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.
This week, I received a notice in the mail that a neighbor to Mackay Laneway House is seeking variances for their own laneway house. I immediately thought to myself, “oh, the hypocrisy.” Here is a neighbor that vehemently opposed my Committee of Adjustment application back in 2017 and now wants to do something similar.
It’s also not like you need minor variances in order to build a laneway house today. They are, as many of you know, permitted as-of-right. That’s how MLH was ultimately built. We went straight to building permit. But in this case, the request is for 7 variances to the current by-law. The build aspires to go above and beyond.
As I’m sure you can imagine, there’s part of me that wants to be a real asshole here. But of course, that would run counter to many of the objectives that we regularly cover on this blog: more housing, revitalized laneways, and so on. So I can’t do that. It’s directionally the right city building move, and they have my full support.
Here is a good example of why “missing middle” housing is so challenging to build in Toronto, despite everyone talking about how great it would be if only we could build more of it.
It’s the story of a minor variance application that was asking to sever a 50-foot lot at 2165 Gerrard Street East so that two semi-detached buildings and two laneway suites could be built. It would have added 10 family-sized rental units to a site that is on a streetcar line and that is within walking distance of both the subway and regional rail. And yet the consent to sever was denied.
How come you ask?
“I don’t believe dividing the property is in the best interest of the community,” said committee member Carl Knipfel, himself an architect and planner who complimented the beauty of the existing house and critiqued the design of the new buildings. “What is proposed is too dense … I really have serious concerns as to where this consent may lead us.”
The last sentence is the best part.
The article then goes on to argue that this is really all about the supremacy of single family homes and the desire to keep renters out of these neighborhoods. (Hey Airbnb, it’s not just short-term rentals that people have a problem with; it’s also long-term rentals.)
The kicker, for Mr. Galbraith [the project’s planner], is he knows if he wanted to sever the lot for two single-family homes he could get that permission without delay and likely also get permission to build more than local zoning allows.
“I can get variances for a one-unit McMansion every day of the week,” he said. “Lot coverage variances are very common; you want to take a bungalow down and make some big ugly house with a weird roof and a high first floor? You see those all over East York and Etobicoke.”
If missing middle-type housing is “too dense” for sites that are endowed with every form of fixed rail transit that we have available in this city, then your guess is as good as mind as to where the hell it’s supposed to go. It’s time to grow up Toronto.
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.
In anticipation of a (very short) presentation that I will be giving at this week’s inaugural laneway summit here in Toronto, I thought that I would share the details about about own laneway house proposal and what I’ve learned from the process. Specifically, I’d like to talk about why it’s currently next to impossible to get a laneway house built in Toronto.
The laneway site I’m talking about is in the St. Clair West and Dufferin area of the city. The neighborhood is officially called Corsa Italia. The address of the site is 95 Mackay Avenue, which is shown in red in the area plan diagram below. The red block to the north is an existing house, and the red – more square – block to the south is the proposed laneway house. Access to the laneway is just to the left of the property.
Right off the bat, there are a few challenges with this property.
First, the laneways dead-end. From an approvals standpoint, you ideally want through-laneways because then service vehicles could, in theory at least, drive right through without having to reverse. But this assumes they can fit in the first place or that the city is willing to allow this.
Second, there’s no existing laneway building at the back of this property. A lot of the laneway houses that you might find in Toronto, such as this one and this one, are renovations of existing buildings. This makes approvals a lot easier because the city isn’t granting a new house, they’re simply allowing an existing structure to be retrofitted. And this is an important distinction because the city is always concerned about setting a precedence. Once one person gets something approved, everybody else will want the same thing.
A more broad-based challenge is that laneways aren’t considered legitimate streets. Most don’t have street names and so your new house won’t be able to receive a proper address. That’s why the city will consider your proposed laneway structure a “house behind a house”. The laneway isn’t considered frontage and so you’re proposing to build at the back. But this is simply a result of how we have historically thought of laneways. There’s no reason they too can’t be legitimate streets.
To get around some of these obstacles, I proposed the following 2 ½ storey laneway house:
The strategy was to sever the rear laneway lot in the shape of an “L” so that the laneway house would technically still have frontage onto the main and only nearby street – Mackay Avenue. The top portion of the “L” would run adjacent to the west side of the existing house.
The hope was that I could then get a proper municipal address and that I could potentially run services (water, sanitary, and so on) directly through to Mackay Avenue as opposed to running them around and through the laneway. Servicing is always a huge obstacle when it comes to laneway houses.
However, one of the big challenges with this approach is that it messes up parking. The zoning by-law requires that every house have a minimum of 1 parking spot. When I did this, it technically left the existing house with none. Parking requirements also need to be met on your own property. But there’s no reason I couldn’t seek a parking variance for this.
As for the laneway house itself, the plan was to have a surface parking spot (with permeable pavers) adjacent to the ground floor (see below). Since this left a smaller footprint for the ground floor, I decided to put the first bedroom there.
Note: The reason for the chamfered corner on the north west corner of the building is because of a neighboring shed and required separation distances.
On the second and main floor is the primary living area, as well as the kitchen and the second bathroom. This second bathroom (the first one is an ensuite on the ground floor) would also serve the terrace level bedroom.
Finally, on the terrace level I placed the second bedroom, a green roof/garden, and a skylight that would allow light down and into the main floor living area. I wanted to keep the footprint of this level as compact as possible so as to not create “overlook” issues with the surrounding backyards. The idea was also that the garden and landscape areas could serve as a privacy buffer.
I’ve been working on this laneway house for a few years now and have been in front of city staff, the area planner, and even the local councillor a few times. In a lot of cases, they couldn’t get their heads around what I was proposing. They didn’t know how it could possibly work and they didn’t know why anyone would want to live there (I would totally live there).
I also spoke to a number of the neighbors and many were entirely supportive. Many gave me formal letters of support and one neighbor told me that he would want to do the same on his property if this one were to get approved (that’s why the city gets scared of precedences).
But to take this proposal to the Committee of Adjustment, which would be the next step, it would cost me about $10,000. And there would be no guarantee that it would even get approved at this stage. I might need to also go to the Ontario Municipal Board at the province, which would be another set of costs.
So instead of rushing to do that, I want to iron out as many of the details as I can ahead of time. The proposal you see here is already the result of a few iterations, so I’d rather continue doing that until there’s a bit more certainty with respect to approvals. But I’m not going to give up. I think laneway housing is inevitable in Toronto. Don’t be surprised if you see me launch a Kickstarter campaign sometime in the future.
If you have any questions about this proposal, feel free to leave a comment below.
