Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

Subscribe

The laneway love continues

The momentum around wanting mixed-use laneways in Toronto continues, or the algorithms just know what gets me going. Either way, I continue to be both impressed and surprised by the number of “hidden” laneway-based businesses that exist in this city and that keep surfacing online.

Here are some further examples:

I honestly think that someone should create a directory/mapping of these businesses. If anyone wants to do this or help do this, I own lanewaylove.com and I’ve been reserving it for projects just like this.

I also think that this has the potential to become a hallmark of Toronto urbanism. It’s already somewhat endemic, it would seem. So imagine what will happen once we actually allow and encourage these uses to their fullest extent. Yes, once.

If you know of any other laneway-based businesses, whether here in Toronto or in your city, please share them in the comment section below.

, , , , , , , ,

One response to “The laneway love continues”

  1. afinetheorem Avatar
    afinetheorem

    Boxcar Social SW of College and Bathurst. Left Field Brewery. Karma Co-op. The reason for literally all of them, though, is that they have had continuous commercial or industrial use going back 100 years or more. If you look at old Toronto property maps, you can literally see the buildings – in many cases, they were bakeries in the back of housing.

    I’m with you: not only do we need housing and commerce in the laneways (and the neighborhoods!), we also should be Melbourne-style turning our laneways into more pleasant, tree-line, pedestrian streets. They could be an amazing asset if we let them. Streets like Claremont and Bellwoods are literally just where alleys are in the rest of the grid – if you walk down them, you realize we can just double downtown density with literally zero change in the perceived built form.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *