Today is Christmas Eve. It’s the season of giving. So I thought it would be appropriate to talk about affordable housing.

Yesterday, Mitchell Cohen – who is a real estate developer and the president of The Daniels Corporation – wrote an opinion piece in the Toronto Star talking about just that. It was called: A perfect storm for action on affordable housing.

Here’s a snippet that summarizes the things he believes we should be doing:

Municipalities across Ontario also have significant tools at their disposal to make a difference. To date, these tools have not been co-ordinated to achieve maximum bang for the buck. Property taxes can and should be waived not only for affordable rental homes but for affordable ownership homes as well. Additionally, cities can and should waive all development levies and other municipal fees for affordable rental and ownership housing.

Combined, these two measures provide municipalities with powerful leverage to implement inclusionary zoning — the most important tool in the affordable housing tool box. Inclusionary zoning on a city-wide basis creates a level playing field, an opportunity for a constructive partnership between municipalities and private sector developers to create both affordable ownership and rental homes within every new building approved for construction.

For those of you who might be unfamiliar with inclusionary zoning, it’s essentially a zoning requirement to build a certain number of affordable units in any new construction project. It originated – as far as I know – in the US, but has been fairly controversial since the outset.

So today I thought we could have a discussion on the merits of inclusionary zoning. Do you think it’s a good or bad thing for cities? Is it really the most effective way to deliver affordable housing at scale? Leave your thoughts in the comment section below :)

I don’t have a strong view on inclusionary zoning, but I do believe that affordable housing and a mix of incomes is critical to cities and neighborhoods.

I do, however, wonder if it’s one of those things that seems to make a lot of sense, but actually has a bunch of negative externalities associated with it. Maybe the answer is to just prototype the idea and then iterate on it.

What do you think?

If you’re a regular reader of Architect This City, there are many things that you might know about me. 

You might know that I was initially trained as an architect, but that I immediately transitioned into real estate development after grad school (where I studied both architecture and real estate).

After becoming a real estate developer, you might know that I completed an MBA with a focus on innovation and entrepreneurship (which happened by default as a result of the electives I ended up being interested in).

And finally, you might know, given the content of this blog and my startup history, that I have a significant interest in technology. More specifically though, you might know that my interest is in figuring out how technology will continue to infiltrate and impact “non-tech” industries such as real estate.

But what you might not know is how I even ended up in architecture and real estate in the first place. Unlike a lot of people who seem to have grown up wanting to be an architect – perhaps because they had a relative who was one – I didn’t decide to study architecture until a bit later on.

Growing up my primary interests were: art and computers.

During high school, my art teachers used to tell my parents that I was going to be an artist. And my computer teachers used to tell my parents that I was going to be a computer geek – or maybe they said computer scientist.

Maybe it had to do with timing and the emergence of the commercial internet in the 1990s, but computers sort of won out during that point in my life. I spent a lot of time building them from scratch, playing with software, and asking my mom not to pick up the phone because I was literally dialed-in to the internet.

So when it came time to enrol in university, I fairly effortlessly decided on computer science. It just seemed to make sense. But after about a year I realized that it wasn’t for me. I didn’t love programming like my classmates did and the thought of doing it for a living scared me.

At the same time, I felt like I needed to feed the artist in me. I wanted something both artistic and technical. So I decided to drop out of computer science and give architecture a try. It just seemed like the perfect marriage of my interests.

I immediately fell in love with architecture. And I spent the next 7 years studying it across 2 degrees.

But during that time, two things hit me. First, I came to the realization that real estate developers are the ones who really have the most say in terms of how our cities are built. And second, that technology was having a massive impact on business and life.

This told me that design alone wasn’t going to be enough. I also needed to engross myself in real estate, finance, business, and technology. So that’s what I set out to do. And I really enjoyed it. On the technology side, it felt like I was coming full circle in a way.

But today, I feel a bit like a 3 legged stool. There’s the design leg. The real estate/business leg. And the technology leg. And oftentimes I feel like life would be a lot simpler if I could just balance on one of those legs – instead of trying to stand on all three. But that’s simply not me.

These are my passions and I need all of them to stand-up.

Yesterday morning I had coffee with a good friend of mine and fellow city geek. We don’t connect nearly as often as I’d like, but when we do we always have great conversations about cities and about Toronto.

One of the things he asked me was whether I was still loving Toronto. And I responded by saying absolutely. We then both agreed that there are a lot of exciting things happening in the city right now. 

But I qualified this statement by saying that I wish we were bolder. I wish we took more chances. Because while it’s great that we’re doing things like building more bike lanes and intensifying our growth centers, lots of other cities are doing those things as well.

To be a leading city, you have to be prepared to do things that other cities think are wrong or won’t work and that are truly remarkable. Whether you’re city, company, or an individual, following trends is never enough.

Take for example the dramatic anti-pollution measures that were recently announced by Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo:

By 2020, no diesel fuel at all will be burnt within Paris. Regular cars will be banned outright from its more polluted roads, which will be open solely to electric and hybrid vehicles. Meanwhile, the city’s most central districts (the first four arrondissements) will be barred to all but residents’ vehicles, deliveries, and emergency services, transforming Paris’ Right Bank core into a semi-pedestrian zone. As a counterbalance, the number of cycle lanes will be doubled by 2020, while the city will fund an extended electric bikeshare scheme to encourage more people to get on two wheels. “I want us to be exemplary” Mayor Hidalgo has declared. 

That’s how you win hearts: by being exemplary.

As always though, I’m incredibly optimistic about the future. Toronto has a new leader at its helm and I know that there are a lot of passionate people in this city who care deeply about its future. I am certainly one of them.

Image: Not my actual coffee (via Flickr)