The shed and pergola added to the back of Blair Scorgie's home in Toronto's Danforth area. The rear of the 15-foot lot backs onto a laneway. When he applied for a building permit, however, he learned that while garages are allowed to abut the property line, sheds need to be set back by a foot, which proved to be an issue on a narrow lot where the building code also regulates the width of the parking pad.Blair Scorgie/Blair Scorgie
On paper, the project looks like precisely the kind of housing Toronto city officials and councillors say they want more of. Eight fairly spacious two- and three-bedroom rental apartments on three floors, plus two more laneway suites, shoehorned onto an infill site within easy walking distance of a pair of subway stops, schools, shops, health care facilities, et cetera.
In short, a veritable hub in the wheel that is the 15-minute city.
But this venture, proposed by Green Street Flats for a slim Barton Avenue property next to a Seaton Village laneway, ran headlong into a wall of complaints at the Committee of Adjustment, which turned down the requested minor variances in April.
Green Street, which builds and manages missing middle apartments, and its consultant, Batory Planning and Management, decided to try again, convening what amounted to a let’s-make-a-deal zoom session with about two dozen locals. Among other concessions, the builder offered to make two units affordable, use frosted glass on one wall to ensure privacy, and edit out a pair of rooftop terraces to mollify neighbours fretting about “overlook.”
Despite those compromises, alongside Toronto council’s recent votes calling for much more of precisely this kind of housing, the planning department declined to endorse Green Street’s new version, subtly signalling the Committee of Adjustment to reject the proposal for a second time.
Even more ominously, a manager in the Transportation Services division who also had to sign off on the application decided to draw a line in the bureaucratic sand. The building, according to a July 3, 2024, memo to the Committee of Adjustment, encroached fully 22 centimetres – about 8.6 inches – further into the laneway than the City’s right-of-way standards specify. What’s more, the plans didn’t include bike racks. Unless those problems were resolved, the official opined, Transportation Services “refuses” the application.
This second, still unsuccessful journey through the city hall’s revolving door has cost Green Street about $50,000, and will further delay an already delayed project; the firm has launched an appeal with the Toronto Local Appeal Body. “It really shouldn’t be this hard to build rental housing,” says Graig Uens, Batory’s director of planning.
Such episodes, which are not at all rare, underscore the width of the chasm between the policies adopted by city council and the gritty business of actually pushing projects through an approvals process that is both excessively rule-bound and frustratingly opaque, even to seasoned planning professionals.
What’s more, such episodes have fed directly into a larger national political narrative – one that has become a favourite talking point for Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, who has repeatedly pledged to block hundreds of millions of dollars in federal infrastructure funding to cities that fail to streamline their approvals processes.
While developer gripes about red tape and costly fees are nothing new, the recent policy shift toward more missing middle and purpose-built rental has highlighted the many ways in which the current approvals system – and an entrenched culture of no within the city’s planning divisions – could inadvertently undermine the desired shift from concentrated clumps of high-rises to more modest scale intensification across a much larger geography.
The source of the complexity is, well, complex and isn’t easily reformed, even after legislative changes approved by Queen’s Park, such as waiving the lengthy site plan approvals process for projects with fewer than ten units.
Some of the tangle is historical: much of older Toronto was built before zoning bylaws existed, and so huge swaths of the city don’t conform to the rules, meaning that most attempts to alter older homes require a trip to the committee of adjustment.
Other problems are more recent and self-inflicted. The City of Toronto Act, passed in 2008 by Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals, gave council far more authority to regulate planning within its own borders. Council has since updated its own zoning codes, with new bylaws in some cases contradicting the older ones. (When old and new conflict, the more stringent rule applies.)
The practical result, which has accumulated over the past 15 years, is that planning officials have gained greater authority to compel developers, homeowners and contractors to provide far more information with their applications – typically in the form of technical studies commissioned from consultants – than any other Ontario municipalities require.
According to the City’s website, anyone who needs an official plan amendment (OPA) or a change to a zoning bylaw (ZBL) for their project is “encouraged” to schedule a preapplication consultation, which involves a fee, the production of a detailed site plan and a meeting with officials from seven city divisions and possibly external agencies (e.g., Toronto Hydro, TTC).
Much smaller projects, which only require minor variances approved by committees of adjustment, have to jump through a third set of hoops. Still others – such as Green Street’s Seaton Village application – fall into a kind of regulatory no man’s land – too big for the minor variance process, but not big enough to require an OPA or a zoning bylaw amendment. (In the Green Street case, the site is about two blocks from larger and older walk-up apartment buildings.)
If an applicant wants to proceed, the next step is formally submitting an application, a completed version of which requires up to 45 technical studies and plans – everything from vibration and shadow assessments to the overall rationale behind the proposal.
Some even require builders to basically collect data that’s already in the city’s hands and repackage it to estimate, for example, the potential incremental impact of a project on the demand for local community services, such as schools – a task that would seem to be the purview of city planners. (Despite those assessments, the city’s boards of education routinely erect signs on development sites warning buyers that there is no capacity in local schools.)
A city spokesperson said the planning department doesn’t monitor the number of studies and plans its requests from applicants as a way of managing the paperwork burden on applicants, but adds that officials have been reviewing and updating its application checklist in the past three years.
While large builders with deep pockets employ teams of planners, lawyers and engineers to carry out such evaluations, smaller firms have to hire consultants, who charge thousands or tens of thousands for each one.
The city’s planning department won’t begin scrutinizing the application until all those studies have been submitted. In some cases, planning officials may commission so-called “peer reviews” of the applicants’ own studies, and then require them to cover those costs as well. The planning department does monitor the number of peer reviews it asks for, a spokesperson says.
Yet all this work only gets a builder to the starting line. If anything, the internal machinations are even more tangled, according to several industry sources.
Because aspects of each application must be vetted by seven city divisions and more external agencies, the timeline for getting a response is hazy, at best. City officials also have a certain amount of discretion, and may insist that a builder undertake a particular study as an unofficial condition of getting a green light. This informal bartering economy within the approvals process leaves little in the way of a paper trail, but is quite commonplace.
Then there’s the intramural skirmishing among officials from the various divisions that are asked to weigh in. One planning adviser describes an application for a larger project in which officials from urban forestry, urban design and transportation services couldn’t agree on the public realm treatment for the base of a high-rise that had received zoning approval over a year earlier. The departments wouldn’t talk to one another, the adviser explained, adding that their client had to negotiate through their impasse.
Some of the procedural roadblocks are just weird. A few examples:
- A builder looking to erect a mid-rise apartment on a former strip mall site in Scarborough discovered that the property had four so-called “daylight easements,” put in place by the former Township of Scarborough in the mid-1950s, when the area was being built out.
The easements, which are legal instruments that can survive changes in ownership, must be formally extracted or accounted for in the redevelopment. “You will need to have your ‘traffic study’ or ‘sightline study’ show that the proposed building will not cause blind spots or sightline hazards for turning traffic,” says the developer, Jonathan Diamond.
- A firm looking to get into the missing middle market with a 10-unit apartment project on St. Clair West, near Runnymede, was told to commission studies assessing sound and air quality because the property is situated within 300 metres of a rail corridor.
The provincial Planning Act imposes a range of conditions on projects near rail corridors, including setbacks and crash walls. In this case, however, the site is literally in the middle of a residential area that was developed in the 1990s.
Indeed, tens of thousands of Torontonians have lived for generations in neighbourhoods located within 300 metres of the city’s rail corridors. The builder was told that completing the air quality and noise study would assist in securing a thumb’s up from the City when or if their project goes to the Committee of Adjustment.
- Blair Scorgie, a planning consultant, wanted to add a shed and a pergola to the rear of his 15-foot wide lot in the Pocket, which backs onto a laneway. When he applied for a building permit, however, he learned that while garages are allowed to abut the property line, sheds need to be set back by a foot, which proved to be an issue on a narrow lot where the building code also regulates the width of the parking pad.
As a workaround, the owner had to construct the shed to garage standards, with the result that it now resembles a very tall and very sturdy outhouse (the roof even has hurricane clips). “I managed to convince the building department to classify it as a garage, and I got my building permit without having to go through a minor variance process,” he says.
- A downtown developer, Lifetime, applied to build a mid-rise condo on the south side of Wellington Street, a few metres west of the new Well project at Front Street and Spadina Avenue, which includes several high-rise apartments facing south and a stepped back 14-storey condo facing north. That condo, a Tridel project, has a rooftop terrace.
Lifetime proposed 17 storeys, also with a rooftop terrace that would be fitted out with a trellis. But city staff questioned the trellis and asked Lifetime to conduct a shadow study to see how it would impact the surrounding buildings. Lifetime has since revised down the height to 14 storeys, and it appears, from descriptions on various online condo marketing sites, that the rooftop terrace is no long part of the project, which is still in the presales stage.
Meanwhile, the developers behind that 10-unit Green Street project in Seaton Village is considering their next move, with deferring the application as one of the options now under consideration.