Celia Chandler need to alter her life and she wanted a place to live and write while she rented out her house. Her plan for a laneway suite faced hurdles …
Source From: Toronto Star
Celia Chandler converted her double-car garage into a 550-square-foot laneway house.
After Celia Chandler’s husband, Jack, died, her home seemed just too big. She decided to leave her partnership in a law firm in 2022 and become a writer, after her online series about her spouse’s illness and medical assistance in death won a national writing award. She thought she would convert her spacious garage into a laneway suite, where she could live and work, and rent out the main house. Then things got tricky.
The path from garage to new home was not a smooth one. Despite a city bylaw implemented in 2019, allowing laneway suites, her laneway suite is the only one completed in Toronto’s Weston neighbourhood and it is the farthest north in the city.
“There’s definitely a lot of interest in the suites, but there is a gap in how much turns into actual development,” says Molly White-Williams, sales and marketing specialist for Assembly Corp., a company that builds prefabricated laneway and garden suites. (It also constructs multi-unit prefabricated mass timber buildings for avenues, and one- to 10-storey modular housing.)
White-Williams’ company has completed two laneway houses, has three under construction, and one garden suite (suites built in yards of houses with no laneways) is in progress. Some are intended to generate rental income, some will house family members, and one is serving as an office.
The City of Toronto says it has received some 700 building permit applications for laneway suites since 2018. Of these, more than 500 building permits have been issued.
Chandler understands why uptake has been slow. Her goal had been to move into her laneway home by the end of 2022, but that didn’t happen until May, 2023. Chandler’s two-storey laneway house, named “Chandlerville,” measures 550 square feet. The main floor is 20 ft. by 20 ft., plus the utility room, and the upstairs is 11 ft. by 13 ft.
“I started by getting a design company, that, while (it was) qualified, had not done a laneway house before,” she says. “I am happy with the design, but had I had someone more familiar with laneway suite bylaws, some of problems would not have emerged as late as they did.”
The laneway house exceeded the maximum distance required for fire access. To satisfy the city’s requirements, Chandler had to install a sprinkler system and fire panel, and add a utility room to house a 450-gallon water storage tank. That bumped up the cost of the project, from $400,000 to $500,000, and it delayed construction.
Three mature trees in an adjacent park were close to her property line. Because concrete pillars had to be sunk into the ground to support the second floor of her suite, an arborist had to write a report outlining how to minimize damage to the trees. Chandler had to give the city a guarantee of $8,000 per tree, or $24,000 in all, to ensure she adhered to the arborist’s report. She had to borrow the money and pay interest on it until the city refunded her money 10 months later.
White-Williams says laneway and garden suites have separate rules. The laneway suite bylaw is more lenient, allowing units to be built right to the property line, while garden suites have more restrictive regulations. Construction logistics are more difficult with garden suites, as materials will have to be moved to the site between houses.
White-Williams says Assembly’s laneway and garden suites start around $400,000 and there are several different plans and sizes. All are designed to work with the city bylaws, and this reduces time to get permits. The prefabricated suites sit on insulated slabs (although basements can be added), and that cuts construction time to just a few months. They are built to Passive House standards, so they are high-performance buildings, says White-Williams. Assembly offers a free assessment so owners can see if their property is suitable, and to flag any potential issues.
Early proponents cited laneway suites as an affordable rental option, and the city launched the Affordable Laneway Suites Program program in 2019. It offered homeowners a loan administered using Ontario Priorities Housing Program funding. The loan could be forgiven. Homeowners could access a loan of up to $50,000 in exchange for offering rent below Toronto’s average market rate for 15 years. Just 12 homeowners participated in the program and it was suspended in 2022.
Chandler says there have to be more realistic incentives; a $50,000-grant, especially tied to affordable rent, “is not enough to move the needle.” However, she sees the suites as part of a “larger tapestry of solutions” and says if the 30 homeowners on her street with laneways built suites like hers, that would add 30 new housing units. “But it has to make economical sense to people, especially since the increase in borrowing rates. This is not for the faint of heart.”
Despite that, she has no regrets about building her laneway suite, a year after moving in. “I love my place. It’s a creative space and it’s really cute.”
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