Kelsey Carriere | University of Toronto | April 1, 2017 |
As the Greater Toronto Area struggles to accommodate over 100,000 new residents every year, and house prices continue to soar, how can we maintain an adequate supply of rental units? The success of Toronto’s 1999 Secondary Suites bylaw, with secondary apartments now making up 1/5 of our rental stock, would suggest that one way to accomplished this is by putting the benefits in the pockets of homeowners through expanded provisions to allow detached secondary suites in the form of a laneway or garden suites.
The City of Toronto is currently considering options for laneway suite performance standards based on feedback from three public consultations conducted in partnership with Lanescape, Evergreen, Councillor Mary-Margaret McMahon and Councillor Ana Bailao. Meanwhile, across Canada, most other major cities’ bylaws address both garage (laneway) and garden (backyard) suites. In this context, I spoke with planners in major cities across Canada about their recently adopted detached secondary suite (DSS) regulations, about how and why they were implemented, and about how laneway an garden suites are treated differently in their design guidelines. I mapped out the estimated potential for DSS in Toronto using two neighbourhood case studies, one downtown and one suburban, to apply these findings to the local context of drastically different neighbourhood typologies.
This research analyses the guidelines of eight Canadian cities, and two American cities, and makes recommendations for Toronto, proposing a set of design guidelines to encourage gentle density through not only laneway housing, but garden suite construction across the City of Toronto. The guidelines recommend setbacks and the appropriate placement of windows, entrances, and balconies to minimize overlook and shadowing on neighbouring properties; addresses concerns around servicing, garbage collection, and emergency service access; and suggests a tiered permitting approach that would allow simple guideline-compliant 1 or 1 ½ story DSS to be built as-of-right city-wide, yet allow planners to retain design control over taller or more potentially intrusive projects. This study suggests that, depending on how the performance standards were defined, between 100,00 and 200,000 rental units could be introduced through a permissive DSS bylaw.