This is Part 5 in a series on the Parkmount/Craven garden suite debate. If you haven't already, you can check out:
- Part 1: "Rumble on Craven Row"
- Part 2: "How About a Craven Row Challenge?"
- Part 3: "Thoroughly Modern Through-Lots"
- Part 4: "In Yer Face"
The Planners Proffer a Proposal
On September 9th, the City planners held a community consultation meeting titled "Zoning for Garden Suites: Parkmount Road / Craven Road."
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| Photo: More Neighbours Toronto |
I wanted to wait till the City mailed out their presentation slide deck, so I could post it here for those who weren't able to make it to the meeting.
I also thought it would be good to sit with the arguments raised in the Q&A so I could consider them more deeply, rather than posting a hot take.
Social media platforms score a quick buck from your outrage. Personal blogs give you space to breathe and digest.
Last September when this issue first blew up, and again this month, I've seen some stuff on Reddit, Tiktok and X that I kinda wish I hadn't.
I'm not going to link to it, because over the past year (...decade ...week), it has felt more and more important to make a deliberate effort to discuss a political issue like this without letting the algorithms polarize us further.
We all have to continue to live side-by-side once the flashpoint-of-the-moment has passed.
Quite literally, in this case.
So it's good practice to see if we can disagree and even argue heatedly without hating each other.
[More after the jump... lots more, but I think the ending is worth it...]
Below are the slides in which the planners set out the context for their review.
Craven Road is one of only two streets in the city with these two characteristics:
- Residential through-lots (back yards on one side of the street, fronts of houses on the other), and
- An extremely narrow right-of-way.
I was glad to see that the "uniqueness" of Craven Road has been pared down to these two points. Not the height of the houses. Not the lot sizes. Not a certain undefinable quaintness around which we could chase our tails forever.
Parkmount Road properties are all through-lots. As I argued in this post, that makes a key difference. A garden suite in a Parkmount "rear yard" is, effectively, also a house with a "front yard" on Craven.
And while its narrowness and Parkmount's garages give Craven the look and feel of a back alley along the west side, it is classified as a street, not a laneway.
Those, I think, are the only two uniquenesses that matter. Through-lots and street width.
Review and Analysis
The slides describe the care the planners took to consider all angles and welcome all input:
I was not surprised to read on the slide above that the average front yard setback on Craven is 2.6 metres. That's a historical hangover from olden times, because in Toronto today, any new house must have a front yard setback of 4.5 to 6.0 metres.
I was also interested to read that the average lot depth on Parkmount is 37.7 metres (123.7 feet).
That's not far off the lot depth of Ashdale Avenue properties backing onto Craven below the train tracks: 36.6 to 37.1 metres (120 to 122 feet), judging by a half-dozen real estate listings.
South of the tracks, Craven was widened a century ago "to a uniform width of thirty-three feet by expropriating from nine to fourteen feet off the rear of Ashdale avenue lots."
So Ashdale lots should be shallower than their Parkmount cousins by 2.7 to 4.3 metres.
Distance and Design
Then, finally – drumroll, please – we get the big reveal.
Below is the City planners' recommendation for garden suites facing onto Craven Road:
The recommendation is to increase the "rear yard" setback of a Parkmount lot, which is also a "front yard" on Craven, from the standard 1.5 metres of a normal garden suite, to 2.6 metres, matching the average front yard setback on the other side of Craven Road.
A facing distance of 11.0 metres is also, the slide points out, consistent with the City's low-rise design guidelines. You can see these in the illustration and table below:
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| Townhouse and Low-Rise Apartment Guidelines, 4.2 Facing Distances and Setbacks |
In addition to the distance recommendation, the planners also recommend encouraging architects to design garden suites in Parkmount's back yards with an understanding that they are, in fact, also fronting on Craven.
The "back wall" of the garden suite could be made to look like the front of a house, with windows and doors instead of a blank wall, and landscaping to give a sense of a "front yard".
The "On Craven Road" Blog Non-Hot-Take
Personally, I was very impressed with the presentation and the suggestions. I don't have a horse in this race, as I'm south of the tracks, where these guidelines would not apply.
But as someone who has spent waaaaay too much time exploring the history and geography of Craven Road, I could see that these planners have put thought and care into grappling with an edge case that they could have just dismissed, but instead understood was worth considering.
Some folks who spoke up during the Q&A were not as pleased.
There were Craven residents who felt the 2.6 metre setback was not enough, and would have preferred height limitations as well.
And there were Parkmount residents, and allied urbanist/housing advocates, who felt that any change to the city-wide guidelines was unacceptable.
I can empathize with the Parkmounters who feel unfairly treated. I also absolutely stand with urbanists who want to see an abundance of new homes built.
But in my first post on the dispute exactly one year ago, I wrote, "there must be a way to find a compromise that works for everyone. I don't believe this needs to be a zero-sum game, as much as it looks that way right now."
For the Craven residents, it is my hope that they can come to see the planners' recommendations as the best possible give-and-take, a compromise that doesn't make either side happy, but gives a little something to each. To me, it seems like a kind of Judgement of Solomon, in which they have the choice to be the mother who insists on all or nothing, or the mother who is willing to sacrifice in order to keep the baby alive.
For Parkmount and its allies, if I understand correctly, the main arguments against treating Craven as a "unique context" are:
- Anything more than the standard 1.5 metre rear-yard setback would infringe on Parkmount owners' property rights. They should have the same rights as property owners everywhere else in Toronto.
- The fact that this recommendation took almost a year (too much) suggests that City planning resources were wasted.
- The fact that this recommendation adds only an additional 1.1 metre of setback (too little) suggests that City planning resources were wasted.
- Laneway suites can be built with a narrower facing distance than 11 metres, so giving Craven Road an 11-metre facing distance treats laneway suite residents as second-class citizens.
- Even a 1.1 metre additional setback is enough of a burden to discourage Parkmount residents from building garden suites, and in a housing crisis, Toronto needs every additional dwelling it can get.
- Granting any neighborhood-specific exemption or "bespoke policy" starts a slippery slope. It would set a dangerous precedent, inspire NIMBYs across the city, and gravely undermine Toronto's hard-won garden suite policy.
Here are my thoughts on these arguments.
1. Property Rights
Parkmount lots are through-lots. Most property owners everywhere else in Toronto don't have double-fronting properties like these. The vast majority front on a single street, and back onto another back, or a laneway.
That's what makes Parkmount lots special. They're pushmi-pullyus: "An imaginary creature resembling a llama or antelope, but with a head at either end of the body, pointing away from the torso, so that the creature always faces in two directions at once."
Fronting on a street gives you advantages (like breathing room from the folks across the street) and responsibilities (like the requirement to set a new house 6 metres back to give the folks across the street breathing room).
Fronting on two streets should give you those advantages and responsibilities on both ends.
These twin arguments suggest that this recommendation took almost a year (too much time) to return a suggestion of just a 1.1 metre setback (too little change), and that therefore City planning resources were wasted.
There are about 2,000 working hours in a year. If the City planners spent that long on these suggestions, then yeah, they took way too long. That works out to setback cost of half a millimetre an hour.
A bigger setback would improve the math, but I'm guessing that's not the point. I'm also guessing that this project was interspersed with hundreds of other projects the planners worked on during that year.
A year ago, one Parkmount resident said that "This is being rammed through… without any prior notice or discussion with affected homeowners, and no opportunity to provide meaningful input." I was glad when the result of the first community consultation was a motion "Allowing Time for a Thorough Review."
Sometimes we want more time for consideration. Sometimes we want something not to be considered at all. It usually comes down to which route we think will deliver the result we want.
4. Laneway Suite Comparison
As much as Craven feels like a laneway, it simply isn't. It's a road.
Suggesting that Craven residents are trying to get special treatment that laneway suite residents don't get is like saying apples want special treatment over oranges. Roads are a different category from laneways.
And implying that Craven residents actually believe laneway suite residents "should enjoy less space" is just... a very pretzel-ish logic-leap. That leap echoes other insinuations that Craven's advocates are somehow implicated in all the other ills of our current housing crisis.
Those ills are real. But Craven residents are house-on-road residents, not laneway-suite residents. Asking for a (percentage of) normal house-on-road setback does not throw any shade on laneway residents' dignity.
5. An Extra 1.1-Metre Setback Will Discourage Building
As noted above, the average lot depth on Parkmount is 37.7 metres (123.7 feet).
The only garden suite application to date on Parkmount was turned down at the Committee of Adjustment because "In the opinion of the Committee, the variances" it requested were "not minor."
The least-minor of those variances was a zero-metre setback from the rear lot line, because the plan incorporated an existing garage built right up to the edge of the road.
Thanks to that zero-metre rear setback, the plan preserved almost 12 metres of yard space between the garden suite and the main house – or 9.6 metres if you measured from an existing addition half the width of the house:
It's understandable that the Parkmount owner wanted to maximize their yard space by pushing their garden suite as far as possible toward Craven.
However, a setback shifting the exact same garden suite 2.6 metres closer to the main house would still leave between 7 and 9 metres of backyard for the residents of both units to enjoy.
And the garden suite residents would also still be able to enjoy the 2.6 metres on the other side.
That doesn't seem like a deal-breaking burden.
6. The Slippery Slope
The final argument suggests that any "carve-out" like the one proposed for Parkmount/Craven will create a slippery slope, inviting an avalanche of exceptions and special pleading from every neighbourhood and street across Toronto.
Maybe they will indeed try their luck.
But consider this. "In a 1998 case, a bike courier convinced the federal court that the extra food he ate for energy was a legit business expense — like gas for a car. The CRA doesn't usually allow food write-offs, but this ruling set a rare precedent."
That precedent did not open the floodgates to every Canadian being able to write off their lunch. Maybe some people tried. But our federal government requires tax filers to defend their claims, and it has the capacity to distinguish between the reasonable and the ridiculous.
Our municipal government also has the capacity to distinguish between fair and frivolous requests for adjustments to the garden suite guidelines.
Craven Road has two solid arguments for its "uniqueness" claim: (a) garden suites facing this road are, well, facing a road – see our two-faced friend the pushmi-pullyu, above – and (b) since Craven is unusually narrow, those faces are unusually close together.
The City already has tools for measuring this claim. Here are its road classification criteria in action:
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| 2018 Update to the Road Classification System |
If you zoom in, below, you can see that local roads have a typical right-of-way width of 15 to 22 metres. Craven Road's right-of-way is 6.1 metres. That's less than half.
(Right down at the bottom, there's also a note that laneways or back alleys "are not part of this classification" at all.)
In addition, our municipal government manages to change the classification of certain roads, through careful consideration of specific criteria, without the whole city-wide system falling apart. Take a look at this 2018 update:
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| 2018 Update to the Road Classification System |
City planners consider the width of sidewalks just as carefully as the width of streets.
The majority of roads in Toronto have sidewalks on both sides. The City's Missing Sidewalk Program aims to add them to roads that have none, even in the face of opposition, in neighbourhoods like Etobicoke which were "built in the 1950s and 1960s when the car was king."
An extra 1.1 metre setback on the non-sidewalk side of Craven seems like a reasonable addition when compared with the widths in this fun graphic from Toronto's Complete Streets Guidelines:
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| Toronto Complete Streets Guidelines, Ch. 4: Street Design for Pedestrians |
Conclusion
I've probably taken far too long with this blog post, but it feels good to get all the thoughts out of my head and onto the page.
The anger in the Q&A of that community meeting really stayed with me.
The Craven/Parkmount tensions have in no way been comparable to the alarming acrimony we're all watching south of the border these days.
But whenever our local debate has tilted toward contempt for the other side's perspectives, it's reminded me of how essential it is for people in a democracy to work as hard as we possibly can on persuading each other with reasons, instead of allowing disagreement, frustration, and anger to simmer into hatred.
Coming back to that pushmi-pullyu, though, the strongest argument for a decent facing distance is that llamas can spit up to 10 feet.
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| Tintin in Tibet (1960) |
