It’s no secret that Vancouver is way out in front of Toronto and many other cities when it comes to laneway housing. 

Good luck trying to get a laneway house approved in Toronto. They’re only allowed under rare circumstances where there is already an existing house in the lane and/or you’re willing to fight it all the way to the province.

But in Vancouver, it’s a different story. And they’ve even taken it a step further according to this recent Globe and Mail article by Frances Bula. The city recently approved small scale laneway apartments in the West End:

“The city, which created the possibility for laneway apartments when it approved a new West End plan last year, has approved the first four buildings with 47 units in total. Three are in this particular alley between Nelson and Comox on either side of Cardero, around the corner from Cardero Bottega and Firehall No. 6. Others are in the pipeline. Many more are expected.

They’re the first of a new kind of infill that planners hope will produce 1,000 new small homes in this popular downtown neighbourhood.”

Here’s a rendering from the article to give you an idea of what these laneway apartments might look like:

Readers of this blog have argued that Toronto doesn’t need laneway housing. There’s enough room for intensification elsewhere. 

But what is clear to me is that Toronto is continuing to build less and less ground-related housing. There’s little to no room for that. And what is left of our low-rise stock is becoming increasingly unaffordable.

So if we believe that social diversity is important for building a great city – which I do – then I think it behooves us to figure out how to not only increase the supply of new housing, but also increase its diversity. This is something Andrés Duany argued for in yesterday’s video post.

The biggest hurdle is community opposition. But below is how one of the neighbours in Vancouver responded to the proposed laneway apartments. He gets it.

“Dean Malone, who lives across the street from one of Mr. Sangha’s three projects, took the trouble to go to city hall to support it because the laneway apartments provide a way of creating new housing that isn’t a tower and isn’t a luxury development.”

What this also does is allow the private sector to do more before the public sector needs to step in with affordable housing subsidies. I believe that laneway housing will help, but not solve, the affordable housing problem happening in most of our cities. 

But every little bit helps. And this is one solution that many cities are simply ignoring.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on New Urbanism, I thought I would post an interesting video discussion between Andrés Duany and Ben Stevens. 

Duany is the father of New Urbanism and Stevens runs a great blog called The Skyline Forum where he interviews notable city builders, developers, architects, planners, and so on. If you can’t see the video below, click here.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfZZ61C4YOY?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

Once again it’s a great reminder that so much of what we do and build in our cities is dictated by parking requirements. One of the ways Duany differentiates New Urbanism from “old urbanism” is that the new explicitly provides for the car. 

Regrettably, I think we do that almost everywhere nowadays. But I take his point that New Urbanism happens almost as an intervention in areas where there are few or no other mobility options besides the car.

I also thought it was interesting that Duany refers to big box stores as the new noxious-use in cities, rather than industry. He describes the parking, not the stores themselves, as creating a “flume of unwalkability.”

It always seems to come down to parking.

The term “lean” is well known in technology and startup circles. Thanks to people like Eric Ries and Steve Blank, it’s become all about starting up lean and not investing a lot of time and money before you’ve really tested your business assumptions in the marketplace.

But keeping it lean isn’t unique to just tech companies. Its origins are actually in manufacturing—mostly from Toyota’s celebrated production system. Lately though, it has been starting to make its way into cities with a new buzzword called “Lean Urbanism.”

Championed by New Urbanist Andres Duany—who is actually in the midst of writing a book on the topic—the methodology seems to be gaining awareness in cities spanning from Detroit to San Diego. Here’s an article that a friend of mine (currently working in San Diego) sent me yesterday on the topic.

At first, the article gave me the impression that the movement was all about building as-of-right. That is, build what’s allowed and stop asking for special discretionary permissions, which is often how real estate development works.

But then I started to do a bit more research.

And it turns out that Lean Urbanism is about something much deeper. It’s about empowering incremental urban growth:

"Lean Urbanism…focuses on revitalizing cities by finding ways for people to participate in community-building — specifically, by enabling everyday people to get things done."

What Lean Urbanism hopes to do is create tools and techniques that will help local communities avoid and workaround overly onerous regulations. It’s about removing the barriers to entry—whether that be a business permit or a building permit—so that more people can participate in shaping their own community.

What I like about it is that it’s building upon the renewal cycle that has traditionally always powered cities. It hopes to empower the proverbial artist that moves into a neighborhood like New York’s Soho and magically makes it cool—then spurring an onslaught of investment.

And so while the buzzword might be new, it’s a renewal cycle we’ve seen before. But, if it works, maybe not with so much frequency.