Not in your front yard
What may seem heavy-handed at first makes sense when you look at it more closely
Around city hall debates, we often encounter NIMBYism — some group of homeowners encounters a proposal for a new rail bridge or a homeless shelter or a townhouse development and shouts “not in my backyard.”
But the agenda for this month’s city council meeting brings us something a little different: a motion by Councillor Shelley Carroll, seconded by deputy mayor Denzil Minnan-Wong, that you could say is a “Not in your front yard” resolution, even if NIYFY makes sort of an awkward acronym.
The proposal council is to consider would put a citywide moratorium on front-yard parking pads, extending a ban that’s already in place in the central former-city-of-Toronto district.
Carroll points out that as a matter of land-use policy, front-yard parking pads — where people pave the area that would usually be their front lawn and use it as a storage space for a car — are already forbidden everywhere, but as it stands the city accepts applications to make exceptions. For the past few years, the downtown area has refused all of those applications as a matter of course, and now Carroll says it’s time to make that policy a citywide one.
I like this issue because it’s one of those things — like so many involved in municipal politics — that seems straightforward at first, but is surprisingly complex when you look closely.
At a glance, you might think the key consideration here is what private property owners have the right to do with their own property. Some will want to maintain a lawn manicured like a golf green, some will want to plant a prairie garden full of tall prickly pear cacti and coneflowers, some will want to pour out the blacktop to make room for their car collection. We may not love our neighbours’ choices — some people think tall grasses look raggedy or that cars on the lawn look redneck — but who are we to say they shouldn’t be able to make them? Live and let live, right?
You could almost start to think this is a case of the city government unjustly meddling in homeowners’ personal choices.
Except those personal choices carry much broader consequences, and not just in how they make a neighbourhood look. There are a bunch of reasons the personal convenience of front-yard parking pads for those who have them impose an unfair burden on everyone else.
First of all, when a parking pad is allowed legally, it involves more than paving the space on private property. It also involves cutting the curb to install a driveway ramp over the sidewalk to allow access to the parking space. Which has the effect of privatizing a public resource: in places in the city where street parking is allowed, everyone in the community has access to any of the spaces along the curb. When the curb is cut, a public parking space disappears, and only one household has access to the resulting spot. What was publicly available — a parking spot — is now reserved for one private party.
Obviously, this is a more pressing issue in the older parts of the city, where parking is more scarce (and often regulated by permit). Which may explain why a ban on new parking pads has been more easily accepted downtown.
But the community interest goes well beyond that. There are environmental concerns about paving areas previously unpaved. They make the city hotter because pavement absorbs heat more than vegetation does, which means both a harsher environment for surrounding trees and plants and, generally, more money and energy spent on air conditioning.
Dramatically more immediate is the effect it has on our water quality and on our sewer system. A lawn (or a prairie, or even an untended patch of weedy dirt) will absorb rainwater and melted snow into the ground. Pavement, as a rule, will not, which means that water runs onto the road and into public storm sewers and, through them, into the lake.
When the curb is cut, a public parking space disappears, and only one household has access
Along the way, the water absorbs all kinds of pollutants: fertilizer and pesticides leaked out from lawns, grease and petroleum products on the road, bacteria, and so on. This all goes, untreated, into the lake, which is the source of our drinking water.
But on the way to the lake, stormwater can also overwhelm the sewer system. In older parts of the city, when the storm sewer system gets overloaded it actually causes our sanitary sewer system to overflow, which means untreated sewage — the stuff we flush down the toilet — flows into the lake.
Overloaded storm sewers also cause basement flooding across the city, which has been a real problem in Toronto during recent big storms, so much so that city council has implemented and gradually expanded a subsidy program to help homeowners try to flood-proof their cellars — a program the city is slated to ramp up (in a different proposal also on this month’s agenda). The threat of basement flooding is the stated rationale for Carroll and Minnan-Wong’s motion. But it isn’t the only one.
So even though at first the ban seems heavy-handed, when you look at all the reasons to prevent front-yard parking, this proposal seems not just reasonable but long overdue. Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire