Toronto is moving forward with allowing laneway houses in Yorkville after the area has been exempt from the housing type for years.
The city will be holding a public meeting about the proposed zoning bylaw change for the area on Feb. 28. However, the meeting is only a formality, according to local resident and co-president of the ABC Residents Association, Ian Carmichael.
That’s because, due to the province’s Bill 23 — the More Homes Built Faster Act — Toronto is forced to allow laneway housing, and it is illegal to bar it. Local city councillor Dianne Saxe wrote in an email that the bill is being “imposed on the city against the unanimous opposition of the mayor and council.”
“I remain adamantly opposed to [Ontario Premier Doug] Ford’s deeply destructive Bill 23 and the many harms it is imposing on the people of Toronto,” Saxe said but did not elaborate on by the time of publication.
When the City of Toronto first introduced its laneway suites policy, Changing Lanes, the ABC Residents Association (ABCRA), whose jurisdiction is from Avenue Road to Yonge Street, and Bloor Street to the railway tracks in the north, requested an exemption from the blanket policy for its area, which Toronto City Council approved.
No longer.
Carmichael said residents are disappointed that laneway suites will be allowed in the neighbourhood without more specific rules laid out in a secondary plan for Yorkville, which was promised 10 years ago but still hasn’t been delivered.
The concern, according to Carmichael, is that those building laneway suites will try to bypass certain rules, such as the height of the structure or distance from other entities, by going to the committee of adjustment. This, in turn, will create an extra burden on Yorkville residents to have to fight their neighbours, which Carmichael said is not conducive to a healthy neighbourhood.
“Everything becomes a negotiation now,” he said. “It just becomes more onerous from a planning perspective, from a resident perspective, to address all of these exceptions.”
Parking or privacy problems are some of the issues that could arise from the housing, Carmichael said.
Laneway suites were more broadly allowed in Toronto in 2018 to create more housing in the city to help fight the supply and affordability crisis.
However, Carmichael contends that laneway suites are not actually helping in Toronto’s housing crisis because they are often not affordable and not enough are being made to actually create a dent in the city’s housing supply.
Now, with Bill 23, Carmichael said the focus is just more “density, density, density” to fix the housing crisis, rather than exploring other options
“The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and hoping for different results,” he said.
