Well, it only took 11 years.

I still remember the first time I walked into Etobicoke Civic Centre and showed the lady at the counter my design for a laneway house. She didn't know what a laneway house was and she couldn't figure out where it fronted. "Wait, it's behind the main house? It has no frontage. Where's the street? Huh?" A lot has changed over the past decade, as I knew it would. All of the building permits are now in and Mackay Laneway House is under construction in Toronto's Corso Italia neighborhood.

Kilbarry Hill is overseeing the construction process. (Construction was supposed to start earlier this summer, but COVID-19 had something to say about that.) Regular updates will be posted on the Globizen blog and on the socials, with the goal of creating a kind of "how-to guide" for laneway suites. Expect detailed construction updates, a list of the individual trades that are being used, post-completion costing information, and probably a bunch more.

The first order of business is the site servicing work, all of which has to be done via the existing house. No connections off the mains because, remember, these are intended to be secondary suites, similar to basement apartments. This raises the question of how best to submeter the utilities. Thankfully, the good folks over at Lanescape were kind enough to share how they have done it.

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Last week the Ryerson City Building Institute published a terrific report on Toronto’s Great Streets. It profiles five streets in the city that have been “redesigned for greatness.” They are:

• Harbord Street (continuous bike lanes)
  

• Roncesvalles Avenue (placemaking and people)
  

• St. Clair Avenue West (dedicated streetcar lane)
  

• Queens Quay West (public waterfront promenade)
  

• Market Street (prioritized for people and patios)
  

But what exactly makes a street a great one? The report describes it in this way: “They all play a key role in making the surrounding neighborhood a great place to live, work, and visit.”

This relates closely to what the City of Toronto calls a “complete street”, which is an approach to accommodating multiple kinds of users, enhancing the local context, and determining which trade-offs to make.

And there will always be trade-offs. I am fairly certain that all of these street redesigns were contentious at the time when they were proposed. Because at the end of the day they will never be all things to everyone.

I remember the St. Clair West fight vividly because I moved to the neighborhood in 2009 and the dedicated streetcar lane didn’t fully open until 2010. From 2005 to 2017, streetcar ridership grew 23%. But drivers have remained grouchy.

I now walk Market Street every single day and I agree that it’s one of the most beautiful and functional streets in the city. But the bollards are constantly getting beat up by drivers attempting to parallel park and the retail vacancy rate has not been 0% like is suggested in the report.

Queens Quay West is also a magnificent street. It was a giant step forward in terms of the quality of the public realm in this region and I spend a lot of time there. But it’s of course not perfect. All of us have seen the reports of cars ending up in odd locations, including underground, along the waterfront.

Riding your bike there can also feel like a challenging game of Frogger with all of the pedestrians that now obliviously meander back and forth across the cycling trail. I suggest riding with a good blow horn. The report rightly mentions the lack of delineation between these users.

But cities are a living laboratory and none of these streets should now be considered static. We are fortunate to be in a position to critique levels of greatness. If anything, the map at the top of this post tells me that we need to create more greatness across the other areas of this city.

Back in 2011, blogTO ran an article calling Geary Avenue one of the ugliest streets in Toronto. And it’s certainly up there. It’s an industrial street with a mixture of different building types (lots of autoshops), giant power lines running along the south side of it, and a railway disconnecting it from the city to the south.

But as somebody who used to live around the corner from this street, I’ve had my eye on it for a number of years. Despite the fact that it was never very pretty, it always felt like an area with lots of potential. And sometimes it’s the areas that seem most unlikely to gentrify, that end up doing exactly that.

Probably the first signs of hipness came with the opening of places like Kitch Bar on Geary Avenue and Actinolite on Ossington Avenue. More recently though, it was announced that Dark Horse Espresso will be opening on Geary and that Bellwoods Brewery will be opening their second location on Dupont Street in this incredible building:

So whether you call it Dovercourt Park, Dovercourt Village, or some other name, I think it’s only a matter of time before Ossington cool moves north and the area in and around Dovercourt Road and Dupont Street becomes one of the hippest areas in the city. Get ready.

Full disclosure: I own a house very close to this neighborhood.

Images: Actinolite and Bellwoods Brewery