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.
Today, I’m excited to share that I’ll be attending the second annual Elevate event this December as an industry ambassador. This means I get to ride alongside industry celebrities like Norm Li. (He better be DJ’ing.)
Put on by Zonda, in partnership with Livabl and ARCHITECT Magazine, the event is focused exclusively on “the art of high-rise luxury living.” Everything from the overall state of the housing market to how to sell branded residences.
I wasn’t able to attend last year, but I heard from a number of industry friends that it was very well done, which is why I agreed to participate this year. That now means I have a discount code you can all use if you’d like to attend — BRANDONVIP30.
For those of you who like art and culture things, the event also happens to fall right after Art Basel. This was done on purpose, and so now you have at least two good reasons to be in Miami Beach in December.
Here is a short film by Nils Clauss and Neil Dowling, which recently premiered at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. (If you can’t see the embedded video above, click here.) The film is named after this year’s Seoul Biennale (which is going on right now until the end of October) and focuses on five crossroads of city life that were put forward by French architect Dominique Perrault: above/below, heritage/modern, craft/digital, natural/artificial, and safe/risk.
To illustrate these urban crossroads, the filmmakers visit New York, Seoul, Mumbai, Paris, and Nairobi. But instead of interviewing so-called “experts”, these crossroads are examined from the perspective of people just living through them. The documentary is very well done. And having just come back from Paris, I can say that I think they chose the right city to tackle the heritage/modern crossroad.
To close things out, I would like to share one screenshot from the film. Here you can see an ingenious little urban table that slips over a street bollard. It’s just perfect. There is so much that can be done to better activate our streets and public spaces.
Somehow — even after I sarcastically put out the above tweet — I ended up on a BISNOW panel next week about the impact of COVID-19 on Toronto’s residential real estate market.
When I was asked if I would do it, I replied with: “Does this mean I will need to put on pants?” That was interpreted as a, “yes, I will join the panel.” And so here we are.
It’s on Wednesday, May 13 at 2:30pm. Steve Keyzer of Gin & Sonic fame (Colliers International) and Kevin Stark (Trinity Development Group) are also speaking on the panel. To register, click here. I’ll do my best to be as controversial as possible.
The Junction House team is excited to announce that construction will start this fall and that our ground breaking ceremony will be held at 11AM on Saturday, October, 19th. Mark your calendars.
It will take place at our Sales Gallery — 2720 Dundas St W. This will be one of the last opportunities to see the award-winning Junction House Sales Gallery before it is demolished in preparation for construction.
There will be photo opportunities for everyone in attendance, and so we encourage you to bring your phones/cameras. You’re welcome to extend this invitation to family and friends, but kindly RSVP by sending an email to info@junctionhouse.ca.
It has been a while since I wrote about laneway housing, so here’s a panel that I’m going to be speaking on this Thursday alongside Gregg Lintern, Mary-Margaret McMahon (former Toronto City Councillor), and Craig Race. It is being organized by Lanescape.
As most of you know, I’ve been a vocal supporter of laneway housing in Toronto. So I am, of course, thrilled that it has now become a reality. But I must confess that I am less enthusiastic about the broader “missing middle” solution that everyone in the city is enamored with right now.
The problem is that our cost structures make it exceedingly difficult to develop this scale of housing. I have friends who are trying and they can’t make the math work. Maybe this isn’t the case in all cities, but it’s certainly a challenge here.
If you’d like a free ticket to this Thursday’s panel, use the promo code: SLATE.
Today was a historic day for Toronto, for Canada, and for the game of basketball in this country. The Toronto Raptors are world champions for the first time since their founding in 1995. Soak it in. Here is a photo that I took of the parade coming through the Financial District at around 2:30pm:
Some of the estimates going around are that 1 to 2 million people attended today’s championship parade. But 2 million seems like a lot, even though today was frenetic (see above photo, again). I mean, that’s 1/3 of the population of the Greater Toronto Area.
The fact that some of the “official” estimates also have a 1 million person spread tells me that, as of right now, we actually have no idea how many people were at today’s parade.
So that got me thinking: How do people count crowds? And are we using drones to do it, yet? Subway and rail ridership for the day — which surely spiked — will give us some indication. But definitely not the full picture.
It turns out that the typical approach to counting crowds is known as Jacobs’ Method. It was invented in the 1960s by a professor at UC, Berkeley, named Herbert Jacobs. He came up with the method while trying to count the number of students protesting the Vietnam War.
The concept is simple: It’s area x density. And permutations of his method usually use this same principle. What you do is take the area filled with people, break it up into a smaller grid, and then come up with a population density estimate for each square.
He had some rules of thumb for that. A light crowd was about 1 person per 10 square feet. And a dense crowd (such as a mosh pit or an NBA championship parade in Toronto) was about 1 person per 2.5 square feet.
Using this method and aerial photos of today’s parade, I would imagine that we could eventually get to a more precise estimate than 1 to 2 million people. But surely somebody has figured out how to program a drone (or other UAV) and do this even more accurately.
Crowd data is valuable information, particularly for political rallies and protests (I would imagine). If you know of a company doing this, please leave it in the comment section below. And if it doesn’t yet exist, well then, now you have a new business idea.
Mark Garner (Downtown Yonge BIA), Jon Simo (Neon Demon Studio), Rebecca Stubbs (Downtown Yonge BIA), Brandon Donnelly (Slate Asset Management), Rick Sole (Globizen Developments)
What a weekend.
Almost 4,000 people came through the Junction House sales office for our neon popup gallery. At one point throughout the day on Saturday, there was an over 1 hour wait to get in. The team had to implement a viewing time limit in order to keep the line moving.
The event surpassed all of our expectations in terms of visitors and buzz. Many of the local businesses in the area also experienced a pop in foot traffic as a result.
The Downtown Yonge BIA and Neon Demon Studio (as well as many others) did an incredible job coordinating and curating the exhibit. And we are thrilled to have played a small role in bringing it to life.
What is clear to me after this weekend is that people really love neon (and, of course, Instagramming said neon) and that there’s a market here in Toronto for a permanent museum. It’s going to happen.
For those of you who missed the exhibit, there’s no shortage of photos online. Check out #JunctionHouse and #NeonMuseumTO to get started. A big thank you to the entire team for making this happen.
For more information on our Junction House condominium project, click here.
I met Mark Garner, who is the COO and Executive Director of the Downtown Yonge BIA, about five years ago. We met because of our shared passion around Toronto’s laneways. At the time, you weren’t allowed to do what we now call laneway suites. Housing was not to be built on our rear streets. But thanks to champions like the Yonge BIA, Lanescape, the Laneway Project, a number of local Councillors, and many others, a lot has changed over the last five years.
As luck would have it, Mark and I reconnected at the beginning of this year because of another shared interest: neon. The Downtown Yonge BIA has been working for over five years to establish a permanent home for the neon signs and lights that are slowly (or perhaps quickly) disappearing from Toronto’s streets. The goal is to found Neon Museum Toronto. And I am so impressed by their dedication to this cause. You should see what they have collected so far.
Given the obvious connection to Junction House, we decided we were overdue for another fun project. So today the team is excited to announce that — in collaboration with both the Downtown Yonge BIA and Neon Demon Studio — the Junction House Sales Gallery (at 2720 Dundas Street West) will be hosting a Neon Popup Gallery from April 12 to 14. blogTO has already covered the event, here.
It is open to the public. And entry is free. But it is coming to you for one weekend only. So get your camera ready and come by between 11AM – 9PM.
