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Homes & Homelessness

Published 2026-07-30 · part of the research library.

Toronto is the most expensive city in Canada to buy a home, and more than 105,000 households are waiting for subsidized housing — a wait that can stretch past ten years. This page covers housing supply and affordability, homelessness and shelter capacity, the fees and rules that shape new construction, tenant protections, and short-term rentals like Airbnb. Some levers that could change this sit with the city; others sit with the province, and sometimes the federal government.

Where things stand

  1. Toronto is the most expensive city in Canada to buy a home.
  2. At the end of 2025, 105,115 households were on the city’s waiting list for subsidized (rent-geared-to-income) housing — up from 81,664 five years earlier. In 2025, 21,538 new households joined the list; only 2,838 got housed. At that pace, people can wait more than ten years.
  3. In Ontario, municipalities cover about 77% of the cost of social housing, the province about 14%, and the federal government about 9% — even though the province writes most of the rules cities must follow.
  4. In June 2025, City Council allowed small multi-unit buildings — sixplexes — as -of-right only in part of the city (Toronto and East York, plus Ward 23), not citywide.
  5. Municipal fees on a new low-rise home in Toronto — development charges, parkland dedication, and community benefit charges combined — totalled $195,832 per unit as of August 2024, the second-highest of 16 GTA municipalities studied.
  6. A 2025 Auditor General audit of Toronto’s winter shelter system found 625 beds at the winter peak, an average of 174 unmatched callers per day at Central Intake, and 4,331 bed-nights left vacant as Warming Centres were deactivating.
  7. Ontario caps most landlords’ annual rent increase at 1.9% for 2027 (2.1% for 2026) — but any unit first occupied after November 15, 2018 is exempt from that cap entirely. Toronto’s own Rental Renovation Licence Bylaw, in force since July 2025, requires landlords to hold a City licence before evicting a tenant for renovations.
  8. Toronto requires short-term rental hosts to register their principal residence and caps entire-home rentals at 180 nights a year. The city’s own 2024 Auditor General audit estimated about 10% of operators may have exceeded that cap.

What the city controls vs. what needs the province

The city can act on directly: allowing small apartment buildings (like sixplexes) on more residential streets — it has done this in only part of the city so far; waiving building fees on new rental homes; funding housing that comes with support workers; licensing and enforcing rules on short-term rentals; its own Rental Renovation Licence Bylaw; how it plans and staffs winter shelter capacity.

Needs the province: restoring the city’s power to require affordable units inside new buildings — a 2022 provincial law (Bill 23) cut that power back; changing how social housing costs are shared between city, province, and federal government; the province sets and enforces rent-increase guidelines and their exemptions, and runs the Landlord and Tenant Board, which resolved only about half of cases within its 90-day target in fiscal 2025-26 (51–53% against an 80% target).

One honest gap: this page doesn’t have a solid, citable figure for Toronto’s actual eviction rate — the City’s own housing staff have called the underlying Landlord and Tenant Board eviction data incomplete. This page names that as an open question rather than inventing a number.

This category also has by far the largest body of research in this library — dozens of backgrounders on homelessness and shelter policy specifically, covering root causes, funding, legal rights, international comparisons, and more. Browse the full research library for the complete set, filed under the “homelessness-” and “shelter-” prefixes.

Go deeper

How this connects to the election

Several of the levers described above sit with Toronto’s city council and mayor; the province controls others directly, as noted above. A resident who wants to ask a candidate for city council or mayor what they would do about any of these levers can use the neutral, non-partisan candidate question bank for this category — every question there works identically for any candidate, any party. This page does not endorse, score, or rank any candidate or party, and does not direct a reader to any organization or campaign.

Sources & receipts

  1. Ontario's Housing Crisis Explained (fact 1).
  2. City of Toronto Social Housing Waiting List Reports; see the social housing waitlist backgrounder above (fact 2).
  3. The Municipal Role in Housing (fact 3).
  4. June 2025 sixplex-zoning council decision — see the housing supply backgrounder above (fact 4).
  5. Greater Toronto Area Municipal Benchmarking Study, 3rd Edition (fact 5).
  6. Audit of Toronto Shelter and Support Services – Warming Centres and Winter Respite Sites; Audit of Toronto Shelter and Support Services – Warming Centres and Winter Respite Sites (fact 6).
  7. Residential Rent Increases; Residential Rent Increases; Toronto’s Rental Renovation Licence Bylaw via the rental market backgrounder above (fact 7).
  8. Short-Term Rental By-law Implementation Update; Audit of Short-Term Rental Program and Municipal Accommodation Tax: Strengthening Bylaw Enforcement and Enhancing Municipal Accommodation Tax Collection Processes; Audit of Short-Term Rental Program and Municipal Accommodation Tax: Strengthening Bylaw Enforcement and Enhancing Municipal Accommodation Tax Collection Processes (fact 8).
  9. Landlord and Tenant Board Key Performance Indicators (Landlord and Tenant Board performance, “needs the province”).