Lanescape has been working very hard over the past year to make laneway suites a reality in Toronto. With the help of our partners at evergreen, we held a series of public consultations with residents of neighbourhoods across the city to hear your thoughts on how we could work best to craft a Toronto based approach to integrating laneway suites into the fabric of much loved neighbourhoods. We also received thousands of responses to our online survey, and spoke directly to hundreds more.
Your thoughts, along with a host of technical and logistic considerations were compiled in a report that received unanimous approval at Toronto and East York Community Council in June, and was then endorsed by City Council in July.
We proposed a series of recommendations to pave the way for the development of laneway suites in Toronto, and now City Planning is in the process of developing a work plan to make laneway suites a reality by early next year.
We are now reaching out to you, the residents of Toronto, once again to say THANK YOU for your ideas and support, and to let you know that our work continues. We continue to consult with residents of the City and our professional colleagues to refine the design guidelines that we proposed in our report.
In the mean time we have been getting a lot if inquiries from residents asking – Could I build a lanaway suite on my property? Would my property meet the requirements of the design guidelines that you created? What would a laneway suite on my property look like? How big would it be? All of these are important questions and speak to the interest of many residents in designing and building a laneway suite.
Lanescape can help. As professionals and laneway housing experts, we are in the process of preparing a ‘site-assessment’ tool for residents that are interested in exploring the possibilities of a laneway suite on their property. The assessment tool will allow property owners to determine whether or not a laneway suites could in fact be built, where it would be situated on the property as well as the general size and shape that it would likely end up being. It would be based on the design guidelines that we created, that are contained in our report. It is important to know however, that City Planning will continue to consult with residents throughout the course of the year as part of their work plan, and their recommendations will be brought back to City Council at the beginning of 2018. Look out for Lanescape’s site-assessment tool in early September.
There will also be lots of opportunity to contribute to the ongoing discussion of laneway suites as part of the work that City Planning is doing in Fall 2017. We will have all of the details for you in early September, so stay tuned for more!
Originally published 17 August 2017.