From spacing Toronto:
In recent months, I’ve found myself wondering whether Toronto City Council’s much-touted laneway suites policy, circa 2018, was nothing more than an elaborate bait-and-switch operation.
This is a provocative statement, I realize, but there seems to be mounting evidence that the entire project will be rendered almost moot by the City’s determination to take a letter-of-the-code approach to approvals. In particular, fire safety objections from City officials have percolated to the surface as a growing number of homeowners apply to develop these units, only to be rejected because the City’s interpretation of the Ontario Building Code has all the flexibility of an old wooden hockey stick.
Moreover, all this pushback feels kind of switch-y because when the planning department finally got its institutional head around the scandalous notion of adding laneway suites, it sunily foregrounded metrics that suggested the vastness of this housing resource. For example, the planning presentation to council — entitled “Changing Lanes” and dated May, 2018 — noted that Toronto had 2,433 laneways extending almost 300 kilometres.
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