Toronto City Hall's Committee of Adjustment could use some adjustment
City Hall Watcher #294: Historian Hana Suckstorff explores the mysteries of the Committee of Adjustment. What's it for? What does it adjust? And do the things that it adjusts actually need adjusting?
Hey there! I’m still on vacation, and so today, I’m delighted to turn over the bulk of this newsletter to historian Hana Suckstorff.
Toronto’s Committees of Adjustment (CoA) don’t get much coverage, but its four panels wield a whole lot of power. After watching the Toronto & East York CoA recently reject a development in Seaton Village, Hana offered to shine some much-needed light on this part of our municipal government. What is a Committee of Adjustment anyway? What are they adjusting? Do the things they’re adjusting actually, you know, need to be adjusted?
Mysteries are revealed —with research that takes us way back to the 1950s.
And then, because I can’t help myself, I’ve created charts. How often do the COA panels reject proposals? How many rejections have there been since 2000? I’ve crunched a few numbers.
— Matt Elliott
graphicmatt@gmail.com / CityHallWatcher.com
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Committee of Adjustment 101: A long (and costly) adjustment period for Toronto housing
By Hana Suckstorff
On April 17, 2024, the Toronto East York Committee of Adjustment shocked the world — or at least the small corner of the internet that follows Toronto housing policy — by refusing Green Street Flats’ application for minor variances to build an infill property at 91 Barton, in Toronto’s Seaton Village. The three-storey, eight-unit residential building with two laneway suites would have added homes to a neighbourhood close to two subway stations that lost more than 40% of its population between 1951 and 2021.1
The case attracted outsized attention, receiving more than 50 letters in opposition and over 100 letters in support.2 Even BlogTO chimed in, opining that the outcome exemplified “why nobody can afford a home” in Toronto.
Green Street has since engaged the neighbourhood and approached the Committee with a revised application that included smaller units and one unit of designated affordable housing. This too was rejected by the Committee on August 14.
As a resident of Seaton Village, I was disappointed to see 91 Barton refused. (Full disclosure: I wrote a letter in support of the project.) But the fiasco also had me wondering: what is the Committee of Adjustment? What does it do, and where did it come from? What purposes was it established to serve, and has it actually served them? And, as claimed in the BlogTO headline, does it actually make homes less affordable?
What follows is a short primer that answers those questions. You could call it “Committee of Adjustment 101.” As this primer aims to show, the Committee’s work reflects back on the city’s larger land use policies. Projects like 91 Barton show those policies to not only be in need of mere reform, but of a total re-imagining.
What the Committee of Adjustment is
To paraphrase the City’s somewhat long-winded definition: The Committee of Adjustment is a body, similar to a court, that issues decisions about certain kinds of property developments under the Ontario Planning Act, specifically Sections 45 and 53.
It operates independently of the City, though City Council does appoint its 35 members. Those members serve on one of four panels: Scarborough, Toronto East York, Etobicoke York, and North York. Qualifications to serve include interest and understanding of city-building and the city’s neighbourhoods; knowledge of related disciplines such as law, architecture, and planning; and decision-making and mediation skills.3
The Committee’s decision-making work has to do with the City’s zoning by-law, which regulates land use and many aspects of the city’s built form. The Committee itself came into being alongside Toronto’s first comprehensive zoning by-law, in 1952, as a way to allow for relief from that by-law without requiring a formal amendment.4 A look at those regulations, then, gives a sense of the context in which the Committee operates.
Toronto’s zoning by-law is and has been detailed and rigid. It insists on uniformity even in a city of variety within and between neighbourhoods. For instance, properties zoned R1, like 91 Barton, are subject to restrictions on height, distance from the street, floor space, and much more. This level of prescriptiveness is a feature, not a bug, of the system. In a 1978 manual for municipalities on setting up committees of adjustment, provincial authorities asserted that “[a] prominent characteristic of zoning is that it is precise. Its standards are exact. No leeway is permitted.”5 One certainly gets that sense from Toronto’s zoning by-laws.
Given how restrictive the zoning by-law is, any owner wishing to do something different with their property, or simply in possession of a unique lot, must seek relief from the by-law, such as through a minor variance.6 Applying for variances entails not only administrative work but a potentially lengthy period of neighbourhood consultation and public hearings. In the case of 91 Barton, the developer initially sought minor variances for, among other things, height (requested at 12.6m, above the 11m cap), the location of external stairs, and setback from the centre of the adjoining laneway (2.2m instead of 2.5m).
The four tests
Under the Planning Act, the Committee is instructed to consider four criteria when deciding whether or not to grant minor variances. Those criteria, or “tests” as they’re sometimes known, consider whether the requested variances: 1) are minor in nature; 2) are desirable and appropriate for the land; 3) maintain the general intent and purpose of the zoning by-law; and 4) maintain the general intent and purpose of the municipal official plan.
These four tests introduce new layers of subjectivity. They don’t define “minor” or “desirable and appropriate” so much as task the Committee with doing so on a case-by-case basis. In case law, as well as historical documents about the Committee held at the Toronto Reference Library, flexibility and discretion are the name of the game.
There are a few guiding principles, which I’ll do my best as a non-lawyer to distill. Regarding the definition of “minor,” several legal cases in the 1990s and early 2000s held that Committees should consider, among other factors, the overall impact, particularly the “adverse impact,” of the requested variances on adjacent areas and uses (aka neighbours).7
“Desirability” should also be assessed relative to adjacent areas from the perspective of the public interest.8
As for ascertaining the intent of by-laws and official plans, a 1986 report by the Economic and Development Planning Committee of East York acknowledged that “the intent of a by-law restriction is not always explicit to the public.” “[T]he Committee itself,” the report continued, “must on occasion seek assistance from staff in the determination of whether the intent of the by-law will be maintained.”9
In other words, while the variance process seeks input from neighbours, the technical questions at hand are not always straightforward, even to the Committee itself.
Why it matters
On the surface, all this may seem fairly banal. But the practical application of these principles has real consequences for a city in the throes of a housing shortage, as 91 Barton illustrates.
Take, for instance, the idea of “adverse impact” on neighbours. Toronto’s official plan typically defines this to include changes such as increased shadows and noise.10 It does not consider, however, unsustainably high rents and housing prices caused by a shortage of housing to be an “adverse impact.” Moreover, who is the “public” whose interest the Committee considers when deciding if the variance is desirable? Is it primarily the immediate neighbours, who sometimes object to instances of even gentle intensification such as 91 Barton? Is it the city as a whole? Does it include the people who would like to live in the new homes, should they be built?
The City itself seems to recognize something that needs fixing with the Committee of Adjustment. It commissioned a review of the Committee from consultancy KPMG, submitted in January 2023, that recommended various changes to improve public transparency and promote consistency across the four area panels.
I can think of some other possible changes. Among the other qualifications to serve on the Committee, personal experience with housing precarity might be considered. City Council might also intentionally appoint a balance of renters and homeowners to ensure these two roughly equal-sized groups are represented.
But the problem, and the question more fundamentally, has to do with the larger land use apparatus of which the Committee is a part. What is the purpose of regulating land use so minutely that a multiplex 1.6m taller than its neighbours within walking distance of two subway stations is determined to be beyond the pale? What are we trying to achieve here? Do we want a city where residents can make creative use of land and space, a city of variation and uniqueness in the built environment, a city where it is actually possible to build homes in the places where people want to live? Or do we seek primarily, as the current system does, to “protect” neighbourhoods like Seaton Village from even minor change — as if change were a moral hazard rather than a basic fact of life in a functional, thriving city?
Oh, and to BlogTO’s claim about the cost of housing? Green Street Flats, the developers of 91 Barton, have appealed to the Toronto Local Appeal Body (TLAB) with their original application. If TLAB sides with Green Street, the final building will cost at least $50,000 more than it would have without delays at the Committee stage or if the development had been allowed as-of-right.11 That extra $50,000 will be passed on to the eventual residents. The designated affordable unit from the revised application is also gone.
After four months of appeals, all we’ve accomplished is raising the price of these homes even more.
Whenever Toronto’s new chief planner starts, I hope they’ll begin with the big questions: what kind of city we want to build, and what — and whom — city planning is really for.
Hana Suckstorff, PhD, is an historian, musical theatre nerd, and earnest, aspiring urbanist who wants to see Toronto be all it can be. You can find her on Twitter/X at @hanasuckstorff.
Thanks to Hana for the tremendous work on this article! If you’ve got a pitch for a City Hall Watcher contribution, get in touch. And if you’d like to support more independent journalism like this, consider becoming a subscriber. Subscriptions are just $6 a month plus HST. It’s a bargain and a deal. — Matt Elliott
Charted: 24 years of adjustments at Toronto’s Committee of Adjustment
To complement Hana’s work, I decided it might be fun to pull 24 years of Committee of Adjustment hearing data to find out how often the four panels have refused applications for variances. In the end, it was not really fun. But it was interesting.
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