ADVOCATES OF FREEDOM FOR SECONDARY SUITES HAILED COUNCIL’S MOVE.

(wink, wink!) by permitting the proliferation of flophouses or opium dens. Councillors could face a choice between appearing cruel and possibly racist, or offending an entire street’s worth of motivated voters.

So council has now solved the problem. But let us be in the name of the council, to cook up changes in the land-use bylaws that will “include secondary suites as discretionary uses” in lowdensity residential zones. The idea is that the existing bureaucratic process for development permits will take over secondary suites as well, with appeals going to the existing Subdivision and Development Appeals Board, a citizen group mostly made up of architects and lawyers.

Advocates of freedom for secondary suites hailed council’s move as a good first step. And as a professional cynic, I can see that it was a necessary step. But I am not so sure about the overall effect. If the administration creates unrealistic standards for suite applications, and rejects the vast majority of them, applicants might find themselves worse off than they were when they at least had the chance to grovel in public.

The more obvious danger is that the large volume of applications will simply overwhelm a bureaucratic channel that was never designed to discuss whether Old Lady Jones should be allowed to move in with her niece and cook her own meals. If it takes umpteen years for a suite application to work its way through an endless backlog, Calgarians are likely to resort to the solutions some are probably using already: operating illegal, unregulated secondary suites, possibly equipped with portable stoves.