Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.
I was in New York today for meetings. Our office is next to the 9/11 memorial pools and so I walked over with a colleague during lunch. It was my first time visiting the completed memorials and it was hard not to feel things as I stood there watching the water fall into the mysterious squares in the middle of each pool. But even more impactful were the flowers that people have inserted into the various names, and the messages that they have left for their loved ones.
A portion of the street that I live on has been thinking about going pedestrian-only for a few years now. Last summer it was pedestrianized for a few weekends. And this summer, it’ll be pedestrianized until, I think, September as part of a more extensive pilot project. These sorts of moves can be controversial and so our usual approach is to ease-in with a pilot project.
When our condominium board sent out a notice about the pilot project, they framed it as a closure to vehicles. But of course, the other way to frame this is that the street is now open to pedestrians. And since I happen to walk this street every day (and oftentimes multiple times a day), I’ve been tweeting out pedestrian usage updates.
Click here to view on Twitter if the embedded tweets below aren’t showing up for you properly. Spoiler: it’s all working according to plan.
Not every street (or area) is necessarily a good candidate for a pedestrian-first focus. But there are many great examples across the city, including Kensington Market and this stretch of Market Street. So let’s start investing in mechanical bollards, as they do in Europe, and make this pilot a permanent fixture.
Balconies are a never ending debate here in Toronto (and in many other places). In some cities, like New York, they don’t seem to matter for new housing. Residents seem to be generally content without them. But here in Toronto, we have typically included them in new high-rise housing and there has been a lot of debate and criticism around both their utility (high up in buildings) and their impact to overall energy performance.
I have noticed that we are starting to see fewer balconies on new buildings, and I suspect this might increase with the way that costs are right now. And for some people and some (sub)markets, this will be just fine. But I happen to be a huge fan of outside. As my tanned dad likes to say when asked about the value of outdoor spaces in multi-family housing, “you don’t get this dark by staying inside.” He is pretty tanned.
I also believe that great outdoor spaces are an important ingredient in shaking off the deep-rooted cultural biases that this city has toward low-rise housing. Since pretty much the beginning, low-rises houses with backyards have been seen as noble, whereas apartment buildings have been viewed as disease-breeding tenements liable to morally corrupt even the best of intentions.
This is one of the reasons why we created the two-storey House Collection of suites at Junction House and why One Delisle is almost entirely formed by its outdoor spaces (both balconies and terraces). We wanted to celebrate multi-family living.
At the same time, I really like this adaptive reuse proposal by Peter Song over at BDP Quadrangle. The idea is to allow people to infill their balconies with more interior space so that our existing stock of housing can become more flexible for growing families and for when people’s lives just generally change.
It would be a great way to capture additional space within our existing stock of buildings, and I think it would be pretty interesting to see what people ultimately choose when given a binary option: more interior space or more outdoor space. Maybe it would help provide some clarity to the great balcony debate.
Technically, it is my understanding that this is entirely doable.
In the middle of writing this post I shot an email over to one of the best structural engineers in the city (James Cranford, Principal at Stephenson Engineering), and he confirmed that strength is no problem. Typically balconies are designed to accommodate more load than the suites. The thing we’d have to look at is slab deflection, since this is not usually limited on balconies.
The greater challenge is likely to be the overall coordination.
In some cities this sort of thing happens all the time on an ad hoc basis. People just do it and the end result is likely more functional, but the building elevations end up looking pretty schizophrenic. Here you’d need each condominium corporation to bless the change (since the envelope is a common element). And people would also need to agree on what design(s) should be used across the building.
It would require some work, but I think Peter’s idea is a really good one. What do you think?
Generally speaking, the cost of building a new building is always going up. There are moments in time, like during a recession, where costs might temporarily correct downward. But generally speaking, there is a cost floor that is constantly rising. This includes everything from hard costs to rising development charges.
We have spoken before about how developers typically look at their costs, and then price accordingly through “cost-plus pricing.” Put differently, it is answering the question, “what do I need to rent or sell this space for in order to cover all of these projected costs?” This can be tricky when costs are all over the place, as they are right now with double percentage point swings, but that’s a different conversation.
As long as there remains some price elasticity in the market, cost-plus pricing can work just fine. Costs are up, but I’m just going to increase pricing to absorb most of it, or in some cases all of it. However, problems occur when and where you can’t increase pricing. Maybe it’s in a marginal area where rents aren’t increasing. Or maybe interest rates are rising and overall price elasticity is tightening.
Whatever the case may be, in this scenario, it likely means that development will stop and supply will slow or possibly even shut off. We are starting to see some evidence of this happening in Toronto right now.
But if the fundamentals of the overall market remain strong, this should only be a short-term problem. Eventually the market will catch up (through higher pricing and/or some reduced costs), and then projects will return to being feasible. But if there’s a structural problem in the market, maybe development never returns without some kind of subsidies.
Thankfully, it is obvious to most that markets like Toronto have incredibly strong fundamentals. We can screw up a lot of things as long as we remain open to smart immigrants from around the world. This makes it fairly easy to have conviction around what will happen over the longer term. And this is generally how I like to make decisions, whether we’re talking about real estate or crypto (see above tweet).
But all of this doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t also be managing the short run.
What a beautiful day in Toronto. I love the heat.
I took the above photo this morning from the 7th floor of Junction House. It is a view south toward High Park. More specifically though, it is the view from the second and upper floor of what will ultimately become suite 607 (a suite that happens to be still available for sale).
Now that the building is almost topped out, I’m planning to run through a bunch of the suites with my camera and photograph all of the different views. I don’t think I’ve seen something like this done before and I think it could be a pretty cool little photography project.
Buildings take a long time. Slate started investing in the Yonge & St. Clair area in 2013 and we acquired the first parcel for One Delisle in 2015. And here we are now in 2022. When it’s all said and done, it’ll be over a decade.
So it’s important to celebrate the milestones when you can, and we did that today with the official ground breaking event for One Delisle. It takes an army of smart and dedicated minds to realize a project like this, so a huge thanks to everyone involved. You know who you are.
Today was a real milestone. But I’m looking forward to concocting some others so that we have more reasons to celebrate as we complete this very rewarding marathon.
Progress is happening slowly but surely.
Over the years we have spoken a few times about this nice little coffee shop on Shaw Street here in Toronto. It is a good looking and widely visited coffee shop that has made many guest appearances on urbanist Twitter.
The problem, though, is that it was a real battle to get it approved, thanks to the opposition of a single neighbor. That’s all it takes to hold up a new project. In this case it was a coffee shop. But it could also be thousands of new homes.
But that was then. Today if you look on the City of Toronto’s website you’ll actually see this exact coffee shop on a page that speaks to the benefits and the historic role of small-scale retail, service, and office uses.
Right now these uses are only permitted in low-rise neighborhoods on major streets and through an amendment to the Zoning By-Law (unless the nonconforming use already exists). This is a lot of unnecessary work (see above) and it has translated into a steady decline in these sorts of uses across the city.
Thankfully, the city is now looking to change this and permit these uses on an as-of-right basis. So it looks like the good fight was worth it.
For more info, head over here. And if you’d like to attend the public meeting to talk about how brilliant this is, you can do that on July 5 over at City Hall.
I just finished reading this article by Nellie Bowles about how San Francisco became a failed city. Here’s an excerpt that relates to housing supply:
Consider the story of the flower farm at 770 Woolsey Street. It slopes down 2.2 acres in the sunny southern end of the city and is filled with run-down greenhouses, the glass long shattered—a chaos of birds and wild roses. For five years, advocates fought a developer who was trying to put 63 units on that bucolic space. They wanted to sell flowers there and grow vegetables for the neighborhood—a kind of banjo-and-beehives utopian fantasy. The thing they didn’t want—at least not there, not on that pretty hill—was a big housing development. Who wants to argue against them? In San Francisco the word developer is basically a slur, close to calling someone a Republican. What kind of monster wants to bulldoze wild roses?
Decades of progressive governance in San Francisco yielded a thicket of regulations—safety reviews, environmental reviews, historical reviews, sunlight-obstruction reviews—that empower residents to essentially paralyze development. It costs only $682 to file for a discretionary review that can hold up a construction project for years, and if you’re an established club that’s been around for at least two years, it’s free. Plans for one 19-unit-development geared toward the middle class were halted this year because, among other issues raised by the neighbors, the building would have increased overall shadow coverage on Dolores Park by 0.001 percent.
These are just two examples of San Francisco’s exclusionary zoning problem, but of course, the city has other unfortunate things going as well. For the full article, click here.
I have heard a number of people describe this blog as covering all that is new. That wasn’t my explicit goal when I started writing it. My goal was simply to focus on cities and all the wonderful things that shape them. But it turns that new ideas form a big part of that and that I am very interested in new ideas. Change is what moves the world forward.
Of course, there is no shortage of new ideas. We all have brilliant ideas. Maybe you’re looking at Toronto’s public garbage bins right now and thinking to yourself, “You know what, I have some terrific ideas for how these could be greatly improved.” And chances are, your ideas are good ones. The problem, however, is that ideas are fleeting. The real challenge is bringing them to fruition before they die.
So here are a few thoughts that came to mind this morning:
These are a broad set of thoughts. But if there are any lessons to extract from these bullet points it is perhaps these: One, consider the kind of decision that needs to be made. Is it something incremental and intuitive? Is it an obviously sound infill housing project? Because if so, you want multiple paths to a quick yes. And two, consider who gets a say and who controls the decision. Because the wrong group dynamic can kill even the best new ideas.
It’s easy to forget stuff like this:
In the first decade of the 20th century there were no stop signs, warning signs, traffic lights, traffic cops, driver’s education, lane lines, street lighting, brake lights, driver’s licenses or posted speed limits. Our current method of making a left turn was not known, and drinking-and-driving was not considered a serious crime.
There was little understanding of speed. A driver training bulletin called “Sportsmanlike Driving” had to explain velocity and centrifugal force and why when drivers took corners at high speed their cars skidded or sometimes “turned turtle” (flipped over).
The transition from horses and buggies to horseless carriages, as they were first called, was one of the most impactful things to ever happen to our cities. Cars were more dangerous. Some, or perhaps many, were opposed to them initially (and didn’t see the need to move away from horse-drawn wagons). And we had to invent a myriad of traffic systems in order to try and make them remotely safe for people.
One could easily argue that we are still grappling with these same safety problems. See yesterday’s post about traffic-related fatalities. But is the answer to have never invented horseless carriages or is the answer that we need to be much better about managing and controlling them within our built environments and around humans? I would say it’s the latter.
And I would also argue that there are parallels here with how some people feel about electric scooters today. What is clear is that both urban clutter and safety are valid concerns. When electric scooters first started becoming popular, they were being left all over the place. But I think that has been largely solved through geofencing and by forcing people to take a photo of their parked scooter at the end of their rides.
Progress is also happening around safety. E-scooter company Superpedestrian, for example, has designed larger and more stable scooters, and also has something called Pedestrian Defence, which uses fancy AI to block people from riding on sidewalks, from going the wrong way on a one-way street, and from generally doing dumb and unsafe things.
Does this solve all of our problems? I don’t know. But I think innovation in the e-scooter space is a positive thing and I hope that cities like Toronto will one day become more openminded around these sorts of micro-mobility solutions. It’s not like our horseless carriages have an immaculate safety record.
