A Dunbar man wants the city to stop handing out laneway house permits until council and neighbourhood groups review a city report monitoring their emergence in Vancouver.

Peter Selnar, a retired architect and businessman, also wants the city to hold neighbourhood meetings and public hearings to get feedback from residents where laneway houses have been built.

Selnar outlined his recommendations and concerns in an open letter to the mayor and council earlier this month.

He's worried about numerous issues ranging from scale, massing and privacy to noise, parking and impact on market values.

To date, 111 laneway house permits have been issued by the city with 45 more applications in the works that have yet to be approved or rejected.

Selnar favours restricting laneway housing to specific neighbourhoods where there is widespread support from residents, reducing the maximum height of all new laneway houses to a single storey and a maximum height of 15 feet, and restricting them to corner lots.

"What I have a tough time understanding is why city hall made such a massive commitment to change single-family zoning to multiple-family zoning. I'm surprised there isn't more opposition, but I think people really don't understand the implications," Selnar told the Courier.

No laneway house has been built on his block, but he maintains it was unethical to rezone single-family lots to allow laneway houses to be built with limited public consultation and without a pilot project. Selnar's interest in the subject was piqued at a friend's dinner party whose home sits directly behind a laneway house under construction. Guests saw it and were shocked.

"I think it's an atrociously bad idea to have created a blanket zoning without really having a proper process to go through and an evaluation of the pros and cons," Selnar said. "I suspect that there may end up being some changes [in the program], but I'm pessimistic that there's going to be anything of significance.

Brent Toderian, the city's director of planning, said council rejected the idea of a pilot project with limited laneway housing approvals following "vigorous" debate, but the program can still be adjusted based on the outcome of the city's monitoring report.

That report will assess areas such as the city's regulatory approach, the building heights property owners are selecting and the number of parking spaces provided. The report is expected to go before council Oct. 19.

Toderian said the program has worked well and staff don't plan to recommend a moratorium.

"We've seen nothing in our observations that suggest the applications should stop. Rather, what we have seen are opportunities to tweak or improve the program," he said.

He said the city has received a "handful" of complaints, but that was expected.

In many cases, it's not the adjacent neighbours complaining and in some cases it's when a whole property is being redeveloped to include a larger main house as well as a laneway house.

"We never expected there would be complete silence when it came to criticism. There were people who were against the concept and there are going to be folks who complain even about the changing of a single-family house, for example. So the presence of complaints does not suggest the failure of the program," Toderian said. "It's what we can learn from the complaints."

noconnor@vancourier.com