This city has an urban density policy: It wants more of it, and the province's green belt legislation has ensured that a generation of developers has moved from rolling out the sprawl to putting up the Ritz (and the Shangri-La, and the Spire, etc.).
 
But there's more to density than towers. Midrise buildings, like the sort Streetcar and Freed specialize in, are good. But if you look at the really fascinating cities, places like Tokyo and Casablanca, Calcutta and Paris, and you'll see there are no empty spaces. Walk down even the smallest alleyway or path and you'll find it occupied by something: a tower, a block, a house, a shop or even all four.
 
That's where Toronto falls short. While it's an admirably dense city at its core and on many of its east-west axes—walk along Queen Street from Scarborough to Mississauga and you'll experience one of the best long city street walks in the world, maybe the very best—our current obsession with towers won't solve all our problems. (Last week I walked through CityPlace at night for the first time since it's been more or less finished; they should import a couple of thousand crickets to give voice to the atmosphere of absolute abandoned nothingness.) But you know what would make the city better? Laneway housing.
 
Our laneways can be lovely, but they could be so much more. Houses in lanes add invisible density to neighbourhoods. On the surface, neighbhourhoods don't look any different, but they contain far more people, and more people like more shops, and more restaurants, bars and patios. They also just fill up the sidewalks, which makes the city more entertaining during the day, safer at night. Tower density can be quite glam, but laneway density is fundamental, solid, useful and cute.
 
But with very few exceptions, laneway housing is illegal in Toronto. It's not that it has enemies on council; no one thinks it's an especially horrible idea. In fact, Peter Milczyn, the councillor in charge of city planning, as the chair of the planning and growth committee, told me in an email, "I do favour having language in the [official plan] that would allow for laneway housing under certain conditions."
 
Not a ringing endorsement, but it is clear, and it's coming from the right quarter.
 
The obstacles are all practical rather than ideological. "First and foremost," Milczyn wrote in the same email, "there need to be services available [and] many laneways are not readily serviceable."
 
Though chosen by Mayor Rob Ford, Milczyn is a good fit for his portfolio, as a graduate of U of T's school of architecture, and former principal of a design, development and architecture firm in town. He knows what he's talking about, and as I've had opportunity to see in previous face-to-face interviews, the subject of bad buildings, like the one he's obliged to have his community council meetings in, forces his face into expressions of real discomfort and distaste.
 
Laneway housing, though it's often considered invisible, does open up the opportunity for good, possibly great architecture. There's a famous example already, on a piece of property that made it through the cracks in the regulations. It's called Laneway House, designed by Shim and Sutcliffe to live in themselves. Architecture thrives on challenges, and restricted spaces have been especially fertile ground in the past. Solares has also designed one near Huron and Queen, on a lot that had a pre-existing allowance.
 
"There's a great opportunity here to increase density without increasing infrastructure to a great degree," says Chrstine Lolley, a principal at Solares, who says she gets requests to design laneway houses "all the time," before clients realize they're not legal. "Point loads of high density, like condo towers, do create a big strain on our existing infrastructure, and I'm thinking particularly about transit. All the condos that are going up at Queen and Dufferin, all those residents are loading onto the already overloaded streetcars."
 
Vancouver approved laneway housing in 2009, and since then, about 500 houses have been completed or are under construction. Vancouver councillor Raymond Louie was one of the votes in favour of the new option for his notoriously expensive city. "We wanted to give our citizens more opportunity to stay in their neighbourhoods with a diversity of housing options," he says. "I would say it's been successful."
 
As the rules apply in Vancouver, lanes must be at least 22 feet wide, and no property severances are allowed. All the laneway houses, which must be at least 16 feet from the main house, have to be for family members or used as rental properties. They also require the houses to be forward-oriented, towards the laneways, both to increase the cityscaping possibilities, and to protect the privacy of the existing backyard and house.
 
Though laneway houses don't have any particular enemy on our council, thy do have a friend: Kristyn Wong-Tam, a real estate professional before she became a councillor in the last election. As part of her campaign, she even wrote a policy paper on laneway housing, before realizing that Toronto municipal campaigns don't generally discuss policy.

She has not brought the issue up in council yet, she says. Doubts, raised the last time it was contemplated by council, still exist. A 2006 report requested by former councillor Adam Giambrone suggested that emergency services, waste management and snow clearance would be a problem. Small laneways, big trucks. But Wong-Tam figures those are not insurmountable obstacles.
 
"Maybe not every single fire truck has to be the same size," she says. "There are different street widths, and perhaps a big truck that services Mississauga should not be the ones that service downtown Toronto. Right now, there's a one-size-fits-all approach. And I think we have to rethink that."
 
Wouldn't that be expensive? Yes. But developed laneways would also increase the tax base. Wong-Tam sees them being home not only to residential building but retail and commercial ones as well, allowing shops and other small businesses to have addresses that are both central and affordable.

The first indication I had that this was close to her heart was the fact that she called me back from the middle of a conference in Saskatoon on a Friday evening. The second was her paean to the benefits laneway housing could bring to her city.
 
Laneway housing would result in "increased property values. It will increase rental flow," she told me. "The reclamation of laneways allows for the opportunity to beautify these laneways, creating secondary pedestrian corridors. The other benefit is this concept of eco-density and hidden density: you don't necessarily need to go up into the sky. You can push back into your own property.
 
"And it allows for intergenerational living. Instead of having granny, in-law suites in the basement, which are not physically accessible for those using mobility devices, we can foster intergenerational living through shared backyard access: parents, adult children. "The benefits are endless, and the only thing we haven't done is really push the envelope of urban design and land-use planning."
 
Wong-Tam says even if council were to move this week to embrace laneway housing, it would take "several years" for the first approval to be handed down. Yet she figures it's worth getting whipped up about. Endless benefits in return for a little envelope pushing? That sounds like it might be right up Toronto's alley.

Bert Archer is Yonge Street's Development News editor.

On this page, the first two photos are of a house on Orphanage Mews; the next two are Shaftesbury Avenue.