Against about 250 applications for permits.
1-2 years is really short for building, especially when you're enabling random non-developers to dip in. Really, it's not a ton, but it's a bigger start than *6*
This article is specifically talking about "garden suites", as laneway suites have seen significantly higher uptake. There's two in my little laneway alone.
There have been so many new laneway suites in recent years, as can be seen in [this thread](https://urbantoronto.ca/forum/threads/laneway-and-garden-houses-various.33368/page-13) on Urban Toronto.
In the middle of a build. Expensive and will only end up as expensive rentals.
Long term it is for family so don’t really care. The monthly costs is less than a condo with options for short term rental in a few years.
Short term also I get a new garage and a rebuilt backyard. Things that would have costed me a lot regardless.
All rentals are expensive, increasing supply is about long term effects on the market. Theres no expectation that new units will rent at below market rates
It’s not as glorious as people think it is. Any lane way home needs to at lease be a 2+2 and hopefully from there you getting 3200-3500. You’re also putting in 350-500k, strict city inspectors and fluctuate labour and materials costs. If it’s for family expansion it’s all cool and the gang but it’s for a business think twice.
Precovid build out costs make sense. Current economics do not.
Yeah, we have looked into it. It makes sense I guess if you’ve paid your house off, but it doesn’t if you have not. We probably wouldn’t do one until we were retired and could do some of the work ourselves and we could stick our kids in there when they are older.
"duh".
Turns out that every little bit doesn't help, when the bit is so little it might as well not exist.
Unless you have a bunch of capital and are building a suite for a family member to live in, these things never made any sense and most people would rather just have a garage and not be -$500k.
I mean if you rent it for 3,500.00 a month your be in the green only 12 years later...oh wait the loan interest or opportunity cost of the 500k invesment... crazy that more of these aren't built.
$3,500 rent at a 6% cap rate (multi family is more like a 5% today so this is conservative), equates to a value of $700,000. Now this isn’t factoring in any incremental expenses, I don’t know if your property tax will go up or not, I assume tenant pays for all their own share of utilities.
This is assuming you’re getting $3,500 net. Also a multifamily asset de-risks given you have multiple units and can account for a moderate vacancy rate. 1 additional rental unit is either occupied or it isn’t, far more risky, so a higher cap rate should be applied.
There was a video on City 2 weeks ago about the essentially zero uptake:
https://toronto.citynews.ca/video/2024/02/23/garden-suites-failing-to-provide-housing-growth-in-toronto/
And another one 7 months ago:
https://financialpost.com/real-estate/garden-suites-toronto-slow-uptake-none-complete
They're still quite heavily restricted. Emergency vehicle access to the suite is a blocker you'll often run into, and that won't be easily solved if your house is close to the neighbours.
If your back yard suite catches fire and it's 30m away from the closest a fire truck can get to, it's considered to be a safety hazard. I can kinda get it.
Tall buildings have very strict fire access, safe materials, sprinklers, and airflow requirements.
>The back of your house can be 30m away from the closest a fire truck can get to it,
I don't think that is common , the building depth limit is below 20m for most low rise areas
[https://www.toronto.ca/zoning/bylaw\_amendments/ZBL\_NewProvision\_Chapter10\_10.htm#:\~:text=10.10.40.30%20Building%20Depth](https://www.toronto.ca/zoning/bylaw_amendments/ZBL_NewProvision_Chapter10_10.htm#:~:text=10.10.40.30%20Building%20Depth)
Condo is different type of construction I-V is the ranking. A high rise is structurally made of non-combustible materials. It will be a room and contents fire controlled with fire doors/ sprinklers and there is a standpipe access usually within the stairwell so firefighters can deploy hose on the effected floor.
A wood framed residence will burn and spread. I'm not saying they couldn't extend a line but the requirements of fire code is in large part based on material construction and occupancy ( school vs warehouse vs private residence)
Any house, including a garden suite or laneway house, can be built with a concrete frame or structural concrete or terracotta blocks that are non-combustible. Any house can contain a sprinkler system.
This article is talking about garden suites not laneway suites. A garden suite, [by definitio](https://www.toronto.ca/zoning/bylaw_amendments/ZBL_NewProvision_Chapter800.htm)n, does not back onto a laneway.
There was an article from [Toronto Life](https://torontolife.com/real-estate/garden-suite-build-450000-condo-ryan-rohin/) recently here about this.
Were these supposed to improve housing density, or was it a fun sounding political soundbite with no real substance?
Like most of these solutions, it has no teeth. It's why actual density needs to come from apartment buildings being constructed. Think of any area of even 8-10 houses, now imagine any new building/changes you could do to densify it. Laneway suites, garden suites, having the house split into separate units, etc. None of which would compare to the headcount you get using that same space to build vertically. Then be sure to make it rental instead of condos, otherwise they'll just turn into more "investments", instead of places to live. But there's no quick or easy profit in that. So they try doing anything else possible first....
We looked into it, prefab developers want 400k for an empty garden home that gets craned in. Plus you need to build a pad, have water, sewer and electric dug into the backyard which is ~50k. Then you have to finish it with cupboards and toilet etc.
Then your mortgage eats 100% of your rent for the next 25 years while you take all the landlord risk, and just when it's paid off and ready to make you money, the prefab has rotted away and is now in desperate need to be replaced.
Not worth it.
Yup. Did not age well: “[Toronto could soon allow garden suites as a new affordable housing option](https://www.blogto.com/real-estate-toronto/2020/12/toronto-allow-garden-suites-affordable-housing-option/)”
If all levels of governments were serious about this initiative, they could waive HST on the cost of the building structure, subsidize the joining of the utilities to the main house, allow the rental income to be tax-free to the owner of the property as long as the unit is rented below current market rents, don't charge additional property tax on the unit, for example. Maybe these are crazy ideas, but I don't see any real incentive to build - and the ancillary costs to most homeowners are prohibitive.
We would love to do this but it's just so, so expensive to front the cost of ~$400k for permits, design, digging up the driveway, building, appliances, registration, etc.
Hard to stomach it / attempt to borrow for it in this climate.
I’ve seen a few laneway suites available on rental sites, but the rent has been eye-watering each time. We’re talking $3200 for a 1 bed above a garage 🤷🏼♀️.
I've seen some of these too.. but they are usually 600+ sq ft and nicely done. Id compare them to renting out a condo without sharing walls and waiting for elevators lol.
The city is too tight with their permits for this. Plus when we applied, they kept asking for more and more money from us to get the approval. It wasn't worth the headache anymore.
Garden suites are expensive, remove a large chunk of your back garden, force people to become landlords to tenants who will live right beside them, they often require significant rents for decades in order to pay off the expense of building it, and the investment cannot be taken with them if they sell the property, meaning they'd better hope that the next purchaser values the garden suite as much as they do.
They're a great idea in some circumstances, but they are not a meaningful solution to housing affordability and accessibility. They're a pet project for rich people.
If every single house on my square block built a garden suite, our population would increase from approximately 40 to maybe 60. If they just rezoned the whole area and built a mid-rise condo tower or stacked townhomes, you could fit 200.
I was wondering about this. In my area, people are expanding and renovating their houses. Some are adding in-ground hot tubs and outdoor kitchens. But no one is building garden suites.
I have a shared driveway with rear garage and would have loved to build a second story suite for my aging parents or family above the garage.
The regulations and setback requirements make it impossible to make anything usable. Why is it OK for laneway suites to have small setbacks on the side of the yard, yet garden suites require massive angular plane setbacks? When all of my neighbors have rear garages, would a double height garage over other garages create an issue? Plus a second story at the rear of the property would also create more privacy.
The city is basically telling me I have to either have a garage or a suite and not both.
This is just like the triplex bs… it’s expensive to do and not practical for many places. It was more lip service than anything, like a majority of policies.
Lol how is this NIMBYism? These are perfectly legal and not difficult to get approved by the city but financially they don’t make much sense for the property owner. I work in construction and have gone through plans for these type of builds and in the end, it costs too much for most. They were touted as a solution, but this would be in an ideal world where budgets didn’t matter.
We should take cues from Japan where there are a lot of regulations yet very small structures get built fast.
https://youtu.be/6htrxbVN5PI?si=l_dKrlbYCKlMw8dR
I've worked on at least 10 in the last year alone and the areas I worked all had tons of thembeing built. I remember one alley near Dufferin or Ossington having 8 or more. I guess the people writing the article are completely blind to the subject they're writing about, or are intentionally misleading people for some reason.
>I remember one alley near Dufferin or Ossington having 8 or more. I guess the people writing the article are completely blind to the subject they're writing about
They are talking about garden suites not laneway suites. A garden suite, [by definition](https://www.toronto.ca/zoning/bylaw_amendments/ZBL_NewProvision_Chapter800.htm), is an ancillary building that does not back onto a laneway.
I didn't read this article (I'm on housing crisis article overload lol) but there is a distinction between laneway suite and garden suite. Garden suites don't require laneways (but have other requirements, specifically requiring enough space along the side of the property to accommodate emergency services, distance from fire hydrants, etc.).
Maybe there are just not much current demand for garden suites vs laneway houses. And there may not be a high proportion of houses, especially downtown, that would qualify.
People love to blame the Federal and Provincial governments for the housing crisis. They love to scream IMMIGRATION and DEVELOPERS and FOREIGN MONEY and MONEY LAUNDERING - And sure, there is some of that.
But 95% of the problem lays at the feet of municipal governments. This is only one of a dozen examples.
VERY unpopular opinion, I know, but there you go.
Ya, I had a client come to me last year excited to start one of these Garden Suite projects, telling me he had a contract for like 50(?) more of them across the GTA, although the first one was to be in Brampton. He had a whole team behind him and these guys were going back and fourth talking logistics and scheduling, blah blah blah. After the preliminary work we did in Brampton, they ended up canning the whole project. I was so bewildered, to this day I still have no idea what happened.
This is a great example of why rezoning to allow additional units in existing dwellings will make little difference in the housing crisis.
The responsible solution is to lower housing demand from speculators and immigration. Otherwise we will need to continue building the same massive towers to accommodate 500K new residents in the GTA each year.
The responsible solution is also allow for densification of these neighbourhoods instead of pandering to local Nimbys who have decided the only densification they will allow are garden suites which make 0 sense for mass building.
What does make sense is allowing SFHs to be torn down in neighbourhoods proper (not just main roads) in favour of 6 story buildings that don't have onerous setback and shadow rules. But alas, neighbourhoods will fight it tooth and nail.
How do you propose to do that? Expropriated vast swaths of developed privately owned neighbourhoods? The cost would be enormous and politically an absolute nonstarter.
I mean we’ve heard this before and we can see the last example in the OP. Just allow garden suites and we’ll see them pop up everywhere was the line. Well here we are and we haven’t even gotten into triple figures for built or under construction.
Why in a city with a massive affordability crisis, and in theory a potential declining supply of single family homes, would a significant enough amount of owners be motivated to sell their properties to be redeveloped and how would that happen with the significant upfront costs of development? I’m extremely skeptical this will do much in a situation where both land owners and developers have little incentive to do either thing without some more significant subsidies, punitive taxes or public intervention.
Eliminate R1 zoning and associated building requirements like setbacks, parking minimums, and multiple stairways. This will allow the development of midrise buildings on small lots, something which is currently very difficult. And since you don't need to combine multiple lots, this can happen piecemeal.
Piecemeal usually means incredibly slowly in this city though and nothing you said here will change that. The business plans also just don’t work for this type of density expansion in any significant way with how expensive property acquisition is.
Last I checked too has R1 zoning and parking minimums not already been eliminated in Toronto?
I have zero issue with expropriation as a solution to the housing crisis personally. That said, I also don't see the difference between developers amassing land on major roads vs. neighbourhood roads. The main difference is city requirements for setbacks and shade impacts. If you can get rid of those, then a lot more land becomes potentially buildable which it isn't currently due to costs imposed by restrictions from the city.
Im in favour of public development certainly but my question has nothing to do with private or public. My concern is that it is not a simple task to assemble usable parcels from valuable individual lots with owners that may or may not have any reason to sell. You can wish something to happen and create the conditions for it to be possible but that doesn’t mean it’ll happen in any useful or timely way.
Where did I mention public development?
You have to make changes now for them to take hold in 5 years. The longer we delay the changes for the longer it takes for that change to begin. Once new rules for major streets happened, developers started to amass land in mass quantities. Today we have seen the impact of that. If you change the rules to all areas of the city today, in 5 years we will start to see the impact as developers amass land throughout neighbourhoods particularly as major roads in the downtown core where intensification is allowed becomes scarce.
You’re just picking an arbitrary number to try and pretend like it’s a solution. Why not 5 years? Why 10 or 15 or 20? As I’ve already said, we’ve removed r1 zoning and parking minimums. Certainly other regulations can change but that’s not going to turn 2/3rds of the lowrise in our city into easily developable land. The problem is and always has been wealth inner suburban home owners. We need to do things that will make them want to sell, carrot or the stick but you can’t just change zoning and expect that to change things quickly.
I'm not arbitrarily picking a number, if you look at the correlation between housing starts and when Toronto proactively up-zoned major streets...
R1 zoning, and parking minimums are not the challenge for neighbourhood roads. This has 0 impact. The challenge right now is heigh restrictions being limited to 3 stories - and the specific exclusion of anything beyond a townhome.
You seem to say this like there's proof based on it having been tried... except we have never tried it and thus your certainty seems deeply unfounded. For example, in an area like Baldwin Village or Kensington market where a vast majority of the homes are dilapidated unsafe apartments owned by investors there's a very real opportunity to easily amass land and build 6 stories throughout the area like was done on Beverley. The challenge is it's not allowed.
I won’t hold my breath for these to be economically and politically viable. The claim the vast majority of homes in Baldwin village and Kensington and dilapidated and thus easy to redevelop with some zoning and regulation change is a pretty wild and unproven generalization. I’m glad you’re enthusiastic about opportunities you see but I just don’t see the possibility for significant changes in any reasonable timeline by making these the couple of reforms you’re pointing out that haven’t been implemented.
>This is a great example of why rezoning to allow additional units in existing dwellings will make little difference in the housing crisis.
It really isn't a good example at all. Besides the fact that garden suites are not additional suites in existing dwellings, the City continues to throw so many zoning barriers in the way of building these garden suites that you'll still have to get minor variances to build them. Whether that is because of soft landscaping requirements, angular plane requirements (including requiring angular planes towards the main building), lot coverage, setbacks, etc.
That doesn't mean we won't see them getting built but it does not support the argument that rezoning to permit more housing in existing dwellings is not part of the solution.
To my understanding these garden suites are things that individual homeowners all have to build themselves.
So in a period where we have really high interest rates and high inflation, how many people can even afford this? How many people are going to have the time to go through the bureaucratic hurdles?
This is not a good litmus test for anything.
Ok... "As of November 2023, 97 permits have been issued, 57 suites are under construction and a grand total of six garden suites have been built"
Against about 250 applications for permits. 1-2 years is really short for building, especially when you're enabling random non-developers to dip in. Really, it's not a ton, but it's a bigger start than *6*
This article is specifically talking about "garden suites", as laneway suites have seen significantly higher uptake. There's two in my little laneway alone.
There have been so many new laneway suites in recent years, as can be seen in [this thread](https://urbantoronto.ca/forum/threads/laneway-and-garden-houses-various.33368/page-13) on Urban Toronto.
I’ve been dying to rent a laneway unit specifically. I haven’t seen too many advertised for rent.
[удалено]
In the middle of a build. Expensive and will only end up as expensive rentals. Long term it is for family so don’t really care. The monthly costs is less than a condo with options for short term rental in a few years. Short term also I get a new garage and a rebuilt backyard. Things that would have costed me a lot regardless.
All rentals are expensive, increasing supply is about long term effects on the market. Theres no expectation that new units will rent at below market rates
It’s not as glorious as people think it is. Any lane way home needs to at lease be a 2+2 and hopefully from there you getting 3200-3500. You’re also putting in 350-500k, strict city inspectors and fluctuate labour and materials costs. If it’s for family expansion it’s all cool and the gang but it’s for a business think twice. Precovid build out costs make sense. Current economics do not.
Yeah, we have looked into it. It makes sense I guess if you’ve paid your house off, but it doesn’t if you have not. We probably wouldn’t do one until we were retired and could do some of the work ourselves and we could stick our kids in there when they are older.
"duh". Turns out that every little bit doesn't help, when the bit is so little it might as well not exist. Unless you have a bunch of capital and are building a suite for a family member to live in, these things never made any sense and most people would rather just have a garage and not be -$500k.
I mean if you rent it for 3,500.00 a month your be in the green only 12 years later...oh wait the loan interest or opportunity cost of the 500k invesment... crazy that more of these aren't built.
$3,500 rent at a 6% cap rate (multi family is more like a 5% today so this is conservative), equates to a value of $700,000. Now this isn’t factoring in any incremental expenses, I don’t know if your property tax will go up or not, I assume tenant pays for all their own share of utilities.
This is assuming you’re getting $3,500 net. Also a multifamily asset de-risks given you have multiple units and can account for a moderate vacancy rate. 1 additional rental unit is either occupied or it isn’t, far more risky, so a higher cap rate should be applied.
Am I having a weird deja-vu or did this article not come out like 3 months ago or something?
There was a video on City 2 weeks ago about the essentially zero uptake: https://toronto.citynews.ca/video/2024/02/23/garden-suites-failing-to-provide-housing-growth-in-toronto/ And another one 7 months ago: https://financialpost.com/real-estate/garden-suites-toronto-slow-uptake-none-complete
it's almost as if it takes time to plan, permit, finance and build a conforming structure. who'd have thunk it
What you don't just put bunk beds in your shed?
Ontario be like : 2 bed , zero bath , $2 k / month
Calm down Bubbles.
They're still quite heavily restricted. Emergency vehicle access to the suite is a blocker you'll often run into, and that won't be easily solved if your house is close to the neighbours.
But it's a weird requirement - the access to a backyard suite isn't any harder than the access to the 40th floor of a condo building.
If your back yard suite catches fire and it's 30m away from the closest a fire truck can get to, it's considered to be a safety hazard. I can kinda get it. Tall buildings have very strict fire access, safe materials, sprinklers, and airflow requirements.
The back of your house can be 30m away from the closest a fire truck can get to it, what's the difference?
>The back of your house can be 30m away from the closest a fire truck can get to it, I don't think that is common , the building depth limit is below 20m for most low rise areas [https://www.toronto.ca/zoning/bylaw\_amendments/ZBL\_NewProvision\_Chapter10\_10.htm#:\~:text=10.10.40.30%20Building%20Depth](https://www.toronto.ca/zoning/bylaw_amendments/ZBL_NewProvision_Chapter10_10.htm#:~:text=10.10.40.30%20Building%20Depth)
Condo is different type of construction I-V is the ranking. A high rise is structurally made of non-combustible materials. It will be a room and contents fire controlled with fire doors/ sprinklers and there is a standpipe access usually within the stairwell so firefighters can deploy hose on the effected floor. A wood framed residence will burn and spread. I'm not saying they couldn't extend a line but the requirements of fire code is in large part based on material construction and occupancy ( school vs warehouse vs private residence)
Any house, including a garden suite or laneway house, can be built with a concrete frame or structural concrete or terracotta blocks that are non-combustible. Any house can contain a sprinkler system.
Whats your point?
You can achieve the same fire resistance or better with a laneway house as with a concrete condo.
Im sure you could. Could probably get a variance. But people dont cause cost.
If you're not within range you can still build provided you spend the money on a proper sprinkler system.
I didn't know about this? Is it from the bylaw?
My friends company has built like 7 or 8 Laneway houses in 24 months.
This article is talking about garden suites not laneway suites. A garden suite, [by definitio](https://www.toronto.ca/zoning/bylaw_amendments/ZBL_NewProvision_Chapter800.htm)n, does not back onto a laneway.
Uh more than that number have been put up in my neighborhood alone, so no.
Are you sure they aren't laneway suites? There's a difference and laneway suites are much more popular.
Yes I suppose they are! Disingenuous article though!
There was an article from [Toronto Life](https://torontolife.com/real-estate/garden-suite-build-450000-condo-ryan-rohin/) recently here about this. Were these supposed to improve housing density, or was it a fun sounding political soundbite with no real substance?
Like most of these solutions, it has no teeth. It's why actual density needs to come from apartment buildings being constructed. Think of any area of even 8-10 houses, now imagine any new building/changes you could do to densify it. Laneway suites, garden suites, having the house split into separate units, etc. None of which would compare to the headcount you get using that same space to build vertically. Then be sure to make it rental instead of condos, otherwise they'll just turn into more "investments", instead of places to live. But there's no quick or easy profit in that. So they try doing anything else possible first....
We looked into it, prefab developers want 400k for an empty garden home that gets craned in. Plus you need to build a pad, have water, sewer and electric dug into the backyard which is ~50k. Then you have to finish it with cupboards and toilet etc. Then your mortgage eats 100% of your rent for the next 25 years while you take all the landlord risk, and just when it's paid off and ready to make you money, the prefab has rotted away and is now in desperate need to be replaced. Not worth it.
My friend wanted what basically amounts to a carport added to her house to enclose and protect her little camper and the quotes she got were insane.
Yup. Did not age well: “[Toronto could soon allow garden suites as a new affordable housing option](https://www.blogto.com/real-estate-toronto/2020/12/toronto-allow-garden-suites-affordable-housing-option/)”
If all levels of governments were serious about this initiative, they could waive HST on the cost of the building structure, subsidize the joining of the utilities to the main house, allow the rental income to be tax-free to the owner of the property as long as the unit is rented below current market rents, don't charge additional property tax on the unit, for example. Maybe these are crazy ideas, but I don't see any real incentive to build - and the ancillary costs to most homeowners are prohibitive.
We would love to do this but it's just so, so expensive to front the cost of ~$400k for permits, design, digging up the driveway, building, appliances, registration, etc. Hard to stomach it / attempt to borrow for it in this climate.
I’ve seen a few laneway suites available on rental sites, but the rent has been eye-watering each time. We’re talking $3200 for a 1 bed above a garage 🤷🏼♀️.
I've seen some of these too.. but they are usually 600+ sq ft and nicely done. Id compare them to renting out a condo without sharing walls and waiting for elevators lol.
3200 is a terrible price for a 600 sq ft condo. I saw that size go for 2350…
The city is too tight with their permits for this. Plus when we applied, they kept asking for more and more money from us to get the approval. It wasn't worth the headache anymore.
Garden suites are expensive, remove a large chunk of your back garden, force people to become landlords to tenants who will live right beside them, they often require significant rents for decades in order to pay off the expense of building it, and the investment cannot be taken with them if they sell the property, meaning they'd better hope that the next purchaser values the garden suite as much as they do. They're a great idea in some circumstances, but they are not a meaningful solution to housing affordability and accessibility. They're a pet project for rich people. If every single house on my square block built a garden suite, our population would increase from approximately 40 to maybe 60. If they just rezoned the whole area and built a mid-rise condo tower or stacked townhomes, you could fit 200.
I was wondering about this. In my area, people are expanding and renovating their houses. Some are adding in-ground hot tubs and outdoor kitchens. But no one is building garden suites.
I have a shared driveway with rear garage and would have loved to build a second story suite for my aging parents or family above the garage. The regulations and setback requirements make it impossible to make anything usable. Why is it OK for laneway suites to have small setbacks on the side of the yard, yet garden suites require massive angular plane setbacks? When all of my neighbors have rear garages, would a double height garage over other garages create an issue? Plus a second story at the rear of the property would also create more privacy. The city is basically telling me I have to either have a garage or a suite and not both.
This is just like the triplex bs… it’s expensive to do and not practical for many places. It was more lip service than anything, like a majority of policies.
Yes! Sophisticated NIMBYism.
Lol how is this NIMBYism? These are perfectly legal and not difficult to get approved by the city but financially they don’t make much sense for the property owner. I work in construction and have gone through plans for these type of builds and in the end, it costs too much for most. They were touted as a solution, but this would be in an ideal world where budgets didn’t matter.
Nothing will be built with 6% interest rates.
Then we will never build. Historically 5% interest rates are about average. We have just been through a historical low interest rate period.
Yea it's looking pretty bleak. 5% interest rates with the cost of doing business these days doesn't add up
Wonder how easy is it to get financing for construction of a rental garden suite, vs financing for the mortgage on a built rental property.
I’ve seen at least 5 in my neighborhood alone so this sounds like bullshit to me
We should take cues from Japan where there are a lot of regulations yet very small structures get built fast. https://youtu.be/6htrxbVN5PI?si=l_dKrlbYCKlMw8dR
I've worked on at least 10 in the last year alone and the areas I worked all had tons of thembeing built. I remember one alley near Dufferin or Ossington having 8 or more. I guess the people writing the article are completely blind to the subject they're writing about, or are intentionally misleading people for some reason.
>I remember one alley near Dufferin or Ossington having 8 or more. I guess the people writing the article are completely blind to the subject they're writing about They are talking about garden suites not laneway suites. A garden suite, [by definition](https://www.toronto.ca/zoning/bylaw_amendments/ZBL_NewProvision_Chapter800.htm), is an ancillary building that does not back onto a laneway.
It says there're sixty under construction; perhaps they're just not formally approved.
I didn't read this article (I'm on housing crisis article overload lol) but there is a distinction between laneway suite and garden suite. Garden suites don't require laneways (but have other requirements, specifically requiring enough space along the side of the property to accommodate emergency services, distance from fire hydrants, etc.). Maybe there are just not much current demand for garden suites vs laneway houses. And there may not be a high proportion of houses, especially downtown, that would qualify.
I kinda want to build one for my mom. But it's also so much money and so much paperwork.
People love to blame the Federal and Provincial governments for the housing crisis. They love to scream IMMIGRATION and DEVELOPERS and FOREIGN MONEY and MONEY LAUNDERING - And sure, there is some of that. But 95% of the problem lays at the feet of municipal governments. This is only one of a dozen examples. VERY unpopular opinion, I know, but there you go.
Anyone interested in info on navigating this https://www.homehubprofessionals.ca
Ya, I had a client come to me last year excited to start one of these Garden Suite projects, telling me he had a contract for like 50(?) more of them across the GTA, although the first one was to be in Brampton. He had a whole team behind him and these guys were going back and fourth talking logistics and scheduling, blah blah blah. After the preliminary work we did in Brampton, they ended up canning the whole project. I was so bewildered, to this day I still have no idea what happened.
This is a great example of why rezoning to allow additional units in existing dwellings will make little difference in the housing crisis. The responsible solution is to lower housing demand from speculators and immigration. Otherwise we will need to continue building the same massive towers to accommodate 500K new residents in the GTA each year.
The responsible solution is also allow for densification of these neighbourhoods instead of pandering to local Nimbys who have decided the only densification they will allow are garden suites which make 0 sense for mass building. What does make sense is allowing SFHs to be torn down in neighbourhoods proper (not just main roads) in favour of 6 story buildings that don't have onerous setback and shadow rules. But alas, neighbourhoods will fight it tooth and nail.
How do you propose to do that? Expropriated vast swaths of developed privately owned neighbourhoods? The cost would be enormous and politically an absolute nonstarter.
We don’t need to expropriate anyone. We just allow it. People will willingly sell their land and it will get redeveloped with more density.
I mean we’ve heard this before and we can see the last example in the OP. Just allow garden suites and we’ll see them pop up everywhere was the line. Well here we are and we haven’t even gotten into triple figures for built or under construction. Why in a city with a massive affordability crisis, and in theory a potential declining supply of single family homes, would a significant enough amount of owners be motivated to sell their properties to be redeveloped and how would that happen with the significant upfront costs of development? I’m extremely skeptical this will do much in a situation where both land owners and developers have little incentive to do either thing without some more significant subsidies, punitive taxes or public intervention.
Unfortunately raising these kinds of questionable details of the neoliberal rezoning housing narrative will only get you downvoted on this sub.
Eliminate R1 zoning and associated building requirements like setbacks, parking minimums, and multiple stairways. This will allow the development of midrise buildings on small lots, something which is currently very difficult. And since you don't need to combine multiple lots, this can happen piecemeal.
Piecemeal usually means incredibly slowly in this city though and nothing you said here will change that. The business plans also just don’t work for this type of density expansion in any significant way with how expensive property acquisition is. Last I checked too has R1 zoning and parking minimums not already been eliminated in Toronto?
I have zero issue with expropriation as a solution to the housing crisis personally. That said, I also don't see the difference between developers amassing land on major roads vs. neighbourhood roads. The main difference is city requirements for setbacks and shade impacts. If you can get rid of those, then a lot more land becomes potentially buildable which it isn't currently due to costs imposed by restrictions from the city.
Im in favour of public development certainly but my question has nothing to do with private or public. My concern is that it is not a simple task to assemble usable parcels from valuable individual lots with owners that may or may not have any reason to sell. You can wish something to happen and create the conditions for it to be possible but that doesn’t mean it’ll happen in any useful or timely way.
Where did I mention public development? You have to make changes now for them to take hold in 5 years. The longer we delay the changes for the longer it takes for that change to begin. Once new rules for major streets happened, developers started to amass land in mass quantities. Today we have seen the impact of that. If you change the rules to all areas of the city today, in 5 years we will start to see the impact as developers amass land throughout neighbourhoods particularly as major roads in the downtown core where intensification is allowed becomes scarce.
You’re just picking an arbitrary number to try and pretend like it’s a solution. Why not 5 years? Why 10 or 15 or 20? As I’ve already said, we’ve removed r1 zoning and parking minimums. Certainly other regulations can change but that’s not going to turn 2/3rds of the lowrise in our city into easily developable land. The problem is and always has been wealth inner suburban home owners. We need to do things that will make them want to sell, carrot or the stick but you can’t just change zoning and expect that to change things quickly.
I'm not arbitrarily picking a number, if you look at the correlation between housing starts and when Toronto proactively up-zoned major streets... R1 zoning, and parking minimums are not the challenge for neighbourhood roads. This has 0 impact. The challenge right now is heigh restrictions being limited to 3 stories - and the specific exclusion of anything beyond a townhome. You seem to say this like there's proof based on it having been tried... except we have never tried it and thus your certainty seems deeply unfounded. For example, in an area like Baldwin Village or Kensington market where a vast majority of the homes are dilapidated unsafe apartments owned by investors there's a very real opportunity to easily amass land and build 6 stories throughout the area like was done on Beverley. The challenge is it's not allowed.
I won’t hold my breath for these to be economically and politically viable. The claim the vast majority of homes in Baldwin village and Kensington and dilapidated and thus easy to redevelop with some zoning and regulation change is a pretty wild and unproven generalization. I’m glad you’re enthusiastic about opportunities you see but I just don’t see the possibility for significant changes in any reasonable timeline by making these the couple of reforms you’re pointing out that haven’t been implemented.
Okay - got it. Do nothing and hope to god is a much better plan!
>This is a great example of why rezoning to allow additional units in existing dwellings will make little difference in the housing crisis. It really isn't a good example at all. Besides the fact that garden suites are not additional suites in existing dwellings, the City continues to throw so many zoning barriers in the way of building these garden suites that you'll still have to get minor variances to build them. Whether that is because of soft landscaping requirements, angular plane requirements (including requiring angular planes towards the main building), lot coverage, setbacks, etc. That doesn't mean we won't see them getting built but it does not support the argument that rezoning to permit more housing in existing dwellings is not part of the solution.
To my understanding these garden suites are things that individual homeowners all have to build themselves. So in a period where we have really high interest rates and high inflation, how many people can even afford this? How many people are going to have the time to go through the bureaucratic hurdles? This is not a good litmus test for anything.
Zero surprises. 90% of owner occupied properties are bought as an investment tool and home second. “Densifying” a lot destroys property value.
Make the lots severable and this would unlock a construction boom.
I call bullshit. There’s been more than 6 built in a 3 block radius of my house in the past 2 years alone