Council unanimously passes motion permitting secondary, or backyard suites

After a lengthy public hearing Wednesday, regional council unanimously approved a motion to allow backyard, or secondary suites to be built within properties in HRM.

Councillor Shawn Cleary said this will help alleviate the housing crunch in the region. He says more than 30 people signed up to share their views, and with everyone getting about five minutes to speak, it took them about four hours to hear them all out.

He recounts what some of the concerns he heard yesterday were.

“So there were people who were concerned with potentially changing the character of neighbourhoods, both demographically and in terms of physical infrastructure, traffic, privacy, density in general,” says Cleary. “A lot of those concerns, while legitimate, are actually addressed either through this, or through existing policies or programs that we have.”

He explains that if you have a noisy neighbour, we already have a noise by law.

“If you have traffic, and we don't expect a lot of these suites to be popping up anytime soon, so if you do get increased traffic we have a traffic calming policy, so there's all kinds of issues that we deal with,” says Cleary. “There are setbacks, there are height limits, and certain neighbourhoods actually can't, Westmount in particular, you can't even build past sixty feet from the street line.”

Cleary says yesterday they also ran into some technical issues with people dropping in and out of the Zoom meeting – which he says slowed things down as councillors are not able to vote at the end if they aren't present for the whole thing.

He says the provincial government has to give approval to the land use by law change before anyone can build legal secondary suites, which he estimates will take about a month.

Cleary says by that point we will be running out of time in the construction season so he doesn't expect we will see many of those secondary suites before next year.