No accommodation without parking, that’s the rule

There’s worse than a home without washer and dryer hook-ups, it seems. It would be a unit without parking. In fact, it’s completely forbidden on certain streets in Laval, even when a metro station is less than a five-minute walk away.

This is what Dominic discovered with amazement. The Laval resident, who prefers to keep his name quiet, is not a real estate developer, he does not wish to venture into the construction of a 10-storey tower. But he hoped to make a small difference in the housing crisis in Quebec. Add your little drop in the real estate ocean.

He planned to add two apartments to his building, which already has four. The semi-basement, used as storage by the tenants, is large and high enough to accommodate anything other than boxes. Students or couples without a vehicle could find their happiness there and go to the Cartier metro station for the time to listen to a single song.

That’s good, there is a shortage of housing, those close to public transport are all the rage and Mayor Stéphane Boyer dreams of greener neighborhoods oriented towards public transport. Not to mention that the building that Dominic has owned for almost 10 years would be more profitable with two additional rents, despite the required investment of at least $100,000. With this project, therefore, everyone wins.

But oh surprise, his permit application was rejected by the City of Laval.

Not because the addition of housing is prohibited, but because the land is not large enough to accommodate an additional parking space. Each dwelling must imperatively have a parking lot 6.4 m wide, he was told. However, its terrain is not large enough. Currently, the tenants of the four units have access to five spaces to park their vehicle. They can also park on the street, with a sticker.

“That’s nonsense! We want to densify and promote public transport, but we need parking spaces, ”denounces Dominic, while describing exchanges with urban planners as a “infernal spiral”.

At the time, I thought that the regulations dated from the time when we still wanted the car to be king in our cities. But no. The current town planning code came into force in November 2022, after the election of Mayor Boyer and two months after the publication of his book Car-Free Neighborhoods – From Audacity to Reality.

This new version of the code is indeed aimed at reducing the parking supply, we swear. “The City of Laval is well placed to observe that an oversupply of parking spaces invariably creates lower density occupation of the territory as well as an increase in the rate of car ownership,” wrote me the head of public affairs Philippe Déry.

The old regulations required “generally 1.3 spaces” of parking per dwelling, but sometimes up to 1.5 and even 2 spaces. Now, it is lower, especially in the city center and in the Cartier metro area where the ratio has fallen to 0.5 box.

We salute the modernization effort which should in theory allow Dominic to create his accommodation a few steps from the orange line. But his building has the misfortune to be located in the rue d’Aurillac. And, in this street, “because of its existing built environment to be preserved”, it is absolutely necessary to have one box per dwelling, confirms the City. Nothing to do, therefore, the semi-basement will have to continue to be occupied by stored objects.

Stéphane Boyer did not wish to comment on this specific case, but he wrote to me that he wishes to “facilitate development around the major axes of public transport and make it more difficult in our natural environments”. He agrees that densification around the Cartier metro should be encouraged.

“We don’t want it to happen anyhow,” he added. We want the city to develop intelligently in order to make it a pleasant living environment to live in and visit. To achieve this, we cannot apply a general rule to all circumstances and that is why certain streets or [certains] sectors can exempt themselves from a vision that nevertheless applies nearby. »

Of course, cities must have rules and it must be ensured that development is done in a coherent and sensible way. It’s essential.

But we also need to be creative and open-minded to add housing on land where the infrastructure is already there. To avoid urban sprawl and take into account the fact that new constructions are becoming rare.

In Montreal, the number of housing starts recorded in June had not been so starved for 25 years^⁠1. In the midst of the housing crisis, the world is upside down. One would expect developers to rush to build homes knowing that demand is strong. But no, the borrowing costs, the price of materials and the bureaucracy discourage them from getting out the shovels.

The aborted project of Dominic’s two apartments will not make a huge difference to the supply on Île Jésus. But the story illustrates how a city can go against everything it preaches by strictly enforcing a bylaw.

This kind of scenario also occurred in Montreal, where a couple wanted to demolish a decrepit and unused garage on their land to replace it with greenery.

Instead of encouraging this more ecological use of space, the Sud-Ouest borough persisted in enforcing its by-law according to which the garage could only be replaced by… an asphalt parking lot, had reported The duty^⁠2. His only option: pay $2,500 to get around the rules.

Dominic could ask for an exemption, but the process puts him off after all the legwork already done. “I think it’s hard enough just to understand the rules, I can hardly imagine if I had to ask for a waiver. Probably you would have to pay costs with an architect for plans and pay the costs of the case study, without having a guarantee that it will work. »

Sometimes the bureaucratic heaviness is worse than the mortgage burden.