In the weekly How to Fix Toronto series, the Star seeks simple, affordable solutions to the problems faced by Torontonians and the city as a whole.

The problem: While Toronto needs way more housing in the coming decades, it also has tens of thousands of garages that may become redundant as private vehicle ownership becomes less necessary.

When the car was king in the Golden State, the garage was its castle.

It made a cosy fortress for four-wheels, as well as unused workout equipment, and boxes destined for Goodwill.

But as California grapples with an affordable housing crisis, garages, along with other backyard units, are emerging as one potential solution, evicting the automobile to let people take precedence.

A new 2017 statewide law now makes it much easier for secondary units, dubbed accessory dwelling units (ADUs), to be added next to single family homes, blazing a trail for sprawling cities across North America that are moving away from car-centric planning while simultaneously struggling with affordable housing.

“One of the things that excites me most is just the potential to add this invisible density,” says Anne Brown, an assistant professor at the University of Oregon.

In Toronto these units are often now known as laneway suites. But California’s sweeping law goes a few steps further than the city’s June 2018 bylaw. It allows secondary units everywhere, not just on lots that share a property line with a public laneway, and includes suburban communities across the state.

Toronto’s bylaw is just for Toronto and East York. The planning and housing committee recently recommended expanding it across the city. But this needs final approval from council and would still sharply limit how many secondary units can be built as most laneways are downtown.

More from this series:

TTC vehicles get caught in gridlock too often. Transit planners want to change that

Small apartment buildings are virtually impossible to build in much of Toronto. What are we afraid of?

The California law is no silver bullet. But it is “a silver buck shot,” says Brown with a laugh, a reference to a hunting shot where multiple pellets scatter at a target.

It’s also a way to get around NIMBY (not in my backyard) neighbours who might oppose the density a multi-story housing tower would bring. Brown sees ADUs as a “different and flexible way” to add a lot of housing units relatively quickly.

“A garage is already there. So it won’t look or feel any different at all,” she says. “I see it as very complementary to rededicating our cities to people, instead of cars.”

The cities of Portland and Bend, Oregon, and Seattle have also recently made it easier to build ADUs.

Jo Flatt, program director at Evergreen, a Canadian non-profit that works to build better cities, said laneway homes were the “low hanging fruit” in Toronto because people around them were already used to activity and traffic.

“Laneway suites are a great solution for the downtown, but when you think about the massive swaths of land that people have at their disposal in suburban areas or in other parts of the city, we need to think about how to unlock those opportunities for rental,” she says.

“We know that we’re in a position with our housing that we need to be as creative as we can be and we need to look in every kind of place we can look to find new and creative solutions to address this challenge we have right now.”

Some people would oppose more secondary suites, as they sometimes do tall housing towers. But it’s not an “either or situation,” Flatt says. Both kinds of housing are needed, and the strategy for tackling NIMBYism for both includes breaking down stigma about bringing renters into single-family-home neighbourhoods.

“There’s obviously a need for culture change and for people to be comfortable with that but I think it’s a huge opportunity for our city and we should be thinking about the different unique ways,” she says.

California’s new law overrides local regulations, mandating cities and counties issue permits on applications for second units on properties that have a single-family dwelling within 120 days, according to Greg Nickless, a housing policy analyst with the state.

Local jurisdictions can expand on development standards, like maximum height, and size. But they cannot prohibit a secondary unit or be too burdensome with regulations. Secondary units also have to be rented if not used by the owner, and can’t be independently sold.

By the numbers, California’s new law has been a “tremendous success,” Brown says. The state doesn’t track permits, but cities do.

In Los Angeles, there’s been 17 times the number of permits filed for ADUs since the change in state law in January 2017, compared to two years earlier, according to the city’s most recent housing progress report. Eighty-percent are conversions of or additions to existing buildings, such as garages, and there’s been a 42 per cent increase in permits filed from 2017-2018. Although, as Brown notes, some of this is from people who already had secondary units and are now just obtaining the proper permits.

Many cities have gone further, putting in their own legislation that makes it even easier to convert garages and build other kinds of secondary units.

Like San Jose, a sprawling Silicon Valley bedroom community of about 1.1 million tucked between big tech headquarters, where the housing crisis has gotten so bad that last year local news outlets reported on a university professor living out of her car.

The city has partnered with the Housing Trust of Silicon Valley for the Yes In My Backyard Program (a play on NIMBY), to waive city fees and offer forgivable loans of up to $20,000 for homeowners who convert a garage or build another kind of secondary housing unit and agree to restrict rents to a level that is affordable to low-to-moderate income households.

“We’re trying to see if we can do whatever’s possible to eliminate the barriers to entry and really scale the number of these ADUs,” Mayor Sam Liccardo told the Star.

“We have ambitions to do much more.”

San Jose is the 10th largest city in the U.S. but is “relatively new on the scene” compared to the better known L.A or San Francisco. Like a lot of the GTA, it “grew up” very fast in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, Liccardo says.

“That rapid period of growth was really in the age of the automobile, so it was a very suburban sprawl pattern of growth, which provided a very high quality of life for a lot of families for many years but ultimately created a chronic challenge around housing affordability and traffic.”

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

At the same time, tech companies like Google and Apple have moved in nearby. They create “multimillion-square-foot campuses” that generate enormous revenue but leave their own employees without anywhere to live. Liccardo estimates average one-bedroom rent is almost $3,000 (U.S.).

San Jose is now caught in an “awkward age” like a teenager as a city. “It’s a very painful time for us to be taking parking spaces away from folks who feel chained to the steering wheel,” says Liccardo.

“There’s no question that the densification in these single family neighbourhoods is going to have adverse impacts for those who believe they have a constitutional right to the parking space in front of their home.”

That’s a sentiment that wouldn’t be out of place in the GTA. Off-street parking makes up 15 per cent Mississauga’s land, for example, according to a parking master plan released in May.

Evergreen’s Flatt said it’s “the biggest irony” that cars have their own houses, in a city where so many people don’t.

Have your say

City staff did not have an estimate of how many garages there are in Toronto, but according to the 2016 census, across the GTA almost 40 per cent of about 2.1 million private dwellings are single-detached houses, or about 845,000. Many if not most of those come with garages.

That’s a lot of potential affordable housing.

The region’s population keeps growing — it’s projected to jump from 6.9 million in 2017 to 9.7 million by 2041, according to provincial population projections. But with already congested streets, and everyone needing to cut down the carbon emissions generated by vehicles, car ownership can’t keep pace, Flatt says.

The California solution isn’t perfect. In addition to pains around parking, there have been issues with high cost of conversion, which can be in the $150,000 to $160,000 range, says San Jose’s Liccardo. His city is trying to lower the cost.

Cherry Tung, an L.A. accountant and YouTuber, says living in a converted garage has both pros and cons.

There’s no central air and she struggles to keep out ants. But the price, at $950 a month compared to $2,000 for comparable places in Alhambra, about 10 minutes from downtown L.A, is right. And she finds she has plenty of space for herself and her cats Cotton and Candy, with a living room, kitchen, bedroom and bath.

“It’s pretty common but I’ve never lived in one before, so I was a little skeptical at first but I’ve gotten used to it,” she says.

“It’s relatively quiet, no upstairs neighbour, and the rent is cheap.”

About two hours south from Tung’s cosy garage apartment, long-time contractor John Arendsen has seen his San Diego area business Crest Homes increase “dramatically” since the changes in state law.

Garage conversions make up a huge chunk of it, as they’re the most “practical” and “least costly,” kind of secondary units by far.

He estimates at least 50 per cent of his customers are looking to rent out a secondary unit. But he also sees millennial kids back with their parents who want more space, downsizing boomers who move into the smaller unit themselves, and older adults who want live-in caregivers to stay on the property.

The 72-year-old plans to eventually build his own secondary unit in the backyard of the single-storey California ranch, where he lives with his wife.

“We will never leave our home, chances are we’ll probably age in place,” he said over the phone from 40-degree Palm Desert.

It may not be perfect, but Evergreen’s Flatt says the “California model” starts to give Toronto “things to work with.” It also helps us realize it “isn’t so scary after all.”

“It just needs to be customized to our context,” she says.

“It’s not yes or no, but how.”