July 23, 2025
A little tired-looking, the three modest bungalows on quiet northeast Hamilton side streets have clearly done their time.
But the non-profit that owns the homes aims to tear them down to build anew and squeeze more house into their lots.
They’re the first subjects of the “Kiwanis Small Lot Intensification Project,” which aims to turn the single-family homes into affordable fourplexes.
A change to city zoning policies last year that allowed for the “as-of-right” construction of triplexes and fourplexes opened the door for the project, says Brian Sibley, executive director of Hamilton East Kiwanis Non-Profit Homes.
“All of a sudden, fourplexes just became financially viable for us because we already owned the land mortgage-free.”
The non-profit owns 82 homes on 75-by-25-foot (or larger) lots that could accommodate fourplex conversions, Sibley noted.
“Our plan over the next few years is to build 50 of these, so that’s 200 units.”
Kiwanis, one of Hamilton’s biggest providers of affordable housing, owns and manages about 1,000 homes in the area.
In recent years, it has embarked upon larger, multi-residential projects, including a 126-unit building in the works at 1540 Upper Wentworth St. on the Mountain and 60 units off Sanford Avenue North in the lower city.
During the 1980s recession, a period of sky-high interest rates, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), as mortgage insurer, wound up with homes that financially distressed owners had walked away from.
CMHC offered them to non-profits like Kiwanis at much lower mortgage rates to provide them as affordable housing, Sibley noted.
Over the years, Kiwanis has sold them to help fund its capital projects, but with the city’s multiplex tweak, it realized the sales were also contributing to the gentrification, he said.
“We were becoming part of the problem.”
The three Kiwanis homes — 53 Fraser Ave., 97 Garside Ave. and 138 Paling Ave. — are to make way for the construction of three-storey fourplexes this year.
Each will have a one-bedroom unit and three two-bedroom units.
The goal is to work out design, construction and costing kinks for efficient assembly of components on lots.
Then the idea is to scale it up and offer a template to other non-profits, Sibley says.
“So that we can increase the levels of affordability, but also increase how fast we can build these.”
Housing affordability in Hamilton has steadily eroded, with house prices and rents steadily marching upward.
Of 216,390 households in the city, about 28,000 — or 13 per cent — are in “core housing need,” the CMHC notes, citing information from Statistics Canada’s 2021 national household survey.
That means homes don’t meet one or more standards, including state of repair, crowding or affordability (costs are less than 30 per cent of before-tax household income).
With the housing market increasingly out of reach, roughly 6,000 households await subsidized units in Hamilton.