Brandon Donnelly

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.

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Category: Planning

  • An exciting new proposal for Toronto

    I love change.

    In fact, a big part of what I do for a living is imagining what things could be in the future. However, the bias that humans have toward the status quo has been well documented by people like Seth Godin, as well as many others. It is easier to defend that which already exists. Here’s how Seth puts it:

    All one has to do is take the thing we have now as a given (ignoring its real costs) and then challenge the defects and question the benefits of the new thing, while also maximizing the potential risk.

    So as I was reading this recent blogTO article about the work of Stephen Velasco, I wasn’t surprised to see some of the responses. Stephen has built an outstanding 3D model of all the towers that are currently planned or under construction in Toronto. Here’s what that looks like:

    For some of you, this is exciting. And for others, this may look like too much density. In both cases, we might think we are being fair and reasonable in our assessment, but the reality is that it’s actually quite difficult to be a neutral judge. We are all guilty of poor logic and too much emotion.

    But here’s a good mental exercise, put forward by Seth, to test your logic: flip the story and then see if you still feel the same way.

    In this particular case, imagine that all of the above proposed buildings are already built. This is the city that we all live, work, and play in. This is the status quo. Now consider an exciting new proposal being put forward to demolish many/most of these buildings, create more surface parking lots in the core, industrialize our waterfront, and reduce our overall population density.

    Photo from the 1940s:

    Photo from the 1960s:

    Is this a better proposal?

  • My predictions for 2022

    As promised, below is a list of some of my predictions for this coming year. I have tried to be both punchier and more precise in my prognostications; because, well, obvious predictions are boring and precision will allow me to better evaluate my thinking at the end of the year. So here goes.

    1. 2022 will be the year that COVID-19 becomes endemic and finally fizzles out to a point where it no longer factors into our decision making in the same way that it has for most people over the last two years or so. I think this will happen by as early as the summer.
    2. As a result, I think the majority of people will be back in their offices by this September at the very latest, with many coming back much earlier. The whole hybrid/flexible work thing won’t completely disappear, but the majority of people who used to work in offices will be back.
    3. Recreational/fringe residential real estate will soften in 2022 as a result of 1) its tremendous run-up during this pandemic and 2) the renewed pull of urban/office life. Conversely, urban apartment rents will continue to rise and eventually surpass their pre-COVID levels. The SF Bay Area could be one exception.
    4. The explosion of travel that I thought was going to happen in 2021, will truly happen this year. The summer will mark its official return, with European travel volumes (to give just one example) returning to their pre-COVID levels.
    5. We will see meaningful efforts to further breakdown the hegemony of single-family zoning throughout many North American cities. This has been building for a number of years and I think we will see some tipping point-like moments in 2022. Specifically, expanded permissions for multi-unit housing and greater densities.
    6. I wish I could say that autonomous vehicles are destined to do something truly remarkable this year, but I think we are still a few years out (2024-2025?) before a large chunk of us are ride-hailing AVs. But on a related note, I do think that Uber will come into its own this year and finally become profitable (and not just with adjusted profits).
    7. Public transit ridership will, unfortunately, remain depressed and below its pre-COVID levels for this entire year. The beneficiaries of this will continue to be cars (not good), bikes, and micro-mobility solutions like e-scooters.
    8. 2021 was a huge year for NFTs and other fun stuff like digital fashion. Given these trends, I believe there will be growing demand from people to better integrate their digital and physical lives through technologies like augmented reality. Snap has been at the forefront of this space for many years and 2022 will be an important year for its Spectacles (AR glasses). But Apple and others will also make major announcements.
    9. Miami’s ascent as an important tech hub will get interrupted by questions surrounding the climate crisis and its own resilience. At the time of writing this post, the price of carbon on the EU’s Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) is about €80 per tonne. I think we will see it break €125 per tonne this year, and possibly go even higher.
    10. Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Solana (in this order) will be the top three cryptocurrencies according to market cap by the end of the year. At the time of writing this post, their market caps are $446 billion, $895 billion, and $55 billion, respectively. I am also expecting some breakout web3 consumer applications that will push, maybe, 40% of Canadians and Americans into the crypto space.

    Photo by Dave Xu on Unsplash

  • Toronto’s elimination of most parking minimums is now official

    We knew it was coming. But it’s important and worth mentioning again. This week, Toronto City Council adopted new Zoning Bylaw Amendments that will remove most parking minimums across the city. We now join many other cities across North America who have done similar things in order to try and encourage more sustainable forms of mobility.

    If you’d like to take a spin through the draft amendments, you’ll find them linked here. I haven’t gone through them in detail, but I did do a word search for “maximum” given that this week’s adoption represents a pretty clear change in perspective. Here’s an excerpt from the staff recommendation report that speaks to what I’m talking about:

    Recognizing these challenges, this review of the parking standards in the city-wide
    Zoning By-law 569-2013 was guided by the principle that parking standards should
    allow only the maximum amount of automobile parking reasonably required for a given
    use and minimums should be avoided except where necessary to ensure equitable
    access. The previous review, which began in 2005, was guided by the principle that the
    zoning standards should require the minimum responsible amount of parking for a given
    land use. This is inconsistent with Official Plan policies which discourage auto
    dependence.

    One other thing I found in the documents that went to Council was this map of parking spot selling prices in active high-rise developments across the city. Not surprisingly, downtown and midtown are showing the highest prices per parking space. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of all of these dots, but it looks directionally right and I can tell you that at least one of them is correct.

    All of us in the industry know how much parking drives decision making. There’s a joke (half-joke) that when you’re designing a building, first you lay out the parking and then you design all of the residential suites around that structural grid. That’s not the way things should be done. The future of this city should not and cannot be centered around the car. This week’s adoption is in service of that.

  • Toronto is on the verge of finding the missing middle

    Toronto’s chief planner Gregg Lintern (who you can follow over here on Twitter) was recently in the Toronto Star talking about the city’s plans to allow more multi-unit dwellings in our low-rise single-family neighborhoods.

    I was careful to say “more” because they are already permissible in some areas. The challenge is that they’re not happening at any sort of meaningful scale, which is an obvious signal that some key ingredients are still missing.

    Or perhaps there are too many required ingredients. For example, right now the zoning by-law requires one car parking space for every dwelling in a multi-unit building. This is, of course, dumb and the requirement should be completely eliminated.

    Changes like this, as well as many others, are long overdue. Not just in Toronto, but in many other cities. And it is partially what I was getting at when I wrote about laneway housing this past weekend and hinted at the need for other solutions to increase housing supply.

    So when you have a few minutes, I would encourage you to complete the city’s survey on expanding permissions for multiplexes across the city. I just did it and voted to bring on the multiplexes.

    Photo by Tiago Rodrigues on Unsplash

  • Toronto to eliminate parking minimums

    For the last year or so the City of Toronto has been doing a review of parking requirements for new developments. This would include things like how much car and bike parking needs to be provided for each residential unit in a new building. More information on this work can be found here.

    City staff are now preparing to release their initial findings and, as I understand it, it is going to include the removal of most minimum parking standards across the city and the introduction of some maximum parking standards. What this should mean is that in most cases you can build as little parking as you want, but in some cases you’ll be stopped from building too much of it.

    There are lots of examples of other cities doing this. Buffalo is one example and I recently wrote (over here) about what happened to new developments once its minimums were eliminated. Among other things, it revealed where the previous parking requirements were overshooting what the market was actually demanding.

    Urban parking is heavily dilutive to new developments. It drives up the cost of new housing. It is also hypocritical to claim that we want to encourage alternative forms of mobility while at the same time mandating that we build a certain amount of car parking. Do we want people to drive or do we want people to do other things? Which is it?

    Some will bemoan this inevitable loss of parking (though it was already happening). But I think this is a great thing. It is Toronto growing up and continuing to realize that it’s pretty damn hard to build a big and well-functioning global city if everyone is driving around everywhere. Maybe one day we’ll even allow e-scooters.

  • 🙌 La Bovida

    Paris 1e

  • Our Plan Toronto

    The City of Toronto is currently reviewing its Official Plan, which is a city planning document that acts as a kind of master guide for land user matters. It is a pretty important document in that it dictates, among other things, what kind of development should go where. One way that it is often explained is that our OP is the “vision”, whereas our zoning by-laws are the “precision.”

    This update will be completed by next summer. Why? Because the Province of Ontario said so. (That’s how things work around here. I think cities should have more power.)

    Toronto is expected to grow by more than 700,000 people and add some 450,000 jobs by 2051. Where these people and jobs will be accommodated is a big part of the exercise here.

    As part of this review, the City of Toronto published this Story Map. It is pretty neat. It looks at how the city has grown over the years (the above image is Toronto’s 1943 Master Plan). It explains a little bit about how planning works. And it has a bunch of stats on how people live and work in the city. I just used it to confirm my hunch that there are exactly zero single-family homes in my neighborhood.

    Looking at the above map from 1943, it is, of course, interesting to see how much the city has grown. But it also interesting to note that many of the neighborhoods that now form part of the city were just “New Residential Areas with Prospective Populations.” They were colors and numbers on a map in areas that had yet to be built out by developers.

    When I see this, I can’t help but wonder what the narrative was like at the time with respect to these new developments. Were people upset? Were people happy? Did people even notice what was happening on the edges of their city? Because sprawl, and that’s what this was, is quite different from intensification.

    Our focus today is on the latter. It is about building up as opposed to out. There’s no more room for yellow shaded areas with numbers. This means that we will end up using our land and other resources more efficiently, but it also presents a whole host of issues. Change is hard. Intensification is hard. Part of the job of this document is to navigate some of these challenges.

    If you’d like to get engaged with the city’s Official Plan review, head over here.

  • A city split in half

    Here is a short video by Dave Amos (of the YouTube channel City Beautiful) about the splitting of Berlin into two. What a fascinating urban case study. I just recently discovered his channel, but he seems to cover some interesting topics, all of which are related to cities and city planning. When Dave is not making YouTube videos, he is a professor of city and regional planning at Cal Poly. He also graduated with a Master of Architecture at some point before getting his Ph.D., so presumably he knows a few things about buildings and cities. I guess that also makes him an imposter architect, like me.

  • Too much low-rise — Theresa O’Donnell in conversation with Larry Beasley

    I attended the above talk last night over Zoom. (Shoutout to Michael Mortensen for inviting Slate’s development team and for helping to moderate the Q&A.) The talk was a conversation between Larry Beasley (former Director of Planning for the City of Vancouver) and Theresa O’Donnell (the newly appointed Director of Planning for the City of Vancouver). Prior to this, Theresa was the director of planning for cities such as Las Vegas, Nevada, and Arlington, Texas.

    I’d like to point out two comments that she made last night that I found interesting.

    The first is that community meetings over Zoom actually aren’t all that bad. And the reason that they’re not all that bad is that they tend to draw out larger crowds (they are easier to attend), and so the feedback on development applications tends to be a bit more inclusive / representative. I agree with this overall view and I’ve been arguing for years (here on the blog) that the typical approach to community engagement is pretty much broken. The opinions become lopsided when you erect too many barriers to participation.

    The second point has to do with the amount of land in Vancouver (and other North American cities) that is dedicated to low-rise housing. It’s too much and it’s going to need to be addressed in order to increase overall housing supply and to chip away at the housing affordability problem. This won’t be news to this audience, but it’s interesting to see how widespread this belief has become. Of course, the big questions remain: How gentle should gentle density be? How much intensification should these neighborhoods see?

    I also appreciated her comment that it’s pure lunacy (my words, not hers) to have higher order transit lines running through mostly low-rise neighborhoods. We need much higher densities to sustainably support these kinds of investments in infrastructure. For us Torontonians, a good example would be (most of) the underdeveloped Bloor-Danforth subway line, though there are other culprits.

    Welcome Theresa.

  • What if versus should be city planning

    Witold Rybczynski makes an interesting comparison between military and civilian (city) planning in a recent blog post called, “The Fog of Life.” Here’s an excerpt:

    Good military planning, as I understand it, is based on preparing for “what if,” that is, developing different scenarios. What if this happens, or that happens? City planning is different, more like advocacy, that is, what should happen. This advocacy is based on certainties: open space is good, density is good—or bad, depending. The problem is that what planners think should happen—separation of pedestrians and cars, superblocks, megastructures—often runs into trouble when it hits the fog of life.

    These are two very different perspectives. “What if” planning responses assume that a thing has already happened. You’re not working to affect a particular outcome, you’re responding to one that already exists. Does this necessarily make this approach more reactive than proactive?

    Either way, what should happen implies that the thing isn’t currently happening, but that it should — presumably because the thing is nice and desirable. It could also imply that the thing is sort of happening, but just isn’t happening quite enough.

    Let’s use the example of 3-bedroom condominiums and apartments, which is a topic of discussion that has been circling in Toronto for as long as I’ve been in the business. Developers here, are generally encouraged or mandated to build a certain number of larger family-sized suites in every new housing project. Oftentimes this number is 10% of the total unit count.

    The reasoning behind this is sound. Cities should be inclusive and they should work for the young, the old, the single, and for families, among others. The problem is that, for a variety of reasons, the market, when left to do its own thing, tends to build more small units than large units. At least that’s the case here in Toronto. (I’ve talked about some of the reasons why in previous posts.)

    There is a view that if only developers built more large units that more families would choose to live in apartments. It’s an issue of supply and availability, and also a question of design. You need to design for families too. This you could say is a “what if” approach. Families want to live in multi-family buildings; so let’s build more and better family-sized housing.

    But is this really the case or is there some advocacy going on here? All things being equal, does the market want low-rise or does it prefer higher density? It’s a fascinating set of questions, but unfortunately all things aren’t equal. It’s not just a question of availability and design, it’s also a question of economics. Large family-sized units cost money.

    I suppose this is the fog of life.