GARDEN SUITES ARE LEGAL IN TORONTO
Garden Suites are now allowed in all Residential zones in the City of Toronto.
The beloved Ontario Land Tribunal [aka OLT – not to be confused with the lottery terminals] just released their ruling on a recent appeal to the City’s Garden Suite bylaw and accompanying Official Plan Amendment. We’ll save you the gory details, but the ruling threw out the appeal on the simple grounds that the bylaw could not be appealed in the first place by anyone other than the Minister of Housing, and to the best of our knowledge @Steve Clark was not one of the associations who appealed.
Curious if your property meets the tests to be allowed to build a beautiful, green and affordable garden suite? Check out our FREE online eligibility report below.
To also learn more about Garden Suites and Laneway Housing in Toronto, join us and sign up for one of our Webinars listed below!
If you’d like a more thorough personal review, book a $50 Zoom consultation with one of our Garden Suite experts who will answer all your questions.
On February 2nd, Toronto City Council approved bylaws to allow Garden Suites on as many as 400,000 properties in the City! Backyard Houses [aka Garden suites or Laneway suites] can be built behind detached houses, semis, and townhouses throughout all of the Residentially zoned lands in Toronto. These neighbourhoods make up 35% of Toronto’s land area, but 70% of all the Residentially zoned lands (the rest being where mid-rise and high-rise buildings are allowed) so this is huge.
LEARN MORE ON JUNE 13TH 2023 AT OUR WEBINAR ON THE INS-AND-OUTS OF GARDEN SUITES IN TORONTO
CAN’T MAKE THE WEBINAR ON JUNE 13H, 2023? DON’T WORRY, WE HAVE ANOTHER WEBINAR TAKING PLACE COMING UP IN JULY !!
Green Architect & Backyard Housing expert Daniel Hall, OAA will discuss
- Where and when you can build
- How to contain costs and keep a low carbon footprint when you build
- How to avoid the common pitfalls in building in your backyard
- How to create a proper project budget for your Garden or Laneway Suite
- Examples of what has been and can be built
To Find out more , make sure you are subscribed to our special Garden Suite newsletter list.
Can’t make it to the webinar? Check out this pre-recorded video about laneway housing in Toronto!
Garden Suites + Accessible Design = Beautiful long term living for your family
Many of our Clients are interested in finding ways to share their property with several generations of their family – be it their parents or adult children and grand-kids. Garden Suites provide another option for ageing gracefully-in-place. Here at Collaborative Architecture, we are experts in designing for accessibility and long term flexibility to give you peace of mind for your family’s future housing needs.
Our recent award winning GAGA design provides a perfect illustration of an accessible, low carbon solution to backyard housing.
BACKYARD HOUSING IN TORONTO
Garden Suite, Backyard House, ADU, Granny Flat, Coachhouse, Laneway House, Secondary Dwelling Unit…..
Call them what you will, they are all a House-behind-a-House and since the passing of the 2019 ‘More Homes, More Choice Act’, municipalities across Ontario have been stepping up and creating more options for Homeowners to build a secondary, smaller house-behind-a-house. The rules around what a ‘Garden Suite’, to use Toronto’s term, can be will vary from town to town, but they all share some common characteristics.
From an environmental perspective, Garden Suites provide an opportunity to add gentle density, optimize our use of existing investments in infrastructure, rejuvenate aging neighbourhoods, and add much needed rental housing to the market across the Province. Furthermore, they don’t rely on large developers, but instead provide many ordinary Ontarian’s with a safe means to invest in rental housing and in the future of our own communities.
Collaborative Architecture has taken a deep interest in this form of intensification with the several laneway house projects nearing completion and in design. We have also developed a series of low cost ‘ready-to-build’ green designs to suit the common requests for this kind of new housing.
SOME COMMON QUESTION’S OUR CLIENTS HAVE ABOUT GARDEN SUITES & LANEWAY HOUSING IN TORONTO:
- Can I build a garden suite/ laneway house on my lot?
- Can a garden suite/ laneway house be fully accessible?
- Can I keep my parking spot?
- What will this cost to build?
- What about Solar power and Net-Zero homes?
- What makes a garden suite/ laneway House eco-friendly?
- Can I get funding to make it affordable?
- How will it adapt as our needs change?
Get these questions and more answered at our next garden suite webinar
THE TOP 4 REASONS PEOPLE WANT LANEWAY HOUSES IN TORONTO:
And while you’re here… take a look at our READY-TO-BUILD Laneway Suite Design
We have developed three prototypical designs for Laneway Houses that can be easily adapted to most laneway sites. You can choose from one of 3 types – The “Classic Coachhouse”, The “Garden Cottage”, and The “Bungalane”.
What’s different about our research is our core focus on green design. In particular, we are showing that Net-Zero laneway houses are not only possible, but practical to build, and that even a Passive House or Living Building Challenge certified ultra green laneway house can be achieved.
Find more great information on the City’s Garden Suite website