{"id":60069,"date":"2019-04-02T12:00:28","date_gmt":"2019-04-02T16:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/?p=60069"},"modified":"2019-04-02T12:47:14","modified_gmt":"2019-04-02T16:47:14","slug":"lorinc-fiddling-while-toronto-burns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2019\/04\/02\/lorinc-fiddling-while-toronto-burns\/","title":{"rendered":"LORINC: Fiddling while Toronto burns"},"content":{"rendered":"

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With Doug Ford\u2019s Tories systematically confiscating Toronto council\u2019s capacity to govern \u2013 from political representation to transit planning and even our ability to locate safe injection sites as a public health response<\/a> to the opioid crisis \u2013 it\u2019s grimly instructive to observe how municipal officials seem to be retreating to those few domains where their authority is unlikely to be challenged from on high.<\/p>\n

As happened to democratically-elected school boards after Mike Harris in the mid-1990s erased their power to levy taxes, these institutions grew steadily more inward and irrelevant as their clout vanished. A generation later, with a mayor who flatly refuses to spend political capital to defend his city, perhaps this same fate awaits us, too \u2014 a council stripped of its right to plan invariably growing ever more obsessed with minutiae and inappropriate displays of vestigial power.<\/p>\n

Consider the case, last week, of Councillor Jaye Robinson\u2019s motion to block a committee-approved staff recommendation<\/a> automatically allowing homeowners to create entrances to secondary suites in the street-facing walls of their houses.<\/p>\n

The decision \u2013 an 18-7 victory<\/a>, with Mayor John Tory and apparently progressive suburban councillors like John Filion and Paul Ainslie backing Robinson \u2014 shows how the elected officials of Canada\u2019s fifth largest government decided they needed to assert the municipality\u2019s right to regulate<\/em> \u2014 !!! \u2014 front fa\u00e7ade design of private dwellings, ostensibly in the name of a mostly sham planning concept dubbed “neighbourhood character.”<\/p>\n

This rule had been in place for almost a generation, the concession to ratepayer groups for a 1999 council decision allowing homeowners across the megacity to add legal secondary suites \u2013 mostly basement apartments \u2013 in their houses. Despite strict bans, tens of thousands of homeowners had been quietly renting out basement suites for decades, including in tony neighbourhoods like Lawrence Park, Robinson’s turf. The 1999 measure not only legalized the practice but increased the likelihood that these apartments would be fitted out with safety gear.<\/p>\n

Formal calls to legalize secondary suites first surfaced when Bob Rae was premier between 1990 and 1995; post-amalgamation, the City of Toronto, under Mel Lastman, was, relatively speaking, an early adopter.<\/p>\n

The arguments against basement apartments were legendarily misleading. Here\u2019s Mississauga mayor Hazel McCallion, back in 1992, urging measures to crack down on an estimated 7,000 \u201cillegal\u201d basement flats: \u201cIf there are two families living in a house and one is using the basement apartment, we’re only getting tax revenue from the one family,” McCallion told the Toronto Star<\/em>. “That pushes the burden on all of the taxpayers of Mississauga and there is an extra burden on the boards of education and all of our services.” I\u2019m going to go out on a limb and suggest her concern had nothing whatsoever to do with the state of Mississauga\u2019s finances.<\/p>\n

The telling detail, however, is that once Toronto council legalized secondary suites, many other municipalities followed; a door had been opened. Indeed, a survey<\/a> of secondary suite policies in the 905 and some other Ontario municipalities, which was released with the aforementioned staff report, reveals that dishonest pretext arguments like McCallion\u2019s are, officially, a thing of the past.<\/p>\n

What remains, however, is the lingering objection \u2014 formalized in zoning bylaws \u2014 to permitting secondary suites to be accessed via entrances facing the street. Backdoors, alleyways, even those dog-leg, partially concealed entrances tucked underneath front front porches \u2013 these are all okay. But the fa\u00e7ade is sacrosanct.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth pausing to consider the psychology deeply embedded in this rule. There is, it would seem, something shameful about having an apartment within a residential home. Or at least, something officially<\/em> shameful. The existence of that second front entrance not only demonstrates the presence of a (presumably transiet) tenant, but also broadcasts the homeowner\u2019s need for the additional rental income. A front-facing second door reads like a scarlet letter, rendered in the prosaic script of residential architecture. Consequently, we need to hide it away, like a drinking problem or mental illness, and instead pretend this phony restriction has something to do with \u201ccharacter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, homeowners have long maintained secondary suites (or, in earlier times, rooms for lodgers). What\u2019s more, this practice was once an entirely acceptable way for people, especially those with modest or lower incomes, to finance their dwellings. As a bonus, the existence of such suites came to provide plenty of inexpensive housing in established residential neighbourhoods.<\/p>\n

The ban on front entrances, moreover, may be a peculiarly Torontonian fetish. Montreal\u2019s tri-level apartments<\/a>, such as those found throughout the Plateau and Mile End, have multiple front-fa\u00e7ade entrances and doors, including those on the ground floor, where the building\u2019s owners often lived. Similarly with rowhouses in places like Brooklyn and London, where no one would bat an eyelid about a semi-basement suite, with stairs leading down from the street to a small entrance area.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve seen newly-built and well designed townhouses in Toronto equipped with a front-facade basement apartment entrances \u2013 steps down to that second front door, plus windows, all visible from the sidewalk. This configuration is apparently still possible, but remains subject to a minor variance application (plus costs and delays) instead of being provided as of right.<\/p>\n

The key difference, it must be stressed, is that the owner or the contractor must jump through bureaucratic hoops, appear before the Committee of Adjustment and seek the dispensation of his\/her neighbours in order to proceed. Consequently, success is not assured.<\/p>\n

The strangeness of this requirement merits further comment: it\u2019s not like we\u2019re giving residential neighbourhoods over to squatters, perish the thought. The minor variance applications are sought by homeowners, which is to say that increasingly rarified portion of the population capable of buying a house in Toronto.<\/p>\n

Given these pointless hurdles, let\u2019s also remember that the double and even triple case in favour of secondary suites has never been stronger:<\/p>\n