Toronto is usually looking skyward for housing solutions, but the city might find some answers right it its own backyards.

That’s the message from designer Elaine Cecconi, who practically lives in a backyard herself. Nestled in a laneway behind a couple of semi-detached houses near Dundas and Dufferin Sts., her luxurious custom home is easy to miss. But she says it could be a beacon for the future of housing in Toronto if planners considered the city’s 250 kilometres of back roads as space to accommodate some of the 100,000 new residents each year.

“It’s a gentler way of densifying the city without creating vertical buildings,” says Cecconi. “Plenty of lots in the city are about 200 feet deep, which is more than enough space.”

Colonizing Toronto’s back alleys, though, may be easier said than done. In the face of zoning restrictions, lack of infrastructure and narrow back alleys that were never designed for homes, even one-time enthusiasts have become discouraged.

A landmark 2003 study by architects Terence Van Elslander and Jeffrey Stinson found that Toronto’s laneways could house around 6,150 new homes. What’s more, they said, those homes could be built on the cheap — $100,000 each — without altering the streetscape of neighbourhoods, as they could be built on existing infrastructure.

Nowadays, Van Elslander is a lot more cynical. A stricter approval process has made building a laneway house in Toronto “an impossibility,” he says. Years can be spent seeking consent for the projects from various municipal departments. Meanwhile, getting the alleys serviced can cost “tens of thousands of dollars.” For one laneway housing development, architect Michael Tarr was required by the city to pay $152,000 for sewage and water connections.

While Van Elsander’s study championed tiny laneway houses as an unrealized source of affordable housing in Toronto, it’s often only those with the time and money to meet the technical requirements who wind up living in them. Penny Carter says she paid between $500,000 to $700,000 for her 1,800-square foot garage-turned-lane home in the Ossington Ave. area. Cecconi’s 4,000-square foot laneway house, meanwhile, is valued at $2,250,000.

The concept, it seems, has gone from bargain to boutique.

“It’s a very expensive development process,” says Van Elslander. “Many clients say to me, ‘I might as well be building a 30-storey building and all I’m trying to do is build a little house.’ The city lacks any sort of mechanism to help make it easier for people because it doesn’t want laneway housing.”

A staff report released in 2006 recommended that the city “not permit construction of housing on proposed/future laneways,” concluding that it was inconvenient for neighbours and impractical for city services, from snow removal to fire truck access.

Although planners still consider laneway houses on a case-by-case basis, they first require builders to meet a myriad of technical standards set by Toronto’s zoning by-laws and committees of adjustment. For this reason, many of the examples that exist in Toronto are passion projects built by designers and architects for their own use. Cecconi says her abode was worth the zoning headache, but most homebuyers may not have the time, cash or know-how to navigate around the city’s red tape.

“[Laneway housing] is certainly not required for us to achieve growth and intensification,” says city planner Peter Milczyn, who oversees planning and growth management. “People in established neighbourhoods may not want intensification on rear lanes because it would alter the character of their rear yards.”

Still, laneway living shows promise in other cities. Since Vancouver approved the construction of laneway homes in 2009 as part of its EcoDensity initiative, it has received more than 500 permit applications, with around 50 trickling in every month. The homes cost between $125,000 to $260,000 to build, and add invisible density to neighbourhoods.

But Milczyn argues the same won’t work in Toronto because most of its laneways were laid out in the age of the horse.

“In Vancouver, the age of their infrastructure isn’t as old as ours,” he says. “The standards they used to build laneways may be different than ours…. Many laneways [in Toronto] have no servicing, so it would be expensive to run water pipes down them.”

However, Cecconi vows to make back alley living accessible to the public with Lane Homes, a new development she’s helping to design in the Annex. Spearheaded by Lindvest Properties, the project will erect six two-storey lane homes along Loretto Lane, near Bathurst and Bloor Sts. Cecconi says it’s “the city’s opportunity to test lane homes at a mass-produced, developer level.”

Lindvest was able to sidestep the typical zoning obstacles and get quick approval via an unusual solution: linking the laneway houses to an adjacent nine-storey condo complex on a main street. Their B.streets Condos development, under construction on Bathurst St., will share its municipal services with the lane homes, from garbage disposal to sewer connections.

“Because laneway homes are embedded in a project with servicing coming from Bathurst St., we didn’t run into any hurdles,” says Councillor Adam Vaughan, who held community consultation meetings to help get the project green-lighted. Recently, he catalogued all of Ward 20’s laneways to see which could accommodate housing.

“It’s a chance to use existing infrastructure that may be dormant and have people live there.… A good creative approach like this shows us why sometimes there should be exceptions to rules the city makes.”

Lindvest vice-president Michoel Klugmann says other developers have shown interest in the project, viewing it as a potential route to getting new laneway developments rubber-stamped. “If the city was more encouraging, the development community would respond actively.”

Van Elslander admits that tying laneway homes to neighbouring properties on main streets could be a solution to servicing the sites. He points to a similar condo being built at 52 Ryerson Ave., near Queen and Bathurst Sts., which will provide common services for three adjacent laneway houses on Egerton Lane.

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But at $739,900 each, Lindvest’s lane home-condo hybrids aren’t quite what Van Elslander had in mind when championing back alley development a decade ago.