Laneway houses a debatable topic

Re Building up the fight for laneways, Dec. 29 Laneway homes are a great idea. Why are so many of the backyard homes in Toronto owned by architects? Perhaps they like the challenge and opportunity that the unconventional setting offers. A neighbourhood of laneway homes can be wonderfully interesting — just wander through Cabbagetown and check one out. It is so delightfully wonky because it was so poor a neighbourhood that the authorities of the day could not be bothered (or were they afraid?) to enforce the bylaws.

And when, a few decades ago, the hipsters of the day found an affordable handy neighbourhood they could tidy up and spice up, they had a field day.

There is also the benefit of an even denser neighbourhood that actually enriches the locals instead of the developers who plop out-of-scale condos along the main roads. Ted Syperek, Toronto Good luck to the proponents of laneway homes. Creative housing ideas are regularly bludgeoned to death by the city of Toronto’s whack-a-mole housing strategy.

City politicians, the planning department and local NIMBY groups have spent years fighting neighbourhood “intensification.” Official Plan Amendment 320 passed by city council in Dec. 2015 ensures that even modest proposals will be deemed to be “out of character” for the neighbourhood. Combine that with 1,981 pages of restrictive bylaws (that haven’t been comprehensively updated since the 1960s) and you get 100,000 families waiting for social housing, a rental vacancy rate at a 16-year low at 1 per cent and an average detached home price of about $1,000,000.

Who could argue with those kind of results? David Matoc, Toronto