About That Laneway House

Our laneway home construction is now a finished tiny home.

The question is fair. So let's talk about it.

We built that house.

About 700 square feet. Energy efficient. Wood from our own shop. Designed carefully, built properly, through the City's entire approval and inspection process.

It cost approximately $500,000.

That number still makes me slightly ill.

Try adding one small home in Toronto

Toronto has an extraordinary number of properties where we could add gentle density. Laneway houses. Garden suites. Duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes. It will never work on every lot. It doesn't have to. Even a fraction is a lot of housing.

Here is what happens when an ordinary property owner actually tries to build a small rental property or family home.

We were required to use an architect. About $50,000 just for the stamped plan.

Engineering, plus design and stamping. About $50,000.

Urban Forestry. Permits, tree inspections, tree protection. We wanted the maple to survive, so we used helical piles instead of pouring a concrete foundation. Soil permeability was important to us, so flooding of neighbours would be avoided.

Electrical requirements. Building permits. Inspections. Design requirements. Engineering requirements.

And $3,900 in education development charges, paid to the Toronto Catholic District School Board.

I want to sit on that one for a moment.

Education development charges fund the acquisition of school sites. Land. Not teachers, not classrooms, not a building. The City of Toronto collects the money on behalf of the Toronto Catholic District School Board, which sets the rate under its own bylaw. That is By-law No. 195, adopted November 27, 2023 and in force from December 3, 2023 to December 2, 2028.

The rate is per dwelling unit. Flat.

So our small laneway home paid the same charge as a four-bedroom house. A charge that does not scale with the size of the home falls hardest on the smallest homes, which are precisely the ones this city keeps saying it wants more of.

It also climbs on a fixed schedule. The rate was $3,293 in year one and $3,593 in year two. It is $3,893 now. It becomes $4,193 on December 3, 2026, and $4,493 the following year. Nobody has to decide any of this again. It is already written down.

The two boards are not treated the same. The City collects education development charges for the Catholic board. It does not collect them for the Toronto District School Board. So what you pay to add one small home in this ward depends on which board holds a charging bylaw, not on which school your building might one day fill.

Most of these building requirements exist for good reasons. Buildings should not fall down. Electrical systems should not start fires. Trees matter. Drainage matters. Neighbours matter. People deserve safe homes.

But every requirement has a cost. So does every additional professional, approval, permit, redesign, and months of waiting. Add the twenty percent tariffs on steel. Yikes. Now they are higher.

Then there are materials

Canada does not manufacture much of what goes into a modern home. HVAC components. Electrical equipment. Fasteners. Siding. Fixtures. Water pipe. Sewer pipe. All of it moves through international supply chains.

When tariffs raise the cost of those inputs, the building site in Toronto bears the brunt. Labour costs more as well. There is an uncomfortable circularity in that. The people we need to build Toronto also have to be able to afford to live near Toronto.

Add financing while you wait.

Add insurance.

Add the property tax treatment, which is based on what the lot could theoretically fetch rather than on anything we can access.

Add the land underneath it.

You arrive somewhere absurd. Roughly half a million dollars to create 700 square feet in a backyard that was already there.

So who lives there

People at the edges of the market who require local, furnished housing.

Parents coming to Toronto when a grandchild is born, close to family instead of paying hotel rates for weeks. Artists placed through an agency that connects artists with housing. People with large dogs who could not find anyone willing to rent to them.

The unit is also there for my own family. My adult children live with us. My parents are aging and have no path to stay in Ward 14. That is what it is held for.

None of that makes it affordable housing.

I have never claimed it does.

I know what needing affordable housing means

I lived in Regent Park because I needed social housing. I know the wait lists. I have stood in rental housing lineups and, at an extremely naive eighteen years old, decided to look at Craven Road to get into the market.

I bought a house on Craven Road for $40,000. Every dollar borrowed, at about 25 percent interest. A sixteen-foot lot. I was a stagehand on a union job, and for a moment I had stable enough employment to get a loan. Stability was not a feature of that work.

There was a door open to me then that has now closed. I could buy something rough and make it livable.

I took down walls. I learned how to solder and replumbed the entire house. Built the kitchen. Drywalled it. Put in a bathroom and a sliding patio door. I finished the basement and made it a room rental to help with costs and taxes.

Today my adult children live with us in a city where that path has almost disappeared. My aging parents may require a unit when they need help. The current waitlist for seniors housing grew from 78,879 at the end of 2021 to 104,851. It grew by a third in four and a half years. Not good.

Somewhere between those two generations, I keep wondering why we make it so hard to create different kinds of homes for different stages of a life.

That is why I think about housing all the time

Not units. Homes.

Where should housing go?

Could an aging parent live there?

Where do those people access healthcare?

What happens when someone needs help to stay independent?

Who provides it? Who pays for it?

Where are the new co-ops?

How long is the wait list?

Which agencies are involved? Where are the homes young people can actually afford?

Where are the accessible ones?

What about artists, and what about the employment land we keep converting?

And why, when someone is willing to spend their own money adding one small home to an existing property, does the process cost half a million dollars?

Systems accumulate

I do not think Provincial Code and safety regulations are the problem.

The problem is accumulation. A fee here. A permit there. Another professional. Another approval. Another study. Another month of financing. Another material increase. Another order of government. Another policy written without reference to the four policies already sitting on the same project.

Nobody designed this. It assembled itself. And nobody is accountable for the whole of it. Asking what an entire system costs is the thing I am actually good at.

What I would do about it

A councillor has five real powers. Votes and motions. City land. Fees and process. Public reporting. Pressure on the other governments.

The last one is the weakest, and it is the one candidates reach for when they want to sound like they are doing something. So I am not going to tell you I will lobby Queen's Park about a school board charge.

Here is what is actually in reach.

Rebuild the program the City already had.

Toronto used to run the Affordable Laneway Suites Program. A forgivable loan of up to $50,000, written down over fifteen years, conditional on the owner charging no more than average market rent.

So the legal question is settled. Council has done this before.

Then read the next line on the City's own page. The program was discontinued for insufficient provincial funding and is not expected to return.

That is the whole problem in two sentences. The one program built to make small housing viable depended on money from another order of government. When that money disappeared, the City had no answer and quietly closed the door.

Rebuild it with City money, sized to survive an election held somewhere else.

Show up when the bylaw expires.

By-law No. 195 expires December 2, 2028. Before a new one can be passed, there has to be a background study and public consultation. That proceeding is where the rate gets decided.

The board that would run it has been under provincial supervision since June 2025. All powers that belonged to elected trustees, except denominational matters, now rest with one appointed supervisor. There is no end date.

So a homeowner adding one small home in Toronto-Danforth pays a charge set under a bylaw now administered by a person nobody in this ward voted for, collected by a City that cannot waive it, to buy school land that may never be bought in Ward 14.

On October 26, you will also be handed a ballot for school trustee. Those trustees may not be seated.

I am not going to pretend a councillor fixes that. What a councillor can do is refuse to let it stay quiet. Put the City on the record at the background study.

Publish what Toronto collects on the board's behalf, how much, and from which wards. Name the supervisor and the Minister in the report, because right now the only person in this chain whose name appears on the invoice is the homeowner.

Count it.

Toronto collects this money on the board's behalf, so the City already knows how many small units paid it, how much was collected, and from which wards.

None of that is published. It should be, quarterly.

Publish the whole bill.

One stacked fee schedule for projects of two to six units. Every charge, every study, every professional requirement, in one document, before an owner hires anyone.

Right now you find out what it costs by paying it.

So, the rent

Yes, our laneway house is expensive to rent.

That is the point.

Half a million dollars for 700 square feet in a backyard that was already serviced, on a street that already exists, behind a house that already stands. Every line of that cost is somebody's reasonable policy. Nobody adds them up.

This is the housing Toronto-Danforth actually needs. Not towers on the Danforth and nothing behind them. The missing middle. Laneway homes, garden suites, duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, small apartment buildings on our main streets. Homes an aging parent can move into, a young family can afford, and a person can grow old in without leaving the neighbourhood.

We have written the zoning to allow it. We have not made it possible to build.

So here is where I stand. Toronto should treat two- to six-unit housing as a category of its own, with its own fee structure, approval path, and published timeline. Not as a tower application with the numbers scaled down. Charges that scale with the home's size.

One document that tells an owner the whole cost before they hire anyone. And a City program to make small projects viable that does not collapse the moment another government changes its mind.

That is not a gotcha about our rental.

That is the job I am running for.