Item - 2024.PH13.14

The Planning and Housing Committee:

1. Requested the Chief Planner and Executive Director, City Planning in consultation with the President, Toronto Parking Authority, to consider the greater need for visitor parking in suburban contexts compared to downtown as part of the ongoing review of the parking requirements in the Zoning By-law and consider the potential impact of Bill 185 in their analysis, and report back no later than the fourth quarter of 2024.

City Council on May 22 and 23, 2024, referred Motion MM18.17 to the Planning and Housing Committee for consideration.

As increasingly new developments are being approved with minimal visitor parking. This will present some foreseeable challenges, especially in the suburbs where there is neither permitted street parking, nor sufficient public parking lots available. While owners choose to purchase a unit with or without a parking spot, they cannot choose whether friends and family live near enough to transit to visit without the use of a car. Having sufficient visitor parking is very important to ensure that people with visitors have somewhere for their visitors to park. Further, we want to ensure there is sufficient visitor parking to encourage social interactions rather than presenting visitor parking challenges that could exacerbate the already serious social isolation that is happening in our city.

For example, recently a developer in Willowdale proposed a 44-storey tower with 513 units with only 7 visitor parking spots, which we negotiated up to 14 spots. I believe this will still be too low to meet the demand of the residents of the building in an inner-suburb context. The impact of limited visitor parking will spill over to the surrounding areas resulting in illegal parking or having no parking left for visitors of those who live in longstanding surrounding communities. Taxpayers will have to absorb the costs of dealing with these challenges created by the cost savings enjoyed by developers in offering limited visitor parking in new high-density developments.

This motion requests staff to look into the greater need for visitor parking in suburban wards as part of their ongoing review of the parking requirements in the Zoning By-law.