Will Toronto city council sink the iceberg home?

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It seems city council thinks Toronto has some homeowners whose pockets go too deep.

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On Wednesday, council is due to consider rules for so-called iceberg homes, a type of luxury house that stretches wider or deeper underground than is typical. The proposal would bring in below-ground minimum setbacks for all low-rise residential buildings and “require new trees and protect growing space,” as an included summary puts it.

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Shannon Rancourt, with the Hoggs Hollow Tree Watch neighbourhood group, told the Toronto Sun that iceberg homes have proven to be “an affront” to her leafy pocket of the city.

In 2021, a little bungalow a few doors down from Rancourt had a date with the wrecking ball. A majestic old maple was cut down to accommodate a new home with a massive basement.

She and a neighbour, Laura Lamarche, got hold of the plans for the home.

“When we looked at these plans, I was like, what the hell is this?” Rancourt said. “It was like science fiction. It had a two-and-a-half storey basement. It had a swimming pool. It had a basketball court. I mean, it was crazy.”

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Richard Wengle is a Toronto architect who has worked on a number of iceberg homes. He said the special steps involved in creating one of these homes — say deeper digging or water management — are “no different than a large development” like a condo tower, “just done on a smaller scale, at cost to the owner.”

It’s no small cost either — they’re perhaps “investing several millions of dollars into a property” — so the builds tend to go on very pricey land, he said.

A major concern is that where basements go in, trees go out as there’s nowhere for their roots. Wengle said some bad apples may have used development “as an excuse” to cut down trees that should’ve been saved, and there are “techniques” to allow plant growth and manage water.

Ironically for a neighbourhood associated with oversized basements, Rancourt said there’s regular flooding in Hoggs Hollow, and many neighbours have more than one sump pump. Her group’s website has photos of a retaining wall that collapsed in a mudslide not long ago.

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“We have the Don River running through us, a lot of underground tributaries. Honestly, probably a hundred years ago they shouldn’t have built in a swamp,” she said.

Look out below

Wengle suggested iceberg homes have been saddled with some negative, perhaps even arbitrary environmental connotations.

“Many of the sites downtown in the Annex,” he said, “are completely paved from front to back. They’ve got garages in the backyard and they’ve got yards that are 100% paved. There’s no absorption there. That was deemed reasonable years ago.”

He said when someone builds an iceberg basement, they get more space in a way that’s “a bit more harmonious in the neighbourhood, where you couldn’t tell that it’s there.”

“There’s all kinds of tricks within a bylaw where you can actually force a house higher and it meets the intent of a bylaw. It doesn’t create necessarily a better solution,” Wengle said.

But Rancourt argued iceberg homes can be above-ground eyesores. Of one Hoggs Hollow home built into the side of a ravine, she said, “at the back, it presents as two storeys. At the front, it presents as four. It looks like an apartment building.”

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As the proposal also explicitly seeks to grow Toronto’s tree canopy, the encroaching basements are — pardon the pun — the tip of the iceberg. Changes to things like on-street parking, the committee of adjustment and permeable soil are part of the package.

The breadth of the changes was clear at January’s meeting of the planning and housing committee, which hammered out the proposal before it was sent to city council.

Councillor Paula Fletcher quizzed bureaucrats about the proportion of trees in Toronto under 30 cm in diameter. Her colleague Stephen Holyday pressed for details as to how these changes would limit Torontonians’ ability to install a swimming pool in their backyards. (Existing pools would be exempt.)

With bemused sarcasm, committee chairman Gord Perks said late into the debate: “If I could take a moment and reflect, for anyone who doesn’t understand how interrelated public policy pieces are here at city hall, the item we’re considering is ‘iceberg homes.’”

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Big digs

Rachel Chernos Lin represents Rancourt and her Hoggs Hollow neighbours as the councillor for Don Valley West. She said her concerns related to the environment go beyond trees and water, as development around her ward’s ravines will be vulnerable to mudslides.

“At least what we’ve seen in Ward 15 is that there has been an increase in applications for what we call iceberg basements, and those have implications that our planning bylaws didn’t really account for,” she said. She added that some aggressive proposals have been turned down at the Ontario Land Tribunal.

Iceberg homes are a relatively new phenomenon in Toronto, but even years before the 2020s they had become a fact of life for the rich and famous in London. A one-time frenzy in the British capital has since passed, as local lawmakers moved to restrict the construction of glitzy mega-basements.

But Wengle said iceberg homes are in a number of Toronto neighbourhoods already. The first build he was involved in dates from the turn of the millennium. If you didn’t notice them, he said, “that’s the whole point.”

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“You won’t know what’s underground,” he said. “You can’t see what’s underground.”

Chernos Lin said she doesn’t expect council to do anything drastic, but to find “a balance” to better preserve Toronto’s canopy. “You want people to be able to build nice homes,” she said.

The proposal is unusual in that this council is seeking changes that would result in less livable space being constructed in Toronto, rather than more. Still, Chernos Lin said that’s not the paradox it looks like at first glance.

“The sense I get is that the majority of these are not actually for more housing,” she said. “They’re for more house.”

jholmes@postmedia.com

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