Should Toronto use size restrictions to keep ‘monster houses’ in check? Seattle do – with a catch

Ever seen a neat project in another city and wondered: can we do it here? Should we? We have, too, and as part of an ongoing series, we will take ideas from around the world and make them look through the lens of Toronto.

It’s a famous enough face in Toronto. Smaller, older houses – perhaps a post-war bungalow, located in an old neighborhood – sold, demolished and rebuilt into a sprawling dwelling, sometimes considered “monster houses”.

Thousands of miles away, the American coastal city of Seattle set foot there.

For newly built homes, city representatives decided three years ago that there would be new limits limiting the size you could build. On a typical plot of 5,000 square feet, the largest new house allowed will be a total of 2,500 square feet. But the rules came with an intriguing catch.

You can build bigger – but only if you have built secondary suites on the property. If you add a clean family suite or a garden cottage, light up 1,000 square feet. Add two, you get 2,000 square feet.

Secondary suites have been allowed across the city for years, but have what senior planner Nick Welch described as “anemic” recording. It was an incentive meant to get more housing units built.

“What we need now is not people living in larger homes,” said Mike O’Brien, a former Seattle councilor who supported the policy changes. “We need more housing opportunities.”

And the policy seems to have worked. Welch warns that several changes have been made simultaneously, making it difficult to analyze the exact impact of any one. But the construction of additional units across Seattle has increased in the years since the rules were introduced, with the city reporting an 80 percent increase in permits issued for secondary suites from 2019 to 2020 alone.

Can the same idea work in Toronto? While the city is considering its garden suite framework and building on the earlier launch of lane houses, Coun said. Ana Bailão – Mayor John Tory’s designated advocate for affordable housing – believes the Seattle policy is worth investigating.

“These are things like this that we are looking at, and that we should be looking at,” Bailão said. “This is how we encourage people to create the housing we need most in the city.”

Toronto is already limiting the size of new homes by using a few different rules. Those rules depend on where in the city you are, and range from maximum coverage to maximum gross floor area and what is known as the floor space index, which is a calculation of density.

What Seattle’s planning system is doing but Toronto has not yet explored, according to Bailão, was to give homeowners a little extra density as an incentive, if their plans include secondary suites.

While the framework for garden suites in Toronto is still being considered, with a vote expected at the city council in February, the city introduced the option of court suites in 2018. The survey, since then, has been slow. Although about 30,000 downtown properties are back on roads, only about 50 units were built by late 2021, Star’s Tess Kalinowski recently reported.

Bailão is not surprised by these figures. “We are not going to have thousands and thousands of these popping up from one day to the next. It will be gradual, ”she said.

But both she and Karen Chapple, director of the University of Toronto’s School of Cities, hope to see more creative ideas to spur development. “It seems like there should be more roots,” Chapple said, emphasizing that public education was also part of the comparison.

Chapple sees secondary suites as a way to make Toronto’s neighborhoods work better for people through different stages of their lives. The units could allow elderly parents or adult children to live independently while staying close to family support, Chapple said.

“If we are not going to build more diverse housing types within our neighborhoods, then, hey! Let’s build more diversity within a single lot. ”

In Seattle, O’Brien said he has watched over the years as his city increasingly feels divided, between largely well-paid employees in the technology sector and others in the service industry.

“Those two economies share the same housing market, and that’s a real challenge,” he said.

While Welch, the city planner, does not believe that the addition of more secondary packages could address “big A-affordability”, he sees it as a bit more housing choice in a difficult market.

The idea of ​​allowing multiple secondary suites from the right has caused some setbacks, O’Brien, the former Seattle councilor, acknowledged, especially from some neighborhood councils.

“There was always someone who was willing to stand up and shout, and they would get a dozen people to stand up and testify,” he said.

And he knows there are still solutions to the rules. A supposed in-laws suite can be used as a children’s playroom with an extra door and a kitchen. A garden suite can be a home office.

But O’Brien banked on the long game. Even if one family uses three units, the next homeowner can rent them. The idea was to build stock for the next 50, even 100 years, he said.

“Whether you’re the kind of progressive city that’s pushing the boundaries with housing policy – as Seattle may be at the moment – or a city that’s trying to make no daring political statements but just making things work a little better, I’m think it fits, ”O’Brien said.