February 2022
You may have read about the male couple asked to leave a Toronto condo because they’re not married. In another recent controversy, one condominium board posted a notice stating that two cousins are not allowed to live together. These are examples of condo boards abusing their authority and misapplying a provision intended for other purposes.
The controversies surround what can be described as the Single Family Provision. It is not uncommon for a condominium corporation to include this provision in the declaration in the form of a statement similar to “each unit … shall be occupied and used as a private single-family residence and for no other purpose…” Applied properly and reasonably, the rule protects owners from illegal overcrowding of units; both from a safety and cost perspective, and from landlords offering short-term rentals in a high-rise residential community.
The restriction protects building residents from overcrowding in specific units which has safety and cost implications for everyone. A Single Family Provision prevents a suite from being rented to unrelated and transient tenants for a short period of time. The definition of family may be quite broad to include cousins or live-in home care workers. It does not, as some argue, conflict with human rights legislation by restricting residency according to gender, age, sexual orientation or other criteria.
A Single Family Provision combined with suite occupancy rules are intended to protect all condo residents. They help to prevent overcrowding and having condo owners subsidize those suites with higher occupancy. Within condo by-laws there may be limits to the number of people who can reside in a condo suite – perhaps two people in a one-bedroom suite and four people in a two-bedroom suite. This may be a hard rule with no exceptions or a soft rule that can be overridden with board approval. There may be higher condo fees to compensate for the cost of increased occupancy.
The Single Family Provision and suite occupancy limits combine to protect all high-rise residents from overcrowding of units, and resulting heavier use of utilities and common areas.
