Fourplexes don't have to be ugly — and these students are helping Mississauga prove it

Britnei Bilhete · CBC News

· Posted: Apr 16, 2025 4:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: 12 minutes ago

As Mississauga looks to fourplexes to assistance easiness a increasing lodging crisis, a radical of assemblage students is helping to situation misconceptions astir the structures sometimes considered disfigured and blocky.

The metropolis has teamed up with Sheridan College to make an duty for students successful its architectural exertion and technician program. 

The challenge: Design a real-world fourplex to inspire builders to conception much of them and residents to invited them successful their neighbourhoods. 

Usually, radical deliberation single-family homes and backstage residences are superior, says architectural technology student Darren Shum, whose plan includes a assemblage courtyard and shared room area —spaces wherever residents tin stitchery and socialize.

"A fourplex is simply a large mode to benignant of bring that societal enactment back to our community," Shum told CBC Toronto. "I anticipation that radical tin alteration their minds astir sharing abstraction with different people. It's not needfully a atrocious thing."

Other students saw an accidental to instrumentality a modern design approach, including first-year architectural technician pupil Kaden Burton, who utilized a operation of stone veneer, stucco and cedarwood for the exterior of his design. 

"Many radical traditionally presumption fourplexes arsenic ample boxy buildings, right? This is our accidental to benignant of alteration that nationalist opinion," Burton said, calling the accidental to enactment connected a real-world task exciting.

In Mississauga, similar overmuch of the Greater Toronto Area, there's a lodging situation — not lone is lodging banal low, but determination are fewer affordable options. Four-unit residences were lone legalized by the metropolis successful December 2023 following pushback from immoderate residents and councillors. Ultimately, the politician overrode council's rejection of the question to get fourplexes passed.

WATCH | Could fourplexes assistance Ontario's lodging crisis? 

Since then, betwixt Jan. 1, 2024 and April 1, 2025, lone four applications for fourplex builds person been submitted, the metropolis says. 

There's anticipation that the task could assistance determination the needle and spur infill, particularly astatine a clip erstwhile residents are moving distant for amended lodging options, says Andrew Whittemore, the city's commissioner of readying and building. 

"Mississauga's neighbourhoods are shrinking successful colonisation and truthful we cognize we request to marque a change," helium said.

"What we're looking to [do] done this task is to truly assistance america amended the public, fto them spot however each these projects tin acceptable into their neighbourhoods with harmony."

The task volition beryllium posted online for radical to see, and the metropolis hopes to person students contiguous their designs successful much depth, Whittemore says. 

Project has benefits, but much enactment needed: advocate

One of the communal misconceptions regarding fourplexes is that "they're each tantamount to rooming houses, which couldn't beryllium farther from the truth," says Kelly Singh, enforcement manager of More Homes Mississauga, a volunteer-led advocacy group.

The task could person a significant impact, she says, not lone successful showing the benefits of fourplexes, but encouraging aboriginal architectural technologists and technicians to deliberation astir gathering multiplexes. 

"This is 1 of those semipermanent investments," Singh said. "You put successful that acquisition and past down the enactment you commencement to spot the fruits of it."

However, in the contiguous future, the metropolis has to play a bigger relation successful actively encouraging fourplex developments, she says.

Recently, the metropolis approved fiscal incentives and programs for spot owners looking to physique a four-unit residence, Whittemore says, and hopefully, with the students' work, much radical volition see it, particularly since it could acceptable the needs of galore antithetic kinds of people. 

"It could beryllium a young family, it could beryllium a retired mates that is downsizing, it could beryllium a senior," helium said.

"All of those radical coming unneurotic successful 1 [place] is simply a truly fantastic assemblage gathering exercise."