This afternoon I stood up at the Committee of Adjustment (Etobicoke York) to present the laneway house proposal that Gabriel Fain Architects and I have been working on for the past year and that I have been working on since 2009.

But before I could start I was told that Councillor Palacio had just submitted a last minute letter to the Committee. I was given a few minutes to read it, but the big bold “REFUSE” was probably the only word I needed to read.

I was then asked if I had read planning staff’s report. I acknowledged that I had read it and that I was aware that they were also recommending refusal of the application. I also noted that a number of my immediate neighbors sitting behind me were also opposed to the proposal.

That’s how my presentation started. 

At this point you might be wondering: why bother?

I stood up today because, as most of you already know, laneway housing is something that I feel strongly about. This isn’t just about my individual project. I mean, why do all of this work for one small dwelling unit? For me, this is about city building and trying to affect positive change. (I would also love to live on a laneway.)

I could go on here about how the proposal was shorter than other existing structures on the lane, how the FSI was in check, how we had carefully studied shadows, and how planning staff had already supported greater densities and multiple dwellings on lots of similar size in the area. 

But that’s not what today was really about.

Today I heard loud and clear that whether the proposal was a laneway tiki hut or a 2 storey laneway suite, the community did not want more people living in the area and they most certainly did not want more renters living in the area.

My message to the Committee was that in my humble opinion this is inevitable. Look to Vancouver. Look to Edmonton. Look to many other cities. What we are debating today, or at least what we should be debating today, is what these laneway houses or suites or tiki huts are going to look like.

Right or wrong, our proposal was an attempt to answer that question. We looked carefully at what others had done before us, including our friends at Lanescape and Evergreen, and we proposed something that we believed was sensitive to its context.

We were unsuccessful.

But here’s the silver lining. At the end of it all, and right before a motion was made to refuse the application, one of the committee members said something very impactful. He more or less said: “I agree with you. This is inevitable.”

Sadly today was not that day.

I would like to thank everyone who came out today and everyone who got up to speak in support of laneway housing. It meant a lot to me. Some of you are also readers of this blog and it was great to meet you in person. Thank you.

If you live in Toronto and only give serious thought to one thing today, it should be to this interactive transit map created by Metro.

The map shows all existing, planned, and proposed transit lines in the city, and then overlays population densities, commuting patterns, household income, and so on. It’s a super valuable map that I think reveals a lot about how we should be focusing our energies to get Toronto moving.

So what sorts of things does it tell us? I’ll give 2 examples.

If you look at commuting patterns across the Bloor-Danforth subway line, you’ll see that Runnymede station in the west is where people switch over from taking transit to driving. People west of that station tend to drive. Naturally, it also happens to coincide with where population densities start to fall off.

By contrast, if you look at the east side of the city along the Danforth and beyond, the entire stretch more or less relies on transit to get around. Part of this likely has to do with income levels, but it’s also because of the availability of the Gardiner Expressway. There’s no equivalent in the east end. Dylan Reid of Spacing Magazine believes this makes a case for some sort of road pricing along the Gardiner, and I would agree.

As a second example, look at the population densities along the proposed Downtown Relief Line, Finch LRT, and John Tory’s SmartTrack line. Outside of the core, the population densities are relatively low along the proposed SmartTrack line – which is never a good thing for rapid transit.

There’s also no Sherbourne station on the SmartTrack line, which happens to have the highest population density across the entire Relief Line – 22,131 people per square kilometre! That’s more than any other stop along the Yonge-University subway line except for Wellesley station.

I’ve written about this a lot before, but I think we need to do a better job of matching up transit investment with expected customer demand. Too often we let politics get in the way of rationale decision making. Maybe it’s time we did something like set minimum population densities. If you want a subway line in your area, you have to first bring the people.

What else does this map tell you?

Earlier this week I wrote a post about a new build home under construction at 37 Canerouth Drive in the west end of Toronto. As part of that post, I asked people what they thought the home would be valued at when it was completed. There were just under 10 responses (many thanks!) and I thought it was really fascinating to see the ranges.

A lot of you responded in the comment section of the post, but a bunch of the other estimates came in via Facebook, Twitter, and email. It isn’t a huge data set, but I’ve nonetheless consolidated the ones I could remember I received:

$2,375,000
$2,750,000
$1,800,000
$3,000,000
$8,500,000
$2,600,000
$3,500,000
$1,750,000

If you average these estimates, you come to a value of $3.3M. However, the clear outlier is the $8.5M. So let’s take that one out and see how the number changes. If you do that, you then get an average estimate of $2.5M. A pretty big swing.

Now, I don’t know offhand how accurate that number really is, but I’m fascinated by this idea of “the crowd” determining value. Particularly for markets such as housing where supply can be completely heterogeneous and there isn’t a lot of transaction volume to refer back to (compared to other types of markets).

Because my strong belief is that under the right circumstances and with enough data points, this number could end up being hugely accurate. And, it could also be more forward looking since it’s capturing current market sentiment as opposed to being based on historical transaction prices.

If you have any thoughts on this, I’d love to hear from you :)