The Two Laneway Homes That Changed How I Think About Housing

What building two laneway homes taught me about housing, affordability, and why Toronto needs to do better.

Three things I learned building two laneway homes

✨ Good policy makes better housing easier to build. The right planning decisions encourage innovation, sustainability, and homes that people can actually afford to build and live in.

✨ We should measure success by what has been built and occupied. Plans, studies, and announcements matter, but they don’t house people. Outcomes do.

✨ Housing isn’t just about density. It’s about giving people options to stay in the communities they love as their lives change, whether they’re raising a family, starting a career, or planning for retirement.

This picture captures life in our tiny home.

People often ask why I spend so much time talking about housing policy and affordability.

The answer is simple. I’ve lived it.

Not through planning reports or council debates, but from the kitchen table, from Regent Park social housing and from my first tiny home on Craven Road in this Ward 14, Toronto-Danforth, where I have grown older, worked and raised a family.

The first laneway home my partner and I built was in Squamish, BC. We had two young daughters, I had just started my Executive MBA, and we were trying to build a life that balanced work, family, education, and a mortgage. Like so many people, we weren’t looking for more. We were looking for a way to make everything fit together. To afford education without risking our housing or food budget.

So we did something that disrupted our lives, and made life affordable.

The four of us moved into a 500-square-foot laneway home.

Two pre-teen girls, two dogs, and two adults.

We designed it around Passive House principles because we believed that the cheapest energy is the energy you never have to buy. Every dollar we didn’t spend on heating or cooling was a dollar that could go toward raising our daughters, paying tuition, or simply breathing a little easier at the end of the month.

That’s when I learned my first real lesson about housing policy.

The hardest part wasn’t building the house.

It was navigating rules that aren't set up for small home builders.

As we worked through the design, I kept running into regulations that made sustainable construction harder than it needed to be. Exterior insulation counted toward setbacks. Energy decisions were impossible. The better we tried to build, the more difficult the process became.

At the time, I was serving on Squamish Municipal Council.

There wasn’t even a laneway housing policy.

I remember looking at what was allowed and thinking that if we were serious about gentle density, we weren’t going to get there with homes that were too small for most families or bylaws that made energy-efficient construction more difficult than it needed to be. No policy meant a long process.

We Changed Policy.

I brought forward zoning to allow laneway homes. We increased the amount of livable space, so laneway homes could work for families, not just individuals. We amended the bylaw so exterior insulation, essential to a changing climate, no longer counted toward setback calculations. It sounds like a small technical change, but it fundamentally changed what people could build. Homes became larger, more energy efficient, less expensive to heat and cool, and better prepared for the future.

That experience changed the way I thought about planning.

Good policy doesn’t just allow something to happen.

It makes the right thing easier to build.

Years later, my partner and I built another laneway home.

This time it was here, in Toronto-Danforth.

The reasons were different, but they were just as practical.

Like many people, we looked at rising property taxes, rising construction costs, and what retirement might look like. We looked at our daughters beginning their own careers and wondered how their generation was supposed to afford housing in the city they grew up in. A laneway home wasn’t about speculation. It was about creating a little more stability while allowing us to remain in the neighbourhood we love.

I thought the process would be easier than it had been years earlier. I thought a large municipality would have better policy. Forward-thinking policy.

Instead, I found many of the same barriers.

Our permit took about a year. Zoning was changing while we were applying. By the time construction was complete, the project had cost close to half a million dollars. Tariffs pushed up the cost of building materials. Every delay mattered because homeowners don’t have investors to absorb those costs. Every additional expense comes directly out of one family’s budget.

“Ward 14 has completed more laneway homes than any other ward in Toronto,” Councillor Paula Fletcher said at a public meeting after I asked why my own laneway home had been delayed. Our project was fully permitted, inspected and close to completion when it was reopened following a complaint to her office. Instead of confirming that the home complied with the approved plans, the City sent additional inspectors and temporarily pulled our permit. We then spent three weeks gathering documentation, remeasuring framing that had already been measured and responding to new inspections for work that had already passed the City’s process. We were fully compliant; however, the complaints had been enough to stall a permitted and inspected home. The experience received media attention because it raised broader questions about consistency, predictability and political interference in Toronto’s permitting system.

Whether you’re building one laneway home or one hundred apartments, uncertainty has a cost. Every unexpected delay makes housing more expensive.

Then I looked at the City’s numbers.

I expected the number to be in the hundreds.

It was 83 homes completed.

I actually read it twice because I thought I had missed a digit.

Eighty-three homes since 2018, when the city implemented the laneway home policy.

If that’s first place, we’re leading a race we’re losing.

That statistic doesn’t tell me laneway homes are a bad idea.

It tells me we’ve made them too difficult to build.

I still believe gentle density is one of the smartest ways to add housing to an established neighbourhood. It allows communities to grow without losing what makes them special. It creates homes without replacing entire blocks. It supports local architects, engineers, suppliers, and trades. It gives homeowners another option as their lives change.

But after building two laneway homes, helping create the policy that made them possible in one community, and then living through the process again in Toronto, I’ve come to believe something even more important.

Housing policy isn’t really about housing.

It’s about whether people can adapt to different stages of life without being forced to leave the communities they love.

Right now, too many people in our Ward 14 cannot.

We celebrate plans, strategies, consultations, and announcements. But homes are what matter. Homes for young adults starting out. Homes for seniors who want to stay close to their families. Coop housing

Homes for people who have spent their lives building this community.

That’s why I care about planning. It’s why I care about policy. And it’s why I think we should measure our success by what has actually been built, occupied, and made available to the people who need it, not simply by announcements, studies, or strategies.

We need the entire housing spectrum working together. Laneway homes. Co-operatives. Purpose-built rentals. Seniors housing. We need infrastructure that grows with density instead of struggling to catch up.

That’s one of the many reasons I’m running to represent Toronto-Danforth on City Council. I’ve learned that the smallest line in a zoning bylaw can change the biggest decisions people make about their lives.

On OCTOBER 26th, Vote for CHANGE.

Vote Susan Chapelle for Ward 14 Toronto-Danforth.