for whom multi-generational living is a cultural preference, but also for those families who find multigenerational living diffcult to escape. Toronto’s multi-generational families have new demands for our urban landscape that are not being met, explains Sandeep Agrawal, an Alberta-based urban and regional planner.
“We’re at a stage where we need public amenities that are more to do with senior citizens and kids in their teens or those who are younger,” he says. “I don’t think we have come to terms with that. We haven’t planned our communities in that way. We haven’t created complete communities. We haven’t built a community for all ages.”
Agrawal calls this kind of thinking “shadow planning” — a city’s choice to design urban spaces and infrastructure with the next 20 to 30 years in mind. Households aren’t constant, he points out. They change over time as families age and their needs, as well as their ability to pay for housing, evolve. A more fluid planning approach should be adaptable to changes in household structures, but what would that look like in practice?
The only way to create change is through policy and zoning, so that today’s single-family home may become a duplex or townhouse tomorrow. But how do governments effect rapid change across housing units that are mostly privately owned?
“We have to figure out how that conversion looks,” Agrawal says. Right now, if multi-generational families want to live together, they will need a larger plot of land to have a larger house, which requires them to move from the urban to the suburban. Does this mean we
“The Canadian culture is, ‘You leave home at 18 and you don’t come back.’ ” BREA MANN-LEWIS TORONTO INTERN ARCHITECT
need more compact development or more urban sprawl? Do we need to create village-type communities or adapt courtyard living from the East here in the West?
“If we addressed it today, maybe designs in the next five to 20 years will change,” Mann-Lewis says. “But as of now, we’re in a crisis.”
The magic of my maternal grandfather’s house in Karachi wasn’t just the five generations that grew up within its walls. It was in the village-style neighbourhood, made up of houses equally full of family members as his was. They all met at one another’s houses — or in the mosque in the centre of the neighbourhood, or at the park adjacent to it, or inside the market a short distance away — every evening for tea or cricket or parties.
Many of them migrated together — extended relatives and cousins and long-time family friends — and together became a communal family through friendships, marriages, and simply by proximity and daily interaction. That kind of lifestyle is nearly impossible to replicate in the context of high-rise buildings and sprawling suburbs.
Some cities are trying to encourage co-existence with innovative solutions. Courier Place is a multi-generational apartment community built in 2012 in Claremont, Calif. It consists of three apartment buildings that surround a green courtyard: two dedicated to twoand three-bedroom rental apartments for families, and one building with single bedrooms for lease and marketed to seniors.
In the suburbs of Calgary, too, the idea of co-existence is being put to the test. Three different buildings are under construction, each designed to house different kinds of people, and coupling varying programs. A seniors’ home is being combined with an early child-care development centre. The idea is to create a shared space that allows movement within and connection to the community — ideas so natural in my grandfather’s neighbourhood but that now need to be fabricated to adjust to change.
Independently, the construction industry is seeing a trend in multi-generational housing that builders are tackling themselves. Ottawa and Toronto changed zoning regulations to allow for laneway homes and secondary suites. In Edmonton, several homebuilders are unveiling a new project on the west side of the city where homes will be built with fully developed, rentable secondary suites.
Craig Marshall has been an Ontariobased builder for almost three decades. He is the creator of Flex Houz — a dwelling designed with a second “complete home” inside the main one. With access to its own garage and a separate private entry, the Flex Houz allows for what Marshall calls “a fine balance of proximity and privacy” for large families.
Marshall watches his neighbourhood in Pickering, where he has lived for over 30 years, change as his children’s friends start returning home. “Baby boomers made all the money in the housing market,” he says. “Now, as their kids return to ask for their parents’ help, we’re seeing people customize their houses.” They are renovating basements, adding stairs and an extra entrance.
But municipalities have only started to adapt their building and planning regulations to accommodate such multigenerational living, says Sneha Sumanth, a Toronto-based intern architect who researched refugee integration in the City of Toronto with her partner, Safira Lakhani, an Edmonton-based intern architect. “Residential housing and condominiums are being developed in a way that is a barrier to a lot of things,” Sumanth says. “It doesn’t facilitate different groups of people. It’s not adapting to different demographics.”
“We aren’t doing the best we can right now,” Lakhani adds.
The suburban neighbourhood of Meadowvale, in Mississauga, has large houses that are adaptable to bigger families, but that doesn’t mean they are functional houses for multi-generational families. “You can have a house that can house multiple generations, but it’s not successful as multi-generational housing because it is still isolated.”
Large houses removed from public spaces that cater to all generations — i.e., Agrawal’s “complete community” — are simply large houses. Multigenerational living is the combination of a functional house and an accessible community. But that idea isn’t being discussed at a policy level, where the focus is constantly on density.
“As more people understand and see the need for (complete communities), they will become more prevalent and influence the building code and future design,” Lakhani says. And while “density is a great thing,” Sumanth adds, “it’s just not always done very well to accommodate all the different kinds of families here.”
My grandfather’s Karachi house was home base, and for the generations after him, it maintains its gravitational pull. My grandparents remained rooted within its walls for 50 years.
Living — and growing — in one house for so long is rarely possible in Canada today. The issue isn’t just housing affordability but also attainability, says Dr. Raza Mirza of the University of Toronto’s National Initiative for the Care of the Elderly.
For a long time, housing policy has been centred on the idea that once someone hits retirement age, they will want to downsize and move to a communal home or a smaller house. But that assumption is simply not true anymore — and perhaps never was. Members of the emerging senior population now often want to stay in their house and neighbourhood, but it’s becoming ever more expensive to do so.
Mirza has noted pockets of multi-generational housing across Toronto, like Chinatown, where families get stuck by circumstance. The younger generation generally can’t move into the housing market, and if they do, the older generation often don’t want to leave their long-time homes. And if these older adults do sell their large homes, where do they go? Vacancy rates are at 1 per cent, Mirza says, leaving few options for people to move within the GTA.
But there are five million empty bedrooms across Ontario, two million of them owned by senior citizens. “We can’t change policy, but we can look at different models to encourage multi-generational living,” he says.
Mirza pioneered an intergenerational housing exchange with the City of Toronto called the Toronto Home Share Pilot Project, which started in June 2018. It partners students with older adults who have spare bedrooms. The program offers an opportunity for senior citizens to counter isolation, depression, and issues of safety; for students, it allows them to save money in exchange for some chores and companionship. So far, 12 seniors have been paired with 12 students at Ryerson University, York University and University of Toronto. These unlikely roommates are matched by a social worker and bound by a rental agreement from September to January.
“Multigenerational housing is not necessarily about families living together,” Mirza notes. “It’s just different generations living in the same home and having similar needs and supporting each other in ways we haven’t thought of.”
It is time, Mirza suggests, to embrace such possibilities. With the region’s housing market and demographics, “we’re not heading toward a crisis,” he says. “We are in one. And the crisis isn’t going to be solved very shortly.”
The consensus is that, over the next two decades, Ontario will have an oversupply of condos and townhouses — neither of which are suitable for an era of bigger families of various kinds. Immigrants and Canadians of past decades could once find a house and grow and age with it. That housing narrative is just not possible anymore. “We have to make housing appropriate,” Mirza says. “We have to look at where we’re building and how we’re building, and who we’re missing.”
“Residential housing and condominiums are being developed in a way that is a barrier to a lot of things … It’s not adapting to different demographics.” SNEHA SUMANTH RESEARCHER