The new city zoning bylaw

Yesterday I was at the city hall trying to submit the building permit application for my house. That didn’t work out since we are missing some signatures in the files. However I did overheard another conversion that the city has already enacted on the new City of Toronto Zoning By-law 569-2013 on May 9, 2013. I must been too busy working my real job and designing the house in the past few month that I didn’t even notice that the new zoning by-law is now official.

The good thing about this new zoning by-law is that now you can finally look up all the by-law text online and look up the zoning maps on line. I will no longer have to wait for hours just to find what zoning code is assigned to my property. And I will no longer have to go to the city hall and flip through the pages in a binder to find relevant by-law text. (I searched high and low but simply can’t find Easy York zoning by-law 6752 text anywhere online.) This is great for someone who want to start their major building project to find all the relevant information. So here we are, point your browser to http://www.toronto.ca/zoning/ and you can find all the necessary zoning information right at your finger tip.

However, as I was scanning through the new zoning by-law text, I found that the new zoning by-law actually puts a serious restriction on balcony in the Residential Detached (RD) zone. See By-law 569-2013 10.20.40.50, it has indicated that in the RD zone, there can only be a maximum of one deck/balcony on each side of the house, and any deck/balcony with access from the second storey or above can only have a maximum of 4.0 square metres each. So what this means is that if you want a balcony that you can sit on, which should be probably around 4′ – 5′ deep, you can only have it 8 ‘ – 10′ wide. The balcony that I designed for my house that’s 5′ deep and 19’ wide will no longer be acceptable in Toronto. As for my house, there is a transition protocol, which allow house that has zoning review application submitted before the May 9, 2103 to be processed under the old by-law. So I should still be able to get what I wanted.