A hotbed of cold feet. That’s the comment by the late Roy McMurtry, former attorney general and chief justice of Ontario, about the federal government. But it applies to all bureaucracies, public and private, which take forever to make a decision and resist making change when it is needed.

It certainly applies to Toronto. If you apply for a change of zoning and official plan to build a large residential structure, city hall takes 500 to 600 days to make a decision given departmental consultations, public hearings, committee meetings and so forth. The cost of delay is thought to be $2,500 to $3,000 a month per unit for carrying costs on the land purchase, lawyers’ fees, inflationary construction costs and more. This delay can add $50,000 to the cost of a single unit. To cover delay costs, developers often apply for bigger buildings. They lose nothing by applying for more than they really want and they often get a large portion of that extra height.    

Premier Ford’s government suggested a simplistic fix to the problem: it said that if a council decision was not made in a reasonable period of time then the city would have to rebate a portion of the developer’s application fee, which is significant. To not lose this fee, the city often refused these applications, then the developer would appeal to the Ontario Land Tribunal — and a long delay would result in large lawyers’ bills. 

(The provincial government has developed an expertise in reversing its bad decisions and has agreed to rescind this rule with its new legislation Cutting Red Tape to Building More Homes.)

Apart from the time problems, this kind of process does nothing to assure local residents of what will be permitted. It’s basically a crap shoot, with the question being how high the new structure will be. We need a new approach, and with city hall beginning a process to hire a new chief planner, maybe we can have one.

A useful precedent was established 25 years ago in the King and Spadina area, using the provocative thinking of Jane Jacobs. She suggested a good approach would be to carefully plan for what could be built on a particular street so there is certainty of what new structures would be like. She suggested that for each area of the city, city hall should establish a maximum building height, a setback from the street line and from the rear lot line and make it clear that no variances would be considered. Any developer proposing a structure that met those guidelines would get a permit automatically without having to go through a rezoning process. And city hall would not permit any variances to those height limits. 

She also said city hall should not specify the uses in the building: the developer could decide how much to offer as retail, commercial, residential and office space, taking a cue from the market. These ideas were adopted for King and Spadina to considerable acclaim.

This process is known as as-of-right zoning. It means the planners actually plan in advance as to what should be permitted in an area rather than sorting it out building-by-building. Everyone would save time and money. The concept of four units on a lot is a kind of as-of-right zoning, but few homeowners are willing or financially able to do this on their own, and most developers think the scale is much too small: more comprehensive planning is needed.  

Planners and politicians generally do not like as-of-right zooming since they are no longer the gate-keepers: they are in the hot spot with cold feet.

Maybe city council will have the courage to seek a new role.