Garden suites are dividing neighbours on this tiny Toronto street

Should there be exceptions to Toronto’s efforts to boost neighbourhood density?
On a narrow one-way street off Danforth Avenue in the east end, this question has erupted into a hyperlocal schism. Craven Road is lined on the east side with single family and townhomes, but their front doors face the garages and backyards of Parkmount Road homes to the west.
It’s a slice of Toronto where homeowners can legally apply to build garden suites, a kind of backyard cottage aimed at offering more housing in cosy neighbourhoods. But a little more than two years after the option was first enacted, city council has now suggested garden suites don’t belong here. 
Councillors asked city staff in June to outline their options for changing the permissions on Craven, after some of its residents warned more density in the backyards of the Parkmount Road homes could overwhelm their one-way street. Weeks later, city council, in a near-unanimous vote, asked Toronto’s chief planner to draft the required legal change by October to erase the garden suite allowance on Craven from Danforth Avenue to Hanson Street.
It’s a directive that has split neighbours and other invested Torontonians into two opposing camps: those who believe, as outlined by Coun. Paula Fletcher, that the “little wee tiny street” with a road width of 4.5 metres should be a rare exception to the citywide rule, and those who see any rollback of increased density options as a slippery slope in a city facing a housing crisis.
According to city staff, who led a virtual meeting Thursday night, the street’s unique history dates back to the early 1900s, when it was built as a “shacktown” with tiny homes on the eastern side. More recently, some of those homes have been replaced with larger, taller contemporary structures, though the area is still dominated by single-family houses and townhomes.
More than 100 locals and onlookers attended the meeting, with many outlining passionate appeals against the change and some participants making personal accusations of their neighbours as well as city hall. Several questioned if the change could have a ripple effect — with the removal of density options in one sliver of Toronto spurring fights from other areas about their own uniqueness.
“What risk is there of further destabilizing garden suite regulations across the city?” Blair Scorgie, a resident of Leslieville and Toronto urban planner, asked at one point. “Is that in our best interests in the context of a housing crisis?”
It’s a suggestion staff refuted. “These little pockets are quite unique, so we’re not anticipating any other actions in other areas of the city,” planning manager Sarah Henstock replied, while batting off a separate question raised by Scorgie and others about the city’s legal authority to make such a specific change.
Repeatedly, when asked why the change was proposed, planners pointed to the directive received from council. Fletcher, in her own remarks, warned against any policy allowing “monster homes” to dwarf the smaller houses on Craven.
That suggestion received some pushback from participants who flagged the height and setback limits under Toronto’s garden suite rules.
Speaking to the Star afterwards, Fletcher said her concern was homeowners getting special permission to build larger than the legal allowances.
Several speakers on Thursday also pointed to the city’s housing affordability woes.
“I come from a generation who will never be able to own a home in Toronto,” said Yvan MacKinnon, who introduced himself as a resident of Craven Road and opposed the proposed change. “Someone needs to speak up and address the frustration of having to work in a city where you can’t live.”
Fletcher, however, noted that garden suites didn’t promise lower cost housing.
As the debate raged on, one local blogger cited newspaper stories from the 1910s recounting fights over housing, development and density dividing neighbours on either side of the road. This fight wasn’t new, she argued, but the latest debate in a hundred-plus years over an unusual sliver of Toronto’s residential space. 
In the meeting’s waning minutes, Fletcher — who says she now intends to amend her request to staff, and ask them to conduct further studies in response to the impassioned debate — raised the spectre of two infamous American families locked into a bitter, decades-long feud in the 1800s, warning against the proposed policy change making enemies of neighbours.
“We don’t want a Hatfield-McCoy on Parkmount and Craven,” she said. “This really is, in my opinion, a neighbourhood matter.”
The proposal is expected to return to the Toronto and East York Community Council on Oct. 24. 
Clarification — Sept. 23, 2024
This article has been updated. Craven Rd. is not in East York, as previously stated.