Laneway suite proposal could offer relief amid Toronto housing crunch
Enthusiasm for housing on lanes is growing. Here’s what the plan currently before city staff will allow, and where some stakeholders say it falls short.

TheStar.com
Dec. 28, 2017
Alex McKeen

Standing in her brightly lit open-concept living room, architect Astra Burka describes the modular features of the laneway house she designed herself 20 years ago.

A separate entrance accommodates a tenant renting the home’s west portion, and Burka’s sister lives upstairs, so the top-floor landing, which used to open atrium-like onto the main floor, is now temporarily closed off for privacy.

The whole house is a large box that she moulds and adjusts according to the needs of the people living there at any particular time. It’s an urban organism, perfectly at home in the Little Italy neighbourhood where street art flourishes and uniformity sticks out.

Burka imagines a network of houses like hers one day animating Toronto’s long-dormant 2,400 laneways — they’ve been unfit for accommodating anything other than cars and storage — and ushering in a more modern community-building standard in this city.

“What we need to do is make (laneways) fronts to the streets rather than backs of the streets so then they become human. And they become a secondary form of infrastructure in the city,” Burka said.

Burka has spent significant time over the past two decades contemplating and fighting city of Toronto rules that prevent this ideal from coming true. The main roadblock is a bylaw that disallows “a house behind a house.”

Only residents with unusual lots who devoted plenty of time to getting an exception to the bylaw have succeeded, as Burka has, in building a laneway house in the city of Toronto. Meanwhile, cities such as Vancouver and Ottawa already have backyard housing policies in place, streamlining the process for homeowners to build this type of housing in a way that fits with the cities’ plans.

City staff is now considering a proposed policy on laneway suites in Toronto that would give homeowners guidelines to build an as-of-right secondary suite on a laneway for rental or family (not for unique sale).

If implemented, the policy would give all homeowners the right to put a secondary suite — already permitted as a basement or attic suite under current Toronto bylaws — on a lane in their backyard. The structure would have to adhere to certain building-size parameters and draw all services from the main house.

It’s a prospect 91 per cent of the 3,000 Torontonians polled by the policy’s authors said they support — not least because it would marginally help increase the rental stock in the saturated city — but at this point it’s far from guaranteed.

A former effort to make laneway housing happen in Toronto shows how hard it’s been, historically, to sell the idea to council. Burka was part of a coalition of architects who presented a report to city council in 2006 proposing that the city develop a master plan for its laneways, including how to service them with water and electricity independent of the main roads.

Council rejected the 2006 report outright, mainly because of the enormous infrastructure costs associated with servicing laneways as though they were secondary streets.

The authors of the new policy, a group of developers and architects called Lanescape paired with the non-profit Evergreen, say they’ve solved that problem by applying their policy only to suites serviced from main homes — no additional infrastructure investment required.

It remains to be seen whether the city will agree with their conclusions, and if they do, whether the effect of the policy will be as transformative for Toronto’s 300 kilometres of laneways as longtime advocates like Burka hope for.

“I think there should be a plan in place. And that’s what they’re trying to do right now, which I think it’s a positive initiative,” Burka said. “But we have a tendency here not to plan for the future.”

Julie Mathien knows something about neighbourhood planning and bureaucracy.

She’s the long-standing co-president of the Huron-Sussex Residents Organization, which represents homeowners and renters who live in the neighbourhood owned by the University of Toronto, and which is currently working on implementing its own laneway suites pilot project.

“What we’ve said all along is this could be a best-practices area, where we work on various approaches and see what the best ones are,” Mathien said.

The pilot, which will involve creating laneway suites in three separate lanes in the neighbourhood, is part of a long-term plan the residents’ organization has had since 2013, thanks in large part to the involvement of the university — the sole landlord in the area — in the research and creation of that document.

She said that having the plan and the support of the university helps guard their neighbourhood against projects coming in that could be more deleterious than helpful — there’s some assurance that if it’s not part of the plan, it won’t be approved.

Not all of the neighbouring residents’ organizations have that kind of safeguard.

The Harbord Village Residents’ Association, right next to Huron-Sussex to the west, conducted its own research in the wake of the Lanescape proposal, then presented it to Toronto city planning in June as a way to argue that laneway suites may be a good idea, just not in their area.

Representatives of the Harbord Village Residents’ Association didn’t respond to requests for comment over email.

Some of the 28 lanes within the neighbourhood’s boundaries simply wouldn’t be able to accommodate laneway suites according to Lanescape’s own parameters. Others, though, could be seen as prime candidates, such as Croft St. between Harbord and College Sts., which was highlighted by Lanescape for its existing laneway homes.

Mathien said she couldn’t speak to surrounding residents’ associations’ reasons for supporting laneway suites or not, but said she sympathized with concerns about changes, especially when neighbourhoods lack a cohesive plan and could therefore be seen as more susceptible to sudden disruptions in the housing ecosystem.

From Burka’s perspective, this challenge isn’t unique to neighbourhoods. In fact, she thinks the entire city has a problem with planning.

“I call it Titanic thinking in the 21st century. We don’t have a plan, and so everyone’s afraid of change,” Burka said.

Although the city does have an official plan, it has regularly been circumvented by developers seeking approval for projects from the Ontario Municipal Board, she said. That leaves Toronto susceptible to piecemeal development and disorganized communities, she argued.

She’s worried that’s what will happen with Toronto’s laneways. She’s been going to all the city consultations she can to argue that the Lanescape plan, though a step in the right direction, isn’t sufficiently ambitious.

Laneways are an opportunity, she said, to plan ahead for a new type of housing that takes livability and sustainability into consideration from the start.

Engineering students from Ryerson, whom Burka supervised on a special project, showed it was possible to build sustainable laneway homes that draw only 30 per cent of their energy from the property in front.

Burka said it would be possible to package these designs, or something similar, into “kits of parts” that would allow homeowners to put up sustainable homes. But to do it properly, she said, the city would have to do its part by implementing underground wiring and paving of the lanes.

“So when you build the laneway suites, you’re actually building into a future of sustainability,” Burka said.

Jo Flatt, a manager from Evergreen, conceded that the ideal approach not only to laneways, but to housing in general, is a cohesive master plan that takes neighbourhoods and social factors into consideration.

“That’s what everyone wants,” she said. “One of the things I often think about is how can you be as strategically aligned as you can possibly be.”

“Laneway suites is a drop in the bucket,” she said. Flatt knows the policy her organization and Landscape formed isn’t going to revolutionize affordable housing in the city.

It will increase the stock of rental housing, but it’s not yet clear how many suites will be built. Laneway suites are unlikely to be affordable units, or even an option for many homeowners to build, unless they have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on construction of a suite, she said.

The laneway policy does serve another purpose, the project’s authors say: The collaboration that went into crafting the laneway suites policy set a precedent for productive conversations between organizations, the city and developers.

That’s left Flatt optimistic for future conversations, especially as she anticipates the national housing strategy promised by the federal government.

Effie Carson has been following discussions about the laneway policy with bated breath. She even started a Laneway suites Facebook discussion group as a way of tracking public opinion and sharing news.

The whole thing is deeply personal for her and her family. The 61-year old bought a house in Leslieville last year with her 63-year-old husband Steve, who has Parkinson’s disease.

The couple loved the location, and saw the house as an investment in their future.

“My daughter and I have always been interested in alternative communities, multi-generational buildings (and) community buildings where people are more supportive to one another,” Carson said.

The mother-daughter pair read about backyard suites in Ottawa that were paired with supportive nursing care and thought that idea could be a great fit for their family — while Steve is mobile and doing well now, his Parkinson’s could cause him to be in a wheelchair not far down the road.

The house they bought is a duplex, and also has a basement suite. On top of that, Carson wants to build an accessible garden suite in the backyard where she and Steve will live, while the kids and their families can be close by in the main house.

“I think it sort of goes back to the more old fashioned way of living, but this provides each nuclear family with more privacy,” Carson said of the idea.

The problem is, their grand plans may not be allowed, even if and when the Lanescape plan is implemented. Race and his partners have expressed support for the idea of garden and backyard suites, but they wouldn’t fit into the parameters of the policy they’ve proposed.

“I considered buying a property with a laneway if that would make it more feasible,” Carson said, determined to see her idea through. They also thought about buying a larger property outside of the city instead, but nothing could beat the accessibility and walkability of Toronto.

So for now, they’re holding out hope that they’ll be able to put their plan in action before Steve’s condition deteriorates and their need for an accessible home becomes urgent.

Carson’s cautiously optimistic on that front. She credits Coun. Mary Margaret McMahon and Deputy Mayor Ana Bailao with championing laneway suites. And the province, she notes, also seems on board.

“It feels like the city’s just snail’s pace,” she said.

Bailao, who’s taken on the affordable housing file as chair of that committee on Toronto city council, understands the urgency of the pressures Torontonians are facing surrounding housing. She said the laneway suites plan is one way the city needs to create new housing options.

“It’s not going to solve housing in the city of Toronto. It’s part of a system and I think that we need to add this component,” she said.

Looking ahead 20 years from now, Bailao painted a picture of lanes in the city as safe, living networks that connect neighbourhoods.

“They would have a lot more eyes on them, so they would feel a lot safer. People would feel a lot more comfortable walking in as well through laneways and using them as public spaces, so it’s not like our homes will have the back turned to them,” she said.

Laneway suites may help reduce rental housing prices by increasing the stock, the deputy mayor said, but their real draw is in enabling people who may otherwise move out of the city to stay in their communities.