Before laneway homes were permitted as-of-right in Toronto, many people couldn't imagine them being a viable housing solution, let alone a desirable housing solution. I vividly remember some critics arguing that only people of questionable moral fiber would want to live in a laneway. Toronto's laneways were only suitable for garages, cars, graffiti, and degenerates, apparently.

If you're a longtime reader of this blog you'll know that I've always felt differently. In 2014, I wrote a post calling laneway homes the new loft. And in 2021, after Mackay Laneway House was finished, I wrote that "slowly but surely, we will start to think of our lanes not as back of house, but as front of house." I went on to surmise that, one day, our laneways could even become the more desirable side of a property.

I was reminded of this prognostication earlier this week when a friend of mine, who is very active in the multiplex space, was touring me through one of his construction sites. What struck me is that he said that on every single one of his projects, the highest-grossing suite is always the laneway or garden suite. It commands the highest rent and it's what gets the most showings.

This, of course, makes sense. It's a standalone structure, whereas the other homes in a multiplex building are not. And if you have the site area to do two storeys, these suites can become relatively large — oftentimes between 1,200 and 1,400 sf. Laneways are also intimate and largely pedestrian-oriented streets, so a nice place to live.

But there's some hindsight bias in this obviousness. It wasn't that long ago that most Torontonians couldn't imagine a "house fitting behind a house." It was an unthinkable solution that would ruin the character of our low-rise neighborhoods. Now we have planning policies that not only allow them, but that are, in a way, promoting an inversion in the way our low-rise neighborhoods function.

Toronto's policies allow up to six suites on the "front" of certain properties, plus a laneway or garden suite at the "back," for a total of 7 suites. The effect is that an entirely new single-family house layer is today getting built on our laneways. An alternative way to think about this is that it's like taking an existing single-family house, pushing it to the back, and then building a small "houseplex" in the front.

As many of you know, the Ontario Building Code requires multi-residential buildings over two storeys in height above grade to have more than one means of exiting the building. This typically means two exit stairs.

If you'd like to build something more ambitious than this, you generally have two options. One, you could design your second-floor homes to be multi-storey. I'm not a building code expert, but I've seen architects like Craig Race (and others) do this without triggering the requirement for a second exit.

Your second option is to apply for what's called an "alternative solution." This is basically a way of saying to the building department, "Hey, my design deviates from the standard prescriptive method, but it still achieves an equal or greater level of safety, performance, and functionality, so you should approve it anyway."

Last year, the City of Toronto sent a message that it was going to be more open to single-egress alternative solutions. It