Alleys (dwellings) as opportunities ... in Toronto

The article "Toronto's 2,400 laneways offer great potential for development," with the subhead "They may be a solution for a city seeking a denser, more efficient future," from the Toronto Star discusses the opportunities. From the article:

In fact, Toronto has a huge number of lanes where people live and work. And except for the fact that city planning policies are designed to keep residents away, the back roads of Toronto could be home to thousands.

There's no better demonstration of the vast potential of Toronto's laneways than Gilead Place, a tiny one-block thoroughfare that runs south from King St. east of Parliament St. In recent years, it has been transformed by the appearance of a row of townhouses on one side and a Jamie Kennedy cafe on the other. Only a few years ago, such a turn of events would have been inconceivable. Today, it seems natural.

Municipal officials would have us believe that lanes are unsafe because they're too narrow to accommodate fire and garbage trucks.

So let's use smaller vehicles. That's what they do in cities as diverse as Rome, Tokyo and Istanbul.

The first comment (there are 25) is quite interesting:

A recently new housing development called Cornell, in Markham, was designed with laneways and garages in back. Many home buyers chose to purchase a developer's option where they built a carriage house over the garages in these laneways.

The comment goes on to lament that this added housing, occupied, has stressed the infrastructure beyond the planned capacity. That's an issue, truly, but one that can be addressed by planning adequately for robust infrastructure from the outset.

Of course, most of the comments on the article are negative. That isn't a surprise. When I finally write a review of the book Nimby Wars, (see this article about the authors from Forbes), I will discuss this general problem of anti-change, even when change can mean improvement.