Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.
Over the years we have spoken a few times about this nice little coffee shop on Shaw Street here in Toronto. It is a good looking and widely visited coffee shop that has made many guest appearances on urbanist Twitter.
The problem, though, is that it was a real battle to get it approved, thanks to the opposition of a single neighbor. That’s all it takes to hold up a new project. In this case it was a coffee shop. But it could also be thousands of new homes.
But that was then. Today if you look on the City of Toronto’s website you’ll actually see this exact coffee shop on a page that speaks to the benefits and the historic role of small-scale retail, service, and office uses.
Right now these uses are only permitted in low-rise neighborhoods on major streets and through an amendment to the Zoning By-Law (unless the nonconforming use already exists). This is a lot of unnecessary work (see above) and it has translated into a steady decline in these sorts of uses across the city.
Thankfully, the city is now looking to change this and permit these uses on an as-of-right basis. So it looks like the good fight was worth it.
For more info, head over here. And if you’d like to attend the public meeting to talk about how brilliant this is, you can do that on July 5 over at City Hall.
We talk a lot on this blog about laneway housing and ADUs, including, of course, the one that Globizen built earlier this year. But beyond being exceedingly cool (see above), what has this policy change meant at the macro level? To what extent is it actually helping housing supply? Let’s consider Toronto.
As a reminder, “laneway suites” became permissible in the former/old City of Toronto in 2018. The policies where then expanded to the entire city of Toronto in the summer of 2019. So we’ve had just over 2 years of this housing type being fully allowed city-wide.
Though it’s worth keeping in mind that there are only so many laneways in Toronto (which is why “garden suites” are going to be important and may actually end up being more impactful):
Between the introduction of laneway suites and June 2021, the City of Toronto received 306 permit applications to construct, of which 238 were associated with a unique address (the same address can have multiple permit applications).
During this same time period, 183 permits were issued. 107 were still under review at the time this report was written. 15 were refused. And 1 was classified as “unknown”, which I guess means it got lost in the ether or under someone’s desk.
Some of you will probably argue that this isn’t enough new housing for a city of 3 million people with high home prices, high demand, and high immigration. And I would agree.
But it’s still early days, there will be an adoption curve, and the policies are still being tweaked to further remove some of the barriers associated with delivering this housing type. Of the 238 unique addresses that submitted a permit application, just over a quarter of them had an associated minor variance application, which means that they did not fully conform to the current laneway suite by-law.
The most common obstacles appear to be the 1.5m laneway setback, the soft landscaping requirements, and the required fire access. But I know that there are others too. I could have used another foot or two in height on mine.
But as I mentioned before, there are more areas in this city without laneways than with. And so garden suites are going to be an integral component of city-wide ADUs. This will certainly help the adoption curve.
I continue to believe that these are all steps in the right direction and that this is an exciting time for Toronto. We are in the midst of transforming our laneways. But we’re not done yet. We’re going to have to make many other tough decisions in order to further increase housing supply. I’m positive we’ll get there.
This past summer, the Bentway (in collaboration with the City of Toronto, the Waterfront BIA, and the Toronto Downtown West BIA) issued a call for expressions of interest to re-imagine two key intersections under downtown Toronto’s elevated Gardiner Expressway. The York Street intersection and the Simcoe Street intersection.
That process has run its course and the following six teams have now been shortlisted:
The next step in this process is a nine-week design exercise where the above teams will go away and prepare their design concepts. We work with a number of the companies on this shortlist and I am sure that there will be some fantastic ideas that are put forward. After selecting the two winners, the plan is to then start construction in 2022.
The Bentway is doing some fantastic work in reimagining the underside of our downtown highway. This is yet another example of that. For more information about the competition, click here.
As most of you know, laneway suites (a form of accessory dwelling unit) are permitted “as-of right” across the City of Toronto. This has led to an explosion of new laneway housing. One framing contractor that I know recently told me that he is now doing a new laneway house every month. Incredible considering how out-there they were only 10 years ago.
However, there are a few barriers to participation with the current policies, one of which is that you need to be adjacent to a laneway in order to have an eligible lot. So the City has been working on adapting these policies to suit residential properties without a public lane. These new accessory dwelling units are being referred to as “garden suites.”
The draft garden suite regulations are now available online and will be heard at Planning and Housing Committee next week. The recommendations are that these regulations form the basis for further community engagement, and that a final report be brought back to the Committee in Q4 of this year.
This final report is expected to recommend Official Plan policies and Zoning By-law regulations so that garden suites, along with laneway suites, can be as-of-right across the city. This is great news. So if you have a lot without a public lane and you’re considering an ADU, now might be a good time to start planning.
As many of you know, Toronto currently allows “laneway suites” across the entire city on an as-of-right basis. What this means is that no variances or special planning permissions are generally required to build. Assuming you meet the by-law, you can go straight to a building permit.
This is how Mackay Laneway House was built and, though it required an extra layer of approvals from the forestry department because of a large on-site tree, getting a building permit was relatively straight forward. I think it took between 6-8 weeks from initial submission.
As part of the City’s efforts to increase overall housing supply, another form of accessory dwelling unit is currently being studied: garden suites. Public consultations are now underway and, from what I have heard, the hope is to make these similarly as-of-right before the end of the year. Hopefully it’ll be earlier.
I think this will be a positive thing for Toronto and so I would encourage all of you to complete the online garden suite survey that the City has open until June 1, 2021. Public consultation is an important part of the planning process and too often it is the voices of a few representing the views of many.
With laneway suites permitted as-of-right across the entirety of Toronto, the City is now looking to other forms of accessory dwelling units and other ways to increase the supply of rental housing. The next frontier is likely to be something that the City is broadly referring to as garden suites. And the timing is likely to be as early as next summer. Here’s how they’re defining it (taken from this recent report):
Garden Suites are sometimes referred to by other names, such as “coach houses”, “tiny homes”, and even “granny flats”. However they are all effectively the same idea – a detached accessory dwelling unit generally located in the rear yard of a detached house, semi-detached house, townhouse, or other low-rise dwelling. It is generally smaller in scale, functioning as a separate rental housing unit. Garden Suites are similar in form and function to Laneway Suites, which are currently permitted across the City in all low-rise residential zones in the city-wide Zoning By-law, 569-2013. To avoid any confusion between these terms, the City is considering all types of detached-accessory dwelling-unit to be a Garden Suite, for the purpose of this review, with the exception of a Laneway Suite, which is already permitted and defined within the Zoning By-law.
The above report will be going to Planning and Housing Committee on December 8, 2020. The goals are to kickstart the public consultation process and to come up with the necessary recommendations to permit garden suites by the second quarter of 2021. Like laneway suites, they are expected to be as-of-right. That means straight to building permit. No variances (and contentious Committee of Adjustment meetings) required.
This is great news and I’m looking forward to seeing garden suites become a reality in 2021. For more information about what’s happening on December 8th, click here.
In the fall of 2016, Lucas Manuel (Partner at Slate) and I traveled to Chicago in order to meet with Jeanne Gang and the rest of the studio. Our objective was simple: We were looking to find an architecture firm that we could partner with and do something very special with at Yonge + St. Clair. We wanted to start from first principles and rethink what a tall building could be in Toronto.
During our meeting and studio tour, Jeanne and her team asked a number of poignant questions about our vision for the area, our goals for the project, and our commitment to sustainable design. So much so that when Lucas and I left the meeting we both looked at each other and said: “That wasn’t us interviewing them. That was them interviewing us.”
It was obvious that they were committed to high quality architecture, environmental sustainability, and overall community building. And it was equally obvious that if we, Slate, weren’t committed to the same, then we weren’t the client and partner for them.
It has turned out to be a great partnership. Over the last three plus years, the team has remained committed to living up to the promises we made to each other in that first meeting in Chicago. And on many occasions, that has meant taking the more difficult path and fighting for what we believe is great design and great city building.
Since 2016, we have held and/or participated in multiple community visioning sessions with Councillor Josh Matlow and key stakeholders from the community. Two pre-application meetings with City Planning. Two big and public community meetings. A design charrette for the Yonge + St. Clair area. And five meetings with a local “community working group” that was formed following the bigger community meetings. Our application was also before the City of Toronto’s Design Review Panel (DRP) at the end of 2018, where it was unanimously supported (though with some constructive feedback).
It has been a long road working to create Studio Gang’s first project in Canada. One that I like to think started in a jazz bar in downtown Chicago (it actually started much earlier). And so I am thrilled to announce that City Planning, City of Toronto, are now recommending approval of One Delisle! Their report is public and the project will be considered by Toronto and East York Community Council this Thursday, March 12, 2020.
If you would like to speak at or submit a comment to Community Council — ideally in support of the project — please email the City Clerk at teycc@toronto.ca. Myself and the team hope to see many of you at City Hall this Thursday morning at 10:00AM.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the project, here is a summary from City Planning:
This application proposes to amend the Official Plan and Zoning By-law to permit a 44-storey (143 metres plus a 7-metre mechanical penthouse) mixed use building with 293 dwelling units and 159 parking spaces within a 4-level below ground garage at 1-11 Delisle Avenue and 1496-1510 Yonge Street. A 2,506 square metre public park will be secured off-site on the rear portions of 30 and 40 St. Clair Avenue West. The Official Plan Amendment also redesignates a portion of the subject site from Apartment Neighbourhoods to Mixed Use Areas.
The proposed development is consistent with the Provincial Policy Statement (2014), conforms with the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe (2019), conforms with the applicable policies of the Official Plan and the Yonge-St. Clair Secondary Plan, and is consistent with the Yonge-St. Clair Planning Framework and Tall Building Guidelines. The proposal also meets a number of significant public realm and built form objectives, some of which are outlined in the Yonge-St. Clair Planning Framework, including: securing a 2,506 square metre public park in close proximity to the Yonge-St. Clair intersection; wider sidewalks along both Yonge Street and Delisle Avenue; enhanced street landscaping; restoration and relocation of an existing Art Deco façade; a pedestrian scale base building in keeping with the main street character of Yonge Street; a north/south midblock connection between St. Clair Avenue West and Delisle Avenue; high quality architecture; and consolidated access and servicing for the block.
This report reviews and recommends approval of the application to amend the Official Plan and Zoning By-law.
Images: Design by Studio Gang. Renderings by Norm Li.
The City of Toronto is currently studying ways to increase housing options/supply and planning permissions in areas of the city that are designated as Neighbourhoods in the Official Plan.
These are areas that are sometimes referred to as the “Yellowbelt”, because they are seeing very little intensification and, in a number of cases, actually losing population. (They’re also colored yellow in Toronto’s land use map.)
Ultimately, the goal is to encourage more “missing middle” type housing forms; housing that is denser than single-family homes but smaller in scale than say mid-rise housing like Junction House.
Here are a couple of interesting charts from the City. Based on Toronto’s Official Plan, “Neighbourhoods” make up 35.4% of the city’s land area.
In Toronto’s Zoning By-law, the “Residential” category makes up 47.1% of the city’s land area.
Digging deeper, 31.3% of Toronto’s total area is zoned for only detached houses — which would mean no missing middle type housing. But 15.8% of the city’s total area is already zoned to permit other types of low-rise residential buildings, such as duplexes and triplexes.
So why isn’t more of that happening?
As we’ve talked about before on the blog, the problem is that it is exceedingly difficult to make the math work on projects of this scale, which is why most developers don’t want to do them. The web of bureaucracy that you need to navigate in order to build anything in the city is also imposing for non-developers (and developers really).
But to be a developer, I think you need to be an optimist. So I am going to remain hopeful that this study — and the pilot they want to do in Ward 19 — will result in a streamlined solution for housing of this scale.
A recent study by the City of Toronto has looked at why tech firms cluster (agglomeration economies) and where they cluster in the city. Here are maps of what they found:
Downtown captured almost half (49.2%) of all tech employment in the city with some 29,701 jobs. The South Employment Monitoring Area, which is the area outlined above in blue, captured 63.4% of the city’s tech base.
I usually shy away from headlines touting some total number of tech jobs because I feel that it can become a bit of a vanity metric. What about the quality of those jobs? How much venture capital have the companies raised?
But this report is different and it is interesting to see the extent in which tech has concentrated itself in the core of the city. As of 2019, jobs in tech establishments represented about 4% of all jobs in Toronto.
This blog has been a little too serious as of late. So here’s something fun. Last week, Toronto street artist birdO, StreetARToronto, and Slate Asset Management unveiled the new 10-storey mural that I wrote about last month. The large-format art piece is part of the City of Toronto’s StreetARToronto Monumental Program and our (Slate’s) ongoing effort to do things that are great and remarkable at Yonge and St. Clair. Below are some photos of the mural by Riley Snelling. I love how these turned out (birdO in his bird mask, of course, helps make them).
