This afternoon, the team, including the Town of Lincoln, hosted a community open house for Project Bench. This is our upcoming development project in the Niagara Benchlands.
This was a follow-up to the pre-application community meeting that we held last November, and it is a precursor to the statutory public meeting that will be held in two weeks on July 8th at 6 PM.
If any of you would like to attend, this upcoming meeting will be held in the Council Chambers of the Town of Lincoln at 4800 South Service Road in Beamsville, Ontario.
Overall, the team feels that today went very well. We're looking forward to continuing the dialogue with the community and further refining our development application.
Community meetings are a critical part of the development process and, over the years, I have come to learn the following:
Open houses, like the one that was held today, are a good format for encouraging dialogue. The typical setup includes presentation boards, representatives walking the floor, and some sort of mechanism for people to provide feedback (post-it notes on a site plan can work well).
Part of why this is a good format (compared to a straight presentation followed by a Q&A) is that it humanizes the team and it gives the community an opportunity to ask all of their questions. A lot of concerns can be addressed through clear explanations.
The most common concerns are usually (1) height, (2) density, and (3) traffic. There are obviously others, but this is a good high-level list.
Many/most people tend to conflate height and density. But as we have talked about many times before on this blog, they are not one and the same. Density tends to be harder to grasp, which is why you'll often hear people criticize tall buildings, but not cities like Paris and Barcelona, despite being two of the densest cities in the world.
A developer's job is to be creative. You have to manage a myriad of competing interests and then thread the needle as best you can. Community meetings are about listening, learning, and then trying to figure out where the needle might go.
The objective should be to make as many people as possible excited about the development. In other words, do great work.
What else would you add to this list?
Sometime next month we're going to be pouring a large concrete transfer slab at the second floor of One Delisle. Its function is to take the loads coming down from the entire tower above it and "transfer" them onto new structural elements, before being brought down to our mat foundation at the bottom of the parking garage.
Put differently -- and, as always, I should warn you that I'm not a structural engineer -- a transfer is used whenever you have a change in your structural grid and the loads don't have a straight path down to your foundations. Because whenever this happens, you're now introducing moment forces and those need to be dealt with structurally.
Transfer slabs are relatively common here in Toronto (which isn't the case in every market), but they are expensive and they consume a lot of depth. In the case of One Delisle, our level two transfer slab is 1.8 meters deep and it's going to contain about 1,200 m3 of concrete. (Some of you might also recall that One Delisle's mat foundation is over 4m deep.)
We were reviewing this with the team today and we think that we'll be able to pour about 100 m3 of concrete per hour. That means that this slab will take about 12 hours to pour! This requires a lot of coordination. Neighbors need to be notified, pumps need to be on standby in case of a breakdown, and so on.
Another major consideration is heat. When concrete cures it generates a lot of it. And with a thick slab like this one, I am told that we run the risk of the middle starting to overheat (especially with the hot weather that we've been having lately). The guideline limit is 60 degrees Celsius, so we'll be monitoring it for probably about 1-2 weeks following the pour.
I find these details fascinating. Maybe some of you do too. So once it's poured, I'll share a few photos.
This afternoon, the team, including the Town of Lincoln, hosted a community open house for Project Bench. This is our upcoming development project in the Niagara Benchlands.
This was a follow-up to the pre-application community meeting that we held last November, and it is a precursor to the statutory public meeting that will be held in two weeks on July 8th at 6 PM.
If any of you would like to attend, this upcoming meeting will be held in the Council Chambers of the Town of Lincoln at 4800 South Service Road in Beamsville, Ontario.
Overall, the team feels that today went very well. We're looking forward to continuing the dialogue with the community and further refining our development application.
Community meetings are a critical part of the development process and, over the years, I have come to learn the following:
Open houses, like the one that was held today, are a good format for encouraging dialogue. The typical setup includes presentation boards, representatives walking the floor, and some sort of mechanism for people to provide feedback (post-it notes on a site plan can work well).
Part of why this is a good format (compared to a straight presentation followed by a Q&A) is that it humanizes the team and it gives the community an opportunity to ask all of their questions. A lot of concerns can be addressed through clear explanations.
The most common concerns are usually (1) height, (2) density, and (3) traffic. There are obviously others, but this is a good high-level list.
Many/most people tend to conflate height and density. But as we have talked about many times before on this blog, they are not one and the same. Density tends to be harder to grasp, which is why you'll often hear people criticize tall buildings, but not cities like Paris and Barcelona, despite being two of the densest cities in the world.
A developer's job is to be creative. You have to manage a myriad of competing interests and then thread the needle as best you can. Community meetings are about listening, learning, and then trying to figure out where the needle might go.
The objective should be to make as many people as possible excited about the development. In other words, do great work.
What else would you add to this list?
Sometime next month we're going to be pouring a large concrete transfer slab at the second floor of One Delisle. Its function is to take the loads coming down from the entire tower above it and "transfer" them onto new structural elements, before being brought down to our mat foundation at the bottom of the parking garage.
Put differently -- and, as always, I should warn you that I'm not a structural engineer -- a transfer is used whenever you have a change in your structural grid and the loads don't have a straight path down to your foundations. Because whenever this happens, you're now introducing moment forces and those need to be dealt with structurally.
Transfer slabs are relatively common here in Toronto (which isn't the case in every market), but they are expensive and they consume a lot of depth. In the case of One Delisle, our level two transfer slab is 1.8 meters deep and it's going to contain about 1,200 m3 of concrete. (Some of you might also recall that One Delisle's mat foundation is over 4m deep.)
We were reviewing this with the team today and we think that we'll be able to pour about 100 m3 of concrete per hour. That means that this slab will take about 12 hours to pour! This requires a lot of coordination. Neighbors need to be notified, pumps need to be on standby in case of a breakdown, and so on.
Another major consideration is heat. When concrete cures it generates a lot of it. And with a thick slab like this one, I am told that we run the risk of the middle starting to overheat (especially with the hot weather that we've been having lately). The guideline limit is 60 degrees Celsius, so we'll be monitoring it for probably about 1-2 weeks following the pour.
I find these details fascinating. Maybe some of you do too. So once it's poured, I'll share a few photos.
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.
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.
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