Nightmare on Craven Road: When Local Politics Derail Citywide Housing Goals

How one Toronto councillor’s “small exception” risks unraveling years of zoning reform.

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Oct 15, 2025

What happens when one city councillor gets Toronto council to vote in favour of “studying” garden suites on a single block, potentially undoing years of zoning reform? In this episode of The Missing Middle, Mike Moffatt and Meredith Martin dig into the Craven Road and Parkmount Avenue dispute to reveal how neighbourhood politics, NIMBYism, and endless “consultation” are slowing Toronto’s housing progress.

From the satirical truth of McSweeney’s “Every NIMBY Speech at a Public Hearing” to the real frustrations of current and future home owners, Meredith and Mike explore why the city’s gentle density goals keep stalling, and how one councillor’s compromise could set a dangerous precedent for zoning across the city.

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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, which has been lightly edited.

Meredith Martin: Hi, and welcome to The Missing Middle. I’m Meredith Martin,

Mike Moffatt: And I’m Mike Moffatt.

Meredith Martin: And today, we’re talking about how a dispute between neighbours over garden suites shows how one city councillor could undermine years of progress on zoning reforms.

Mike Moffatt: Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and leave a comment. We’d love to hear from you.

Mike Moffatt: So, Meredith, one of my favourite pieces of writing ever is from an online humour site called McSweeney’s. This piece has the title, “Every NIMBY Speech at a Public Hearing,” and we’ll link to it in the show notes. Now, the piece is a parody of the absurd and occasionally offensive things that are said at public hearings by people who don’t want their neighbourhoods to change.

Now, it’s not exactly a fair piece; it is satire after all, and there are all kinds of good reasons why people want their neighbourhood to stay as is. But I was reminded of this piece when you were telling us in our group chat about a Toronto Planning Community Consultation meeting that you recently attended about a change in zoning for one particular street.

Now, before we get into that issue and, frankly, that street, what was your overall takeaway from the event?

Meredith Martin: So, I’ve read that McSweeney’s piece, and I also find it very funny. And it’s funny because it rings true.

My overall takeaway is that human beings are messy and complicated. They generally don’t like change, and that any sentence that starts with, “I’m not a NIMBY, but…” usually ends in somebody saying something very NIMBY. So, some examples, “I’m not a NIMBY, but I’m very concerned about the urban tree canopy.” “I’m not a NIMBY, but I’m worried about parking.” “I’m not a NIMBY, but I’m worried about the sewage system and how it might handle dozens more people.”

It was an interesting meeting. There were five City of Toronto Planning staff there, and they had clearly done a lot of work examining this one block of Toronto. I have to say that I think my impression, along with what I suspect was the impression of at least half the room, was that it was a waste of time.

It was a solution looking for a problem. And the reason that I think this dispute is worthy of The Missing Middle’s attention is that it’s the kind of thing that happens across the city all the time, and it’s part of the reasons why it’s so hard to get anything built in Toronto.

Mike Moffatt: Well, now we have the high-level thoughts out of the way. I’d like to say I’m not a NIMBY, but I’d like details about the specifics here.

About a year ago or so, Cara and I had a conversation titled, “NIMBYs Will Fight Even the Gentlest of Density.” Once again, we’ll link to that in the show notes. The community meeting that you attended was about the same garden suite brouhaha in your neighbourhood.

So, this is a continuation of those events from a year ago. Now, for the people who may have missed that episode, can you remind us what this whole dispute is about?

Meredith Martin: Sure. So, there’s a street called Craven Road, and it’s quite narrow. So narrow that when you walk out their front door, what they look out onto is the back of a street called Parkmount. So, they might have a view of a parking pad or a fence with a yard in it or a garage.

The city’s undergone zoning reforms, which we’ve talked about on the show, and it’s allowed laneway houses in much of the city. The problem with laneway houses - it’s very gentle density - but there are very few streets in Toronto that actually have laneways. So, the other solution to building gentle density in the city is garden suites. Now, any property in Toronto that’s large enough can also have a garden suite.

Well, the people on Craven Road found out the people on Parkmount were potentially going to build garden suites, and I guess they didn’t like that. I don’t know if they campaigned their city councillor or if she reached out to them. The councillor is Paula Fletcher; she asked Toronto City Council to basically ban outright garden suites on this one block of Parkmount.

You can see how that might have caused a bit of a conflict between neighbours. And so, there was a meeting about it. People got very upset. That was about a year ago.

Mike Moffatt: Okay, yeah. I remember this now. There was this dispute over garden suites on a very small street. My understanding was, and I may be misremembering because of my old age, but I thought that Councillor Fletcher withdrew that proposal because the Parkmount folks were upset and rallied to make sure that this exemption didn’t happen. Am I misremembering that?

Meredith Martin: No, that’s right. But it wasn’t completely withdrawn. What Councillor Fletcher did was ask the Toronto City Council to recommend that it be studied further. So, city planners studied it, and about a year after that initial brouhaha, there was another meeting where they presented the plan. And that’s where I was the other week.

Mike Moffatt: So, what exactly did Toronto Planning come up with?

Meredith Martin: They came up with something that Councillor Fletcher called a compromise position. It’s funny, I talked to a few of the planning department people just on background, and asked them if they felt it was a compromise position, to which they refused to say it was.

The proposed amendment, which we’ll link to in the show notes, says that the Parkmount garden suites would have to be 2.6 metres from the back of their lot instead of the regular 1.5 metres for all other garden suites in the city.

What the people on Parkmount feel about that is it’s basically like a soft band, because the lots are already fairly narrow, and there’s also a setback from the main property - the original home. It means the plot of land became smaller on the lot where you could build the garden suite.

I think most of our audience understands that building is very expensive. If you have a very small piece of property, that’s a lot of money to outlay, so the smaller the piece of property, the less likely it is to actually make economic sense and get built. There are also some landscaping requirements that other garden suites don’t have.

Now, Mike, my question to you is, does this sound like a compromised position? Originally, the people on Parkmount were going to have unfettered access to garden suites, as anybody with a large enough property was. Then it was going to be banned, and now it’s like, maybe it’ll just be on a smaller piece of property. What do you think of this proposal? Does it sound like a good idea to you?

Mike Moffatt: I think it’s a bad idea. We need to build more homes, and one of the challenges to building more homes is that it’s hard to develop economies of scale here, where all the rules are different on one street versus another, and so on. So, any of these additional requirements and bespoke requirements prevent us from achieving economies of scale. They increase the cost of home building in these areas, and a lot of these projects simply won’t pencil out, so they’ll never happen.

But there’s also a process issue here, where we allow rules to be different in different areas. Those who get the more favourable rules are those who can complain the most, or those who are the most politically well-connected. And that’s a real problem.

I’ve complained about that in the city of Ottawa. For instance, the city tried to simplify zoning across the city, tried to standardize height requirements, and so on. But, in the first couple of iterations, they carved out special exemptions for the neighbourhoods with the richest and most well-connected people.

It works against any progressive idea of we’re all in this together. If the rich get to play by one set of rules, and the rest of us get to play by another. I’m continually shocked by how many so-called progressive planners are okay with that. Okay with one set of rules for rich residents, and another set of rules for everyone else. So it is a big problem. It drives inequality. But it also makes it harder and more expensive to build when we have these bespoke sets of rules all over the place.

Meredith Martin: Yes, exactly. And they say good fences make good neighbours. And this came up in an episode that we had Alex Beheshti on, and he talks about zoning reform. If everybody has the same set of rules, i.e. the city studied the zoning reform for a year, passed this garden suite bylaw, the rules are very clear. And now it’s sort of like chipping away at them one block at a time.

It just means that everything is constantly under review. Instead of saying, “Okay, these are the rules. Let’s play by the rules. The rules are clear. You want an exception? No, sorry. These are the rules.”

It’s very frustrating.

The other thing that this does is it excludes people who might want to live in the neighbourhood in the future, in these garden suites. For the most part, future residents are left out of this process. It’s just the people who already live here that get to have their say. Yes, the meetings are open to the public, but most people don’t know about them, and why would they?

One person did show up who doesn’t live in the neighbourhood. He’s a teacher in the neighbourhood, and he grew up in the neighbourhood. He actually approached Councillor Fletcher after the meeting to sort of make this point: “I would love to live in one of these garden suites.”

She said to him that she felt like the rents on these garden suites, because they’re so expensive to build, would be too expensive. I happen to be sitting right where this happened. She continued saying, “They’re going to be $4,000 a month.” Then he pushed back and tried to explain, “But somebody who’s going to pay that rent might be moving out of a lower rent place, and then I could move into that place.” And she just waved him away.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, that is so unbelievably frustrating. And I’ve had these same conversations with politicians and policymakers where they have this attitude that, “well, it doesn’t solve every problem for every person.” Therefore, we should do nothing and let the situation get worse.

There’s a Simpsons meme that, like, we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas. And I’m so reminded of that in these conversations.

Now, from an outsider’s perspective, it seems off that a councillor who represents both the Craven Road residents and the Parkmount residents would be getting involved in this in the first place because they’re having to choose a side and alienate some potential voters. So why wouldn’t she just say, “Well, look, the council’s made its decision. This is what it is.” Why do you think she’s getting involved in this in the first place?

Meredith Martin: That’s an amazing question. And I did reach out to her through her city email and didn’t get a response by the time we recorded this.

What I’ve learned through this process and from working at the Missing Middle for the past couple of years is that to build in the city is a very layered process. There are all kinds of hoops you have to jump through to get the correct permits and make sure your drawings are in line with the bylaws. There are all kinds of ways in which the system makes building difficult. Then, through that system, you also have a number of opportunities for neighbours to voice their concerns and be heard. I feel like the whole ethos of Toronto City Planning has been with mass consultation.

City councillors have outsourced their decision-making and leadership to a community. Maybe that might have seemed like a good idea, potentially, in the ‘60s when we had a lot of land and there was a lot of building going on. But now, in 2025, with a housing crisis, the pendulum has gone way too far in the other direction.

It’s just a way in which people can be NIMBYs and complain and slow the process down. The Garden Suite reforms took effect in 2022, and only 143 have been built as of July this year. This is a city of 3 million people in a housing crisis.

The planners who are involved are highly skilled and spent so much of their time on this that they could have been doing something productive for the city, like getting rid of impediments to building instead of adding new ones. It’s completely mind-blowing.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, it really is. It’s completely frustrating that despite the housing crisis that politicians and policymakers seem to continue to do things that delay, slow the process down and so on. So I share your frustration, and I wonder on this particular issue, where do you see us going from here?

Meredith Martin: Well, there’s a very concrete thing that’s going to happen, which is in one week from the day this episode airs, there is a meeting with Toronto and East York councils where this amendment will be presented to the public.

People will be allowed to voice their concerns again. People can speak out in favour of the amendment if they want to. Then Toronto and East York Council will vote on it. Then it will go to the Toronto City Council. See what I mean about layers of process.

We’ll have details about this meeting in the show notes. I think it would be amazing if as many people as possible showed up to advocate for the future residents of the city who may want to live in these garden suites and for property rights in general.

We’ve designed a system where way too many people have a say in their neighbour’s business. It’s completely unbalanced. It’s giving incumbent residents too much power to keep out newer residents, and it’s broken our ability to build.

Thank you so much for watching and listening today, and to our amazing technical producer, Sean Foreman.

Mike Moffatt: And if you have any thoughts or questions about garden suites or the humour of McSweeney’s, including their famous piece, Journal of a New Cobra Recruit, please send us an email to [email protected]

Meredith Martin: I’ll see you next time. Go Jays!