Toronto has been making great progress when it comes to allowing more housing in its low-rise neighborhoods. We now allow laneway suites, garden suites, multiplexes, and soon we'll allow 6-storey apartments. But interestingly enough, there is one small part of the city that is looking to regress. This past summer, council asked planning staff to bring forward a zoning by-law amendment to remove garden suite permissions for some of the properties backing onto Craven Road, near Danforth and Coxwell.
Here's a community consultation flyer that went out to residents and that shows the affected properties:
Toronto has been making great progress when it comes to allowing more housing in its low-rise neighborhoods. We now allow laneway suites, garden suites, multiplexes, and soon we'll allow 6-storey apartments. But interestingly enough, there is one small part of the city that is looking to regress. This past summer, council asked planning staff to bring forward a zoning by-law amendment to remove garden suite permissions for some of the properties backing onto Craven Road, near Danforth and Coxwell.
Here's a community consultation flyer that went out to residents and that shows the affected properties:
Brandon Donnelly
Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly.
We've spoken about Craven Road before. It's a relatively odd street with a unique history. Its most obvious characteristic is that it's a kind of single-sided street. For the most part, there are homes on the east side of the street, but no homes on the west side. On the non-home side there is typically a garage, or the longest municipally-owned fence in the city. Here's some of the backstory on Craven Road's infamous fence (which occurs on a stretch further south), and below is what the study area in question looks like today:
So why remove the garden suite permissions here? The answer is to block housing. The people who live on Craven Road like it the way it is and don't want anyone to build new housing on the other side of the street. What's interesting about this is that it roughly mirrors what happened over a century ago. We couldn't figure out how to broker a deal between two adjacent streets and so we just said "screw it, let's build a really really long fence and call it a day."
Today we're saying, "yeah, we really need more housing in the city, but I dunno, somebody might get upset here." There is nothing sacrosanct about the old garages, or the fence, that line the west side of Craven. It is a street, proximate to a major subway station, that is missing homes on one entire side. It's low hanging fruit for infill housing. In fact, there's an easy argument to be made that garden suites aren't nearly enough density for a location like this. We should be encouraging a lot more.
But this is just my opinion. If you'd like to share yours, the City of Toronto is hosting a community meeting this week on September 19, 2024 from 7 - 830 PM. To participate, register here.
This is a beautiful apartment building in the center of Palma. Brutalist ground floor. Operable wooden slats up the rest of the facade. It feels right at home in this climate. It's also a passive-energy building that uses 90% less energy compared to a "conventional" apartment building. The technical classification is nZEB (or a nearly zero energy building). It's pretty amazing that with only 9 apartments, these kinds of projects pencil here. Perhaps it's no surprise that it's also a single-stair building.
This is the sort of housing project that you'd fully expect to find in Tokyo. Seven homes built on a small urban lot measuring only 11 feet wide by 93 feet deep. But in this case, it's not Tokyo; it's Chinatown, Philadelphia, where a residual lot that was created when the sunken Vine Street Expressway was carved through the middle of the city in the 1950s.
Designed by Philadelphia-based Interface Studio Architects (ISA), the project contains 7 levels of livable space. What's interesting, though, is that from a building code perspective this is still a 4-story building. There are two mezzanine levels that don't get counted (and that create some great double-height spaces). This also seems to be what allowed them to get away with a single egress stair in the middle of the building.
The other technique that was used to maximum density is facade projections. Philadelphia's zoning code allows for projections up to 3 feet in the horizontal dimension. And if you look at the above plans, you'll see that these were used to "top up" or extend the site's 11 foot width to 14 feet, when it made sense to do so from a programming standpoint. The result is some very livable spaces.
I am endlessly fascinated by these sorts of projects because they demand creativity and because you ultimately end up unlocking something that the market had been overlooking. Here is an example of a small leftover urban parcel that was previously used as surface parking for two cars. Now it's seven beautiful homes.
We've spoken about Craven Road before. It's a relatively odd street with a unique history. Its most obvious characteristic is that it's a kind of single-sided street. For the most part, there are homes on the east side of the street, but no homes on the west side. On the non-home side there is typically a garage, or the longest municipally-owned fence in the city. Here's some of the backstory on Craven Road's infamous fence (which occurs on a stretch further south), and below is what the study area in question looks like today:
So why remove the garden suite permissions here? The answer is to block housing. The people who live on Craven Road like it the way it is and don't want anyone to build new housing on the other side of the street. What's interesting about this is that it roughly mirrors what happened over a century ago. We couldn't figure out how to broker a deal between two adjacent streets and so we just said "screw it, let's build a really really long fence and call it a day."
Today we're saying, "yeah, we really need more housing in the city, but I dunno, somebody might get upset here." There is nothing sacrosanct about the old garages, or the fence, that line the west side of Craven. It is a street, proximate to a major subway station, that is missing homes on one entire side. It's low hanging fruit for infill housing. In fact, there's an easy argument to be made that garden suites aren't nearly enough density for a location like this. We should be encouraging a lot more.
But this is just my opinion. If you'd like to share yours, the City of Toronto is hosting a community meeting this week on September 19, 2024 from 7 - 830 PM. To participate, register here.
This is a beautiful apartment building in the center of Palma. Brutalist ground floor. Operable wooden slats up the rest of the facade. It feels right at home in this climate. It's also a passive-energy building that uses 90% less energy compared to a "conventional" apartment building. The technical classification is nZEB (or a nearly zero energy building). It's pretty amazing that with only 9 apartments, these kinds of projects pencil here. Perhaps it's no surprise that it's also a single-stair building.
This is the sort of housing project that you'd fully expect to find in Tokyo. Seven homes built on a small urban lot measuring only 11 feet wide by 93 feet deep. But in this case, it's not Tokyo; it's Chinatown, Philadelphia, where a residual lot that was created when the sunken Vine Street Expressway was carved through the middle of the city in the 1950s.
Designed by Philadelphia-based Interface Studio Architects (ISA), the project contains 7 levels of livable space. What's interesting, though, is that from a building code perspective this is still a 4-story building. There are two mezzanine levels that don't get counted (and that create some great double-height spaces). This also seems to be what allowed them to get away with a single egress stair in the middle of the building.
The other technique that was used to maximum density is facade projections. Philadelphia's zoning code allows for projections up to 3 feet in the horizontal dimension. And if you look at the above plans, you'll see that these were used to "top up" or extend the site's 11 foot width to 14 feet, when it made sense to do so from a programming standpoint. The result is some very livable spaces.
I am endlessly fascinated by these sorts of projects because they demand creativity and because you ultimately end up unlocking something that the market had been overlooking. Here is an example of a small leftover urban parcel that was previously used as surface parking for two cars. Now it's seven beautiful homes.
