Fresh eyes on Toronto’s laneway houses: A clarion call too loud to ignore

It’s like Darwinism, but expedited. That’s what it’s like watching laneway houses in the city of Toronto.

First, there were pioneers Brigitte Shim and Howard Sutcliffe, an architect couple who faced fierce objections from the city when they attempted to build a laneway house in the early 1990s, eventually winning at the Ontario Municipal Board. Then came the early-adopters of the late-1990s and early-2000s, who still had to fight for their right to build. By the mid- to late-2000s, city hall began to examine its antiquated policies (and loosen them up for a while), which allowed more adventurous people to embrace the back alley.