Garage-forward homes on city planning hit list
‘Snout’ models isolate residents, and aren’t popular with police
The popular-in-Windsor “snout house,” with its wide, protruding garage dominating the street frontage, should be discouraged and in one specific area banned, according to a new report that cites safety and design concerns.
“In the worst cases, streetscapes become like walled fortresses, with only small trails to passages providing evidence of life inside,” says the report, which says snout houses are a symptom of our addiction to the automobile, giving the garage the “prime location” in our living space.
“Garages and garage doors become dominant, cutting off the resident’s connection to the larger community, isolating residents from social and physical interaction with their neighbours.”
The report recommends the city encourage developers to agree to zoning restrictions that would limit the construction of snout houses; prohibit snout houses in the massive swaths of Sandwich South land proposed for subdivisions between Windsor Airport and the 401 and conduct a review to study banning snout house construction either city-wide or in specific areas.
The report goes to the city’s planning, heritage and economic standing committee Monday. It defines a snout house as a detached house, townhouse or semi that has a big garage sticking out in front of the rest of the house, “squeezing out front yards and making it hard to find the front door.”
They’ve become ubiquitous in new subdivisions. The planner who wrote the report, Jim Abbs, lives in one himself.
Pushing the garage forward enables you to have the most living space on a narrow lot, which is why it has been so popular, he said.
“It’s a style of home that people in this area have come to expect and come to like and enjoy, but there are some problems with them.”
The report came at the request of Coun. Chris Holt, who said he noticed that whenever a housing proposal came to the planning committee, the staff report cited objections coming from the Windsor Police Service.
The report includes an appendix from WPS director of planning Barry Horrobin. He said snout houses “better facilitate acts of crime and disorder to go unobserved,” because the front entrance is often in an alcove, blocked or obscured from view so neighbours can’t see suspicious activity. Snout houses also prevent people inside from being the “eyes on the street,” looking out for suspicious activity at the neighbours, because the view out the front is so limited.
Non-snouted housing designs, said Horrobin, “make it safer and easier for law enforcement to respond, to get a good view of what is going on, and to act accordingly.”
The planner, Abbs, said a snout house also negatively changes the character of a neighbourhood. “Driving down your street seeing nothing but double-car garages, as opposed to the front of a dwelling and the front porch, which makes your streetscape more livable,” he said.
But Realtor Andrew J. Smith, who sells a lot of single-storey town houses with protruding double garages in front, and developer Peter Valente, who builds them, say these houses “are what people want,” and cautioned city officials to not interfere in the housing market.
“When they start dictating too many things, it creates a situation where housing gets too expensive or you end up with a product no one wants,” said Valente, who said if cost wasn’t a factor, no one would build a snout house. People want them, he said, because they want the most house, including a double garage, for the least money.
More than 20 years ago, when the east Riverside area was being planned, the developer touted an old-style approach where houses would have detached garages at the back of properties. After gauging the market, the developers had to redraw their plans to what you mostly see there today — snout houses, according to Valente.
“If these snout houses were so horrible, no one would ever buy them.”
Smith said the popularity of these townhouses are a matter of demographics. Older couples are moving out of their 3,000-squarefoot homes, seeking less space and less maintenance, but still wanting space for both their cars. “Demand is extremely high, extremely high, just because of all the people who are downsizing,” he said.
But Shane Mitchell, a Windsor architectural project manager who rails against snout houses on social media, said developers may say people want snout houses, but people in Windsor haven’t been given good alternatives. New houses can be designed with garages, often at the back, that don’t dominate the street.
“They don’t know what they’re missing,” he said. “Just because people are buying a snout house doesn’t mean they want a snout house. It might just mean whey want a two-bedroom new house.”
He said when a street is filled with snout houses, it becomes a desolate, negative space with rows and rows of garages and cars, instead of neighbours interacting and children playing.
“It just redefines the street as a place not for social interaction but for automobile storage and it pushes people to the back of their houses.”
Abbs said it would be difficult to prohibit snout houses from being built in all new subdivisions because most are already approved under existing rules that allow them. But the Sandwich South lands are not yet rezoned for residential. “So it’s pretty much a clean slate for what regulations we can apply.”
Recently, the planning department has been trying to persuade developers to build homes where the garage sticks forward no more than 1.2 metres from the wall of the house, so a front porch would be even with the front of the garage. Abbs said when other cities have banned snout houses outright, it started with an outcry from residents fed up with these houses changing the look and feel of their neighbourhoods. That public demand hasn’t shown its face in Windsor, he said.
It just redefines the street as a place not for social interaction but for automobile storage.