Amid the city’s housing crisis, as condo units have been getting smaller and smaller another curious thing has happened: walls and doors have turned to glass.

The Multiple Listing Service is full of ads selling or renting condo units in which glass sliding doors or partitions have replaced traditional bedroom walls and doors. It’s a trend that’s prominent in the core, with even two-bedroom units sectioned off this way, some staged with a child’s bed or crib.

“I probably looked at about 10 units and at least five or six of those units had a similar setup,” says Zach McRae, 30, who bought one such one-bedroom condo near King and Bathurst Sts. two years ago.

In his 400-square-foot unit, a glass wall separates the bedroom from the living and kitchen area. Another opaque sliding door opens from the bedroom into the hallway. There’s no closet or window inside the bedroom.

He says it’s a common layout in his Stewart St. building. It’s not ideal, he adds, noting it’s difficult to have company over.

“If you’re living on your own, there’s not a lot of people who can afford a 700-square-foot unit,” says McRae, who paid $398,000 for his place.

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McRae, who’s single, adds “if I had kids I wouldn’t be living here.”

Industry experts say glass dividers are becoming standard for smaller units in Toronto as a way to save space and build bedrooms without windows. But critics say it’s yet another sign of an overheated market in which buyers and renters are forced to give up privacy and accept a substandard living space to fit their budget.

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Hans Ibelings, a lecturer at the Daniels faculty of architecture, landscape and design at the University of Toronto, said developers are using glass to save on traditional doors and walls, while creating an open corner to make “even smaller units bearable.”

“With those deep and narrow units, you hardly have the opportunity to make a decent bedroom,” he said.

“It’s a substandard floor plan, if you have a bedroom without a window. It’s substandard and they’re paying a high price for that.”

Ibelings said sliding glass doors have “become a practice and sort of standard in Toronto” where the rapid rise of condo prices has led to shrinking of units.

He said he noticed the trend a few years ago while researching his book Rise and Sprawl: The Condominiumization of Toronto, and found people who live in these units often don’t plan to stay for long, seeing it as a compromise until they can afford something larger.

“It’s the effect of the market ... every square inch that can be sold as a unit is sold,” he said. “As long as people will buy it, and there is a market, developers have no incentive to change anything.”

In Toronto’s tight rental market, these units are even being marketed for roommates. An ad on Kijiji.ca lists a master bedroom for rent for $1,400 in a two-bedroom shared condo at University Ave. and Dundas St. W. Photos show the room is sectioned off on two sides with glass dividers that have a gap between the glass and the ceiling.

Toronto realtor Davelle Morrison says the glass partitions “could be a bonus from an investment perspective, because it makes it look like a separate room.”

“The downside is the lack of windows,” she said, adding there could be other drawbacks depending on the layout, such as “people having to walk through the bedroom to get to the bathroom.”

But she said location and getting into the market often trumps other desires.

“People would love to have a bedroom with a window, but it’s no longer a deal breaker,” she said. “I don’t think people can be picky.”

Lynda Macdonald, the City of Toronto’s director of community planning, says when it comes to layout, developers have to abide by the province’s building code — which requires bedrooms to have a window that covers at least 5 per cent of area served, but which can be substituted by a door or skylight providing the equivalent glass area.

In cases of a combined space (such as studio units), a window would need to cover 10 per cent.

Macdonald said the glass door trend is especially common downtown as there are fewer and smaller sites available to build on, and so developers tend to build narrow units with windows just at one end.

She said they do encourage developers to allow for natural light in the bedroom because “you’re going to use less electricity and you can actually look outside.”

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Last month, the province modified guidelines for windows in Toronto’s development plans for midtown and downtown neighbourhoods. In the amendments, the Ford government erased a line in city planning guidelines suggesting residential units have “bedrooms that contain closets and an operable window on an exterior wall.”

It was replaced with language calling for units to include, “where appropriate: storage space; operable windows; bedrooms that contain closets; and the provision of balconies and terraces shall be encouraged.”

“We will work with municipalities to encourage the building of different kinds of housing to give people more options,” says a statement from the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing. “As more units are built, tenants will have more options and rents should come down.”

The changes do not affect the provincial building code, which developers still have to abide by.

Rob Saunders, 34, lives in the same Stewart St. condo building as McRae, and says the glass divider that separates his bedroom from his living space sometimes lets in too much natural light.

“I don’t think there is any upside,” he said. “It’s not good in terms of blocking light.”

Saunders said when he was hunting for a condo about a year ago in the Entertainment District, he found at least 50 per cent had glass dividers. He feels it’s the ripple effect of a market where buyers with limited resources are faced with few options.

“It seems like a necessity given the limited floor space,” he said, noting a door swinging into his narrow hallway would eat up more room in his roughly 600-square-foot unit.

“The unfortunate part is the price for what you’re getting,” he said.

Stephan Skydon, 28, who also lives in the Stewart St. building, isn’t too fussy about his sliding doors “as long as it closes,” he said. He does have a window in the bedroom of his roughly 900-square-foot unit, but has sliding barn-style doors for his bedroom and another for the bathroom and says he likes that they takes up less space than traditional doors.

“The only annoying thing is the dog can open it a lot more easily,” Skydon said of his dog, Misha. “Otherwise, it’s good for keeping out sound. It works for me.”

James Ritchie, executive vice-president of developer Tridel, says his company doesn’t regularly use sliding glass or barn-style doors but said the features are practical in terms of making smaller spaces work.

“It’s not the preferred choice,” he said, but he added the glass doors are a way to introduce natural light into smaller, more affordable units. It’s a move that follows an earlier industry trend of removing walls between kitchens, living rooms and dining rooms to save space, he said.

However, he emphasized there are building code requirements and “you can’t just have a closet for a bedroom.”

“There’s a minimum size requirement and there’s a percentage of natural light that must accrued to that living space,” he said.

McRae says the glass fixture does makes his tight quarters on Stewart St. more palatable.

“Esthetically I thought it looked nice,” he says. “I’ve been in other units where you walk in and there is no differentiator, it’s just an open space ... though this is a small unit, this makes it feel a little bigger.”

He says choosing glass over walls was a tradeoff he felt he had to make to stay downtown.

“It’s big in the Entertainment District,” he says.

“This isn’t the greatest unit, but they still fly off the market.”