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.
Following yesterday’s post on small-scale apartments, a number of people commented on the 6m front yard setback that was shown on the city’s drawings and that I mentioned in my post. Well, it turns out that I wasn’t entirely correct about the 6m. What is proposed in the draft zoning by-law is the following:
The modelling has illustrated building setbacks that are appropriate for townhouse developments and small-scale apartment buildings on major streets in a Neighbourhoods context. Based on the review, Urban Design staff recommend that the front yard setback be implemented through use of the average of the existing neighbouring setbacks, or a minimum of 3 meters, whichever is greater. This approach maintains consistency with the existing character of the Neighbourhoods supports protection of existing mature trees.
As you might expect, the approach with these small-scale apartments is to be mindful of the existing low-rise context. But as many of you rightly pointed out when you saw the 6m, the existing context may not be appropriate or ideal for the planned context, especially if there’s retail at grade.
This is just one of the many details that we’ll need to be careful with as this initiative moves forward.
This week we speak about the problem of not enough density next to transit stations. More specifically, we spoke about Toronto’s low-rise residential neighborhoods, which are colored yellow in the city’s Official Plan. Well, as many of you know, the city is, in fact, working to “expand housing options” in these neighhorhoods through their EHON program. One component of the program covers laneway and garden suites, another covers multiplexes (up to fourplexes), and another hopes to allow 6-story apartment buildings on all major streets.
Here are the city’s major streets:
And here’s what these “small-scale apartments” might look like:
The setbacks are intended to be 6m in the front (to be consistent with existing neighborhood setbacks); 1.8m on the sides (so there’s rear access and so that these elevations only get fenestration for secondary rooms); and 7.5m in the back (which is consistent with the current mid-rise guidelines). Now, directionally, and without referring to any of the specific details, this is good. Toronto’s major streets are, in most cases, painfully underdeveloped; the existing built form feels generally entirely out of place. But the important question remains: Will developers actually build these at scale?
Bloor Street and Danforth Avenue, for example, already allow mid-rise buildings that, for the most part, are bigger than what is being proposed here as part of the EHON program. But again, they remain underdeveloped. And there’s a subway running underneath these streets! So why will it be any different on our other major streets? One key difference is that these small-scale apartments are expected to be fully as-of-right. Meaning, no rezoning process and no community meetings. This will save a lot of time and money.
Still, this is almost certainly going to require some iterative finessing to get it right. I think you’ll see developers looking to do little to no parking, no basements, no dedicated loading areas (certainly no type “G” spaces), slab-on-grade construction, and standardized and repeatable designs. And even then, this may not be enough. Rental replacement policies are yet another major barrier to consider. It’s going to have to be all about speed and efficiency, which is why it will likely also create a greater push to rethink some building code items, such as the requirement for two means of egress.
At the end of the day, I want something like this to happen. It would increase housing supply, and make Toronto far more vibrant and far more conducive to non-driving forms of mobility. It’s, no doubt, a really positive thing. But for this to become a reality, it needs to work at scale. Meaning, the development pro formas need to work at scale, and with sufficient margin that developers won’t just automatically look to other opportunities. If the development community can make money building this housing typology, they will look for every opportunity to build it. But if they can’t make money, they won’t. It’s as simple as that.
My colleague shared this project with me while we were researching water features for one of our projects. It is called the miroir d’eau (water mirror) and it’s located in Bordeaux, France.
Supposedly, it is the largest of its kind in the world, or at least that was the case when it was completed back in 2006.
As a design concept, it couldn’t be simpler. It consists of a 2cm deep layer of water that is meant to reflect its surroundings. In addition, there are small jets that periodically mist water, and so it also serves as an active splash pad in the summer months.
Sometimes, or maybe oftentimes, the best ideas are the simplest ones. And in this case, it feels like they really nailed it. The water mirror lets the surrounding architecture do the talking.
The above video is in French, but even if you don’t understand what they’re saying, it will give you some good visuals of the water mirror. It should also convince you that it has helped to create a highly successful public space.
Art and culture are powerful tools for city building. Pictured here is a laneway in downtown Detroit that is known as “The Belt.” It is called this because of its location in the city’s former garment district, but today, it has been redefined as a cultural alley. In it, and deep within unmarked basements, you’ll find venues like Deluxx Fluxx, which call themselves a nightclub art house. (You’re going to want to click through to their website and get a feel for the place.)
This alley isn’t brand new. It was conceptualized by the art gallery Library Street Collective a few years after it was founded in 2012. But I think it remains an excellent example of at least two things. One, Detroit is cool. It really has been going through a cultural renaissance. (You should also know that Detroit is the birthplace of techno.) And two, The Belt remains a perfect example of what is possible with our underutilized urban spaces.
Virtually every city has alleys exactly like this one. But too few are doing something as cool with them.
Reece Martin is a foremost public transit critic based in Toronto. His YouTube channel, RM Transit, has over 284k subscribers and some 50 millions views. If you’re interested in public transit around the world, he is a great person to follow.
He also writes a blog. And today, he published a post talking about the “5 places in Toronto that should have more density.” This, as we have talked about many times before, is essential. The way you get the most out of transit is to pair it with the right surrounding land uses. And here in Toronto, we have many instances of “not enough density next to transit.”
For instance, the first place on his list is Bloor-Dundas West:
The site already has streetcar serving on two routes, the subway, GO, and UP Express (which will be connected with the subway in the next few years — construction is underway), and lots more transit could show up in the future, from an extension of one of the streetcar routes to the Junction (with a transferway please), to the Ontario Line that will be primed for a second phase in this direction if development justifies it, to the potential for future Milton line train service. The site is arguably already the second-best served for transit in the country after Union, and could be made much better in short order.
Hang on this last sentence for a second: the second-best transit node in the country. That’s an incredible asset! Now consider the area’s land use plan (red is mixed use and yellow is low-rise neighborhood in Toronto’s Official Plan):
Other than the mixed-use triangle wedged between Dundas West and the rail corridor, the area looks pretty similar to much of Bloor Street in this city: mixed-use along the major streets and low-rise neighborhoods everywhere else.
We know why this is the case; it is about maintaining the status quo. But it is a suboptimal way in which to try and create transit-oriented communities. We need more density, and we need to start thinking radially instead of linearly. So here’s what a 500m walking radius looks like around Bloor-Dundas West and its two closest subway station neighbors:
The important thing to pay attention to in this diagram is all of the yellow that falls within each radius. This is land that ought to be zoned mixed-use, but that we have instead decided to make low-rise and single-use. If our objective is to create more walkable, sustainable, and vibrant transit-oriented communities, this is not the way.
This morning I toured 1151 Queen East (here in Toronto). It is a new 47-suite apartment building that is being developed by Hullmark and that was designed by Superkül (the same architects as Junction House). It’s not quite finished yet, but it is looking terrific. The interiors feel, to me, like Berlin meets classic Miami Beach (if you can picture whatever this means). So a big congrats to the entire team. I’m sure it will be well-loved once people start moving in this year.
At the same time, it’s hard not to see small and beautiful infill projects like this and wonder, “why do we make it so difficult to build this kind of new housing? This is a 6-storey rental building that, according to Urban Toronto, was first proposed in 2018. It then had to go through the typical rezoning process, which, in this case, seems to have taken two years. Now we’re in 2024. Uh, why?
We should be looking at this kind of infill housing and saying, “Yes! You should go ahead and build this right now. Let us help you with that.” Instead, we erect barriers, which only force developers toward ever larger projects. If you’re going to spend two years in rezoning, no matter the scale of the development, why not build 470 homes instead of 47? And this has only been exacerbated with higher interest rates, because now time costs you that much more.
I say all of this because this is an objectively great infill project. Our city would be a better place with a lot more of these.
It is fairly well documented that communicating to transit riders how long they need to wait for the next train helps them feel like they’re actually waiting less. The problem, it would seem, is the unknown.
This is akin to the pre-Uber days when you’d call for a taxi and then have no idea when it would actually show up. That used to feel like forever.
But what about if you communicate a schedule to riders and then it turns out to be a total lie? Well this is probably worse, because eventually, people will catch on to this. Also, you’ve just maximized the unknown.
Here is an interesting example of community activism. In 2021, Fabio Göttlicher — a software engineer in Chicago — started noticing that service levels on Chicago’s Transit Authority (CTA) seemed to be declining.
I wrote a program that runs 24 hours a day that keeps tracking the live trains as they come into stations.
And then he discovered this:
What I found, when I first started in December 2021, was that the CTA was running only about 55 to 60 percent of the trains their schedule said they should be running. I started publishing the data in local Facebook groups for transit enthusiasts, on Reddit and other social media. That’s how Commuters Take Action started.
It’s hard to think of a more frustrating scenario for transit riders.
In the physical world, great buildings are linked to their architect while those who had poured the concrete or installed the windows are soon forgotten. Berkshire has become a great company. Though I have long been in charge of the construction crew; Charlie [Munger] should forever be credited with being the architect.
This is an excerpt from his recent letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, which, this year, he opens up with an obituary to his late partner, Charlie Munger.
If you take his description (same letter) of what Berkshire does, and replace businesses with properties, this is what you get:
Our goal at Berkshire is simple: We want to own either all or a portion of [properties] that enjoy good economics that are fundamental and enduring. Within capitalism, some [properties] will flourish for a very long time while others will prove to be sinkholes. It’s harder than you would think to predict which will be the winners and losers.
I have written about Bright Moments before. They are a digital art company exploring the intersection of NFTs and real-world experiences. It started as a popup gallery in Venice Beach California, where artists could show new work and where collectors could buy IRL. They then created their own pixel art collection called CryptoVenetians. It included 1,000 different people-centered NFTs by artist QianQian. Since then, they have gone on to host events and create new CryptoCitizen collections in New York, Berlin, London, Mexico City, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires. And this week they were in Paris.
Their end goal is to create a complete collection of 10,000 NFTs, most of which are tied to a specific city. (The only one that isn’t is their CryptoGalacticans collection.) What’s obviously great about this approach is that it’s a way to promote digital art and onboard new users into the crypto space. They are literally going around the world, throwing parties, and saying “look how cool and fun this whole crypto thing is.” At the same time, it also links the digital and the physical, which I believe is fundamental. We’re social beings and web3 will never change that.
The other interesting thing about Bright Moments is that they are structured as a decentralized autonomous organization (or DOA). That’s like a company, except that governance is distributed to its tokenholders and it’s all managed on a blockchain. But it still operates as a company and it can raise money like one too. In 2021, Union Square Ventures invested 500 ETH into the DOA through a blockchain transaction that would naturally be public if you cared to look it up. Based on today’s spot price of about CA$4k per ETH, that was a CA$2 million investment.
In the case of Bright Moments, its tokenholders are the people who own a CryptoCitizen. These are the people who get to vote on how the organization is run. They can also earn money if they do things like host a community dinner or organize a local meetup, with the idea being that, as an organization, you want to encourage this sort of bottom-up participation and innovation. I find it fascinating to watch this new governance and entity structure emerge, and it will only continue to evolve.
I’ve been following Bright Moments more or less since they dropped the CryptoVenetians. I thought about jumping in then, but I figured I would wait to see if there would be a CryptoTorontonian. That would obviously be my number one choice. But once they announced their final list of cities, and Toronto wasn’t on it, I grumpily decided I would instead wait for a CryptoParisian. And since this week was Paris, it was time.
I now hold CryptoParisian #112:
I like that it has the Pont Neuf and that the human is wearing sunglasses.
This means that I now have a small ownership stake in the Bright Moments DOA. So presumably I’ll soon have a say in important and serious matters! It also means that when they launch their final CryptoCitizen collection in Venice, Italy this spring (nice work going full circle here), there is a chance I might get airdropped a CryptoVenetian. It’s a random process, so whatever. I also know that it’s easy to look at this pixelated Parisian and think, “WTF, Brandon.” But something new is building here. And I’m sure that all of the folks who were in Paris this week can testify to that.
I am not a transportation engineer, but sometimes I like to, you know, pretend. And lately, I’ve been thinking about how to better design the Toronto intersection of Dundas, Dupont, Annette, and Old Weston (which I touched on briefly over here). It’s a weird 5-point intersection that is often cited as one of the most confusing in the city. And so there’s a lot that could be done.
Here’s what it looks like today:
The centerpiece is the Dundas-Dupont Traffic Island, which is actually a city-owned park. It’s not the most generous green space, but the real problem with this park is that it’s very much an island. There’s really only one pedestrian access point — its north end. For the most part, you need to be unlawful in your movements on and off it.
This is a fairly common occurrence in cities. The island is, almost certainly, a remnant space. It was never explicitly designed; it is just what was left over after they figured out how to connect all of these streets and negotiate the intersection’s grade changes.
The other signal, that these are remnant spaces, is the paint markings on the street. Their main job is to tell cars where to go. But they’re also unproductive spaces. Nobody is intended to actually occupy them. So what they really say is, “we have too much road and we didn’t know what to do; so we just painted them.”
If you watch the below video of Claire Weisz (founder of WXY Studio) explaining the work that she has done in New York City, you’ll see remarkable similarities to what I’m talking about here. This sort of thing happens all the time, especially at messy intersections where multiple streets converge. The objective was to connect the streets and the rest became a byproduct.
But when properly designed, these spaces actually become better for everyone: drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians. And this Toronto intersection strikes me as a perfect candidate. So if my local Councillor Gord Perks is reading this post, I would ask him to do what he can within the city to encourage this kind of positive change.
And not just here, but wherever there is a street that sucks.
