I came across this poster -- related to this development application -- over the weekend:

And I think it raises a number of important questions:

• Is 2 storeys appropriate for next to a subway station and next to an existing mid-rise building?

• Is a mid-rise building truly unprecedented in this context? See below.

• Are mid-rise homes inappropriate for "residential streets?"

• How does building height factor into flood plain concerns? Wouldn't lot coverage be more relevant?

• And when does a mid-rise become a "high-rise?"

For more context, here's the proposal and its immediate surroundings:

I fully appreciate that there's little incentive to support new development in a place where you already live -- even if you happen to live in a similarly-scaled building across the street. And I am sure that I'll receive a number of emails following this post.

But optimizing the use of land around our existing transit stations is one of the best things we can do as city builders.

Update: I have redacted the contact information on the above poster.

Altus Group recently completed a study for BILD (Building Industry and Land Development Association) that looked at the various factors that might be contributing to housing affordability and supply issues here in the Greater Toronto Area. One area that they looked at was development approval timelines, and I thought these were two interesting charts:

What this is suggesting is that approval timelines don't seem to really vary based on project size. Whether you're rezoning for 3-50 homes or 400-500 homes, it's probably going to take you a similar amount of time. This in turn creates a strong incentivize to want to develop bigger projects. Among other things, it brings down the "number of days per unit" metric shown in this second chart.

I have spoken anecdotally before about minimum project size inflation, and here's some data to support why that is happening. But it really is too bad. We should be doing more to incentivize smaller infill projects. Our cities need development at all scales.

This week the team submitted a rezoning application for the southwest corner of Yonge & St. Clair (1 St. Clair Avenue West).

More of the details can be found over here on Urban Toronto, but so far the response has been overwhelmingly positive. People seem to appreciate the architecture, the public realm improvements, as well as how we're proposing to deal with the embodied carbon in the existing building.

The application proposes to retain the existing 12-storey office building and both expand its floorplates to the west and build new residential on top. In the middle is a shared multi-storey amenity space that also performs some pretty cool structural gymnastics courtesy of Stephenson Engineering (see above rendering).

This approach created some interesting design challenges for the team. Typically when you're adding onto an existing building, you want to do something new and not try and copy/bastardize what's already there. Oftentimes this means something more contemporary.

The architecture team at Gensler Toronto tried this approach but the podium proportions didn't feel quite right when we did it. So a decision was made to instead pay homage to the existing building's architecture, and then kind of reinterpret it by playing with scale and other details.

This way the original building remains architecturally legible, but the entire podium still reads as one and its proportions feel much better. We hope you like it as much as we do.

I came across this poster -- related to this development application -- over the weekend:

And I think it raises a number of important questions:

• Is 2 storeys appropriate for next to a subway station and next to an existing mid-rise building?

• Is a mid-rise building truly unprecedented in this context? See below.

• Are mid-rise homes inappropriate for "residential streets?"

• How does building height factor into flood plain concerns? Wouldn't lot coverage be more relevant?

• And when does a mid-rise become a "high-rise?"

For more context, here's the proposal and its immediate surroundings:

I fully appreciate that there's little incentive to support new development in a place where you already live -- even if you happen to live in a similarly-scaled building across the street. And I am sure that I'll receive a number of emails following this post.

But optimizing the use of land around our existing transit stations is one of the best things we can do as city builders.

Update: I have redacted the contact information on the above poster.

Altus Group recently completed a study for BILD (Building Industry and Land Development Association) that looked at the various factors that might be contributing to housing affordability and supply issues here in the Greater Toronto Area. One area that they looked at was development approval timelines, and I thought these were two interesting charts:

What this is suggesting is that approval timelines don't seem to really vary based on project size. Whether you're rezoning for 3-50 homes or 400-500 homes, it's probably going to take you a similar amount of time. This in turn creates a strong incentivize to want to develop bigger projects. Among other things, it brings down the "number of days per unit" metric shown in this second chart.

I have spoken anecdotally before about minimum project size inflation, and here's some data to support why that is happening. But it really is too bad. We should be doing more to incentivize smaller infill projects. Our cities need development at all scales.

This week the team submitted a rezoning application for the southwest corner of Yonge & St. Clair (1 St. Clair Avenue West).

More of the details can be found over here on Urban Toronto, but so far the response has been overwhelmingly positive. People seem to appreciate the architecture, the public realm improvements, as well as how we're proposing to deal with the embodied carbon in the existing building.

The application proposes to retain the existing 12-storey office building and both expand its floorplates to the west and build new residential on top. In the middle is a shared multi-storey amenity space that also performs some pretty cool structural gymnastics courtesy of Stephenson Engineering (see above rendering).

This approach created some interesting design challenges for the team. Typically when you're adding onto an existing building, you want to do something new and not try and copy/bastardize what's already there. Oftentimes this means something more contemporary.

The architecture team at Gensler Toronto tried this approach but the podium proportions didn't feel quite right when we did it. So a decision was made to instead pay homage to the existing building's architecture, and then kind of reinterpret it by playing with scale and other details.

This way the original building remains architecturally legible, but the entire podium still reads as one and its proportions feel much better. We hope you like it as much as we do.