Craven Road in Old Toronto’s east end is a bit of an oddball: it’s somewhere between a large laneway and a small street, and one side has a collection of one- and two-storey homes with no companions across the way — meaning if you have a Craven Road street address, the front of your house faces the back fence or garage of the folks one block over. (Disclosure: when we were house-hunting 15 years ago, my wife and I looked at a place on Craven; while the specific property didn’t fit our needs, the street was certainly memorable.) But that specific geometry — small homes that directly face neighbours’ backyards — is the cause of some local drama involving Toronto’s planning policies.
The city was reasonably ahead of the curve in expanding permissions (with an asterisk we’ll get to) for various forms of tiny residences built in backyards; often called “laneway homes” or “garden suites,” they’re small structures tucked behind a house, often on top of a garage. On their own, these secondary-suite types of homes add up to less than a Band-Aid on the hemorrhaging wound that is the city’s housing shortage. Their virtue, as I wrote more than three years ago, is that they “all necessarily mean chipping away at the sanctity of the rules intended to keep residential neighbourhoods from changing.”
Well, it turns out those rules still have their defenders, and those defenders haven’t gone silent. On a street like Craven, backyard tiny homes aren’t tucked away out of sight but sit right in people’s faces. Someone on Craven complained to their local city councillor — it might literally have been a single someone; Toronto is a city of 3 million people governed by elected officials congenitally incapable of applying any kind of filter to matters like this — and Paula Fletcher sprang into action. At last week’s council meeting, she introduced a successful motion asking staff to look at restricting permissions to build secondary suites on the street opposite Craven.
Even Toronto’s perpetually overburdened staff should find this an easy report to write: since the city expanded its permissions, the province has followed up with legislation requiring municipalities to legalize these kinds of secondary suites on all residential properties. Fletcher and a majority of city council have asked staff to do something contrary to provincial law, and staff should (politely, deferentially) tell council to go pound sand.
That said, it’s possible that staff will come back to council with a report outlining creative ways to restrict secondary suites without outright breaching the letter of provincial law. Cities put a lot of time and effort into finding legally creative ways to thwart provincial policy, and it’s possible we’ll see that here.
More infuriating is that laneway houses are hardly an uncontrolled Wild West in Toronto: they’re still subject to city planning and to public hearings through the city’s committee of adjustment. They’re “permitted,” but not in the sense that you’re permitted to throw a ball around in a public park or borrow a library book. The process involved is still what a normal person would call lengthy and onerous.
And there’s no guarantee that the committee of adjustment will approve even modest projects. Here, we need only look at the case of 91 Barton Avenue, also in Toronto, and a modest proposal to build infill apartments at walking distance to a subway station. This is also perhaps the only case of a committee-of-adjustment file achieving national prominence: the federal Conservatives (correctly) used it as an example of the city’s obstructing housing even as it was demanding — and receiving — billions of dollars from other orders of government in the name of easing the housing crisis. Last week, 91 Barton was finally approved in an appeals process, many months after it should have received permission to proceed.
Both Craven Road and 91 Barton are what happens when housing is the opposite of a human right — when the entire administrative bureaucracy of housing production exists to say no first and only second to negotiate what will be allowed on a case-by-case basis. Planners have spent a generation trying to find ways to add “gentle density” in North American cities — the kinds of infill housing that are modest enough that they won’t set off a war with local NIMBYs. In 2024, perhaps, we can finally admit that this is a doomed endeavour: there is apparently no type of density gentle enough that it won’t be fought by someone, so the answer is to build a planning and legal system that doesn’t privilege the voices of the already comfortably housed.
This kind of talk tends to give progressives the heebie-jeebies, as they see it as a Trojan Horse for a right-wing, deregulatory agenda. This is a mistake, and the premier of Ontario and his cabinet are illustrating why this week. Doug Ford’s announced plan to restrict bike lanes in Ontario doesn’t yet have actual legislative text we can scrutinize, but on Tuesday, Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria said the cities that want to build new bike lanes will have to prove they won’t have impacts on car traffic. There’s as yet no indication of what kind of process the minister will use to evaluate projects or what kind of due diligence cities will be able to do to prove their work. So far, this looks as if it will be purely up to the minister’s discretion, which might be the point: even municipalities that want to build bike lanes are going to think twice before braving a gauntlet with no certain outcomes.
Cyclists and other broadly pro-urban Ontarians can understand intuitively that this new proposal is designed from the ground up to make it harder to build bike lanes and, in particular, to build ones cyclists actually want to use. But it mirrors in form and function exactly the kind of Kafkaesque bureaucracy we’ve already put in place when it comes to approving (or not) new homes in the places people most want to live. When governments want to see more of something, they don’t add layer upon layer of administrative bloat.
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