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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  • Main street, second street, and beyond

    I think the most important point of this post (by Alfred Twu) about “corridor zoning”, is that it is the result of a political compromise. By corridor zoning, I’m talking about the tradition in many North American cities of putting lots of density on main streets, and then almost nowhere else. It is indeed the result of a compromise.

    We knew we needed to build more housing, but we didn’t want to disturb any of the low-rise housing that forms the majority land use in most North American cities. So we said “look, we’re going to build some taller buildings; but don’t worry, they’re only going to go here and maybe here. You’re probably not even going to notice them that much.” The result is a very spiky city, which is in many ways a suboptimal form.

    I guess that is slowly starting to change with things like laneway housing and smaller-scale multi-family developments like this one here. But these housing typologies are still rooted in the above compromise. In this particular case, though, they are the answer to the question: “What could we build in our low-rise communities that still respects their “character” and doesn’t piss off too many people?” The solution is still a spiky city.

    What Alfred proposes in the above post it something called “second street housing.” And it is what it sounds like. It is about going one street beyond main corridors and adding more, or perhaps the most, density there. Directionally, this starts to break the above compromise. It is recognition that maybe we shouldn’t always respect neighborhood character; maybe we sometimes need to rethink it.

    But compared to Alfred, I would say I’m less fussed about housing and density on main streets. In fact, there’s something to be said about corridors with the right kind of urban grandeur. Instead, I think the important point is that “second street housing” breaks the status quo and proposes going beyond single corridors.

    So I would take it even further. We know that cities work really well as circles, versus lines. And so what we really should be doing is encouraging more than a second interior corridor. What we should be doing is encouraging higher density circles around, at the very least, our transit nodes. That’ll take us beyond just a second street and, yeah, that’s a good thing.

    Photo by Jackson Case on Unsplash

  • Any wear, anywhere

    Yeah, I can’t say I’m excited to try this. Japan Airlines has just launched a new year-long pilot allowing its passengers to reserve and rent clothes. The way it works is that you tell them what you’re traveling for and then you get something like a “spring/fall x smart casual” variety pack delivered to your hotel or Airbnb.

    The clothes, which look something like this, are a mix of excess stock and second-hand stuff, and so it is being positioned as a more sustainable choice. You’re both using clothes that might otherwise go to waste and you’re reducing the amount of weight that you’re traveling with. (You still need to bring your own underwear.)

    And this could add up:

    The site handling the clothing rental system claims that a 10kg reduction in a flight passenger’s luggage results in an estimated 7.5kg reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. A 7.5kg reduction in CO₂ emissions, it adds for reference, is the equivalent of forgoing using a hairdryer for 78 days (based on an average use of 10 mins per drying session).

    I suppose this could also be positioned as a convenience: why lug a suitcase full of clothes around when you can just reserve what you want and have it waiting for you at your hotel? But I also suppose that you need to be okay wearing well-used clothes. Maybe this matters less, though, if the clothes are really nice and fashionable?

    I don’t know. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s a market for this.

    I would also say that even though I may not be excited about rental clothes, I take great pride in packing efficiently for travel. Unless I’m going snowboarding, I basically do not check a bag. I can do 2 weeks just fine with a carry-on and, to be honest, there’s something liberating about reducing your belongings to only what is necessary.

    So who knows, maybe bringing only underwear and toiletries would be even more liberating.

  • Doing great work

    Paul Graham just published his latest essay and it is a recipe for “how to do great work.” I highly recommend it, but you should know two things: (1) it assumes that you’re “very ambitious” and (2) it’s quite long. It’s possibly his longest essay.

    However, this second feature acts as a kind of filter. Because if you do actually make it to the end, his assumption is that it says something about both your level of ambition and your overall commitment to doing great work. You are presumably not the majority.

    As I read through it (albeit relatively quickly), I immediately started copying and pasting excerpts that resonated with me. Eventually I stopped this because there were just too many of them. But as a preview, here are some of the ones that I did pull out:

    • Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier, notice gaps, explore promising ones. This is how practically everyone who’s done great work has done it, from painters to physicists.
    • Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don’t let “work” mean something other people tell you to do. If you do manage to do great work one day, it will probably be on a project of your own. It may be within some bigger project, but you’ll be driving your part of it.
    • The educational systems in most countries pretend it’s easy. They expect you to commit to a field long before you could know what it’s really like. And as a result an ambitious person on an optimal trajectory will often read to the system as an instance of breakage.
    • The trouble with planning is that it only works for achievements you can describe in advance. You can win a gold medal or get rich by deciding to as a child and then tenaciously pursuing that goal, but you can’t discover natural selection that way.
    • To the extent you can, try to arrange your life so you have big blocks of time to work in. You’ll shy away from hard tasks if you know you might be interrupted.
    • There may be some jobs where it’s an advantage to be cynical and pessimistic, but if you want to do great work it’s an advantage to be optimistic, even though that means you’ll risk looking like a fool sometimes. There’s an old tradition of doing the opposite. The Old Testament says it’s better to keep quiet lest you look like a fool. But that’s advice for seeming smart. If you actually want to discover new things, it’s better to take the risk of telling people your ideas.
    • People who do great things don’t get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing.

    You really should read the entire essay, though. It’s worth it.

  • Self-driving cars, plugs, and electrical grids

    This is going to be old news to many of you, but this past week I experienced Tesla’s self-driving capabilities for the first time. And I must say that I was very impressed. It did everything from navigate stop-and-go city traffic to navigate lane changes on the highway. Overall, it makes my five-year old car feel pretty quaint. The software is that much more sophisticated and one has to assume that all of this autonomy stuff will only get significantly better as LIDAR becomes common place in production vehicles.

    In other car news, North America appears to be narrowing in on an EV charging plug standard. It is Tesla’s plug, but it is now appropriately called the North American Charging Standard (NACS) plug. And last week, Electrify America — which is the largest non-Tesla, fast-charging network in the US — announced that it would be adding the plug to its network. The company also happens to be owned by Volkswagen. So big and important companies seem to be coalescing around this plug type.

    Lastly for today, here’s a post by Fred Wilson talking about (1) bi-directional EV charging, (2) the apartment buildings he and his wife are developing, and (3) our ongoing transformation away from a centralized electrical grid to a decentralized one. What he talks about in his post is something that we are actually piloting in a few of Slate’s office buildings right now. It’s still early days, but I think it’s really exciting. Tech seems to be enabling a broader shift toward decentralization. And in the case of our electrical grid, it’s going to lead to a more resilient one.

  • Bike sharing around Toronto

    I love cycling. And I have been using Toronto’s bike share system to get around over the last few weeks (both for work and personal stuff). There’s no better way to get around when the city is busy. But it was also a reminder that we have a lot of work to do when it comes to cycling infrastructure.

    Here are a few observations:

    • The Bike Share mobile app has got to be the worst app that I have ever used. First of all, it’s called PBSC. I think this was a deliberate choice so that it’s impossible to remember and impossible to locate on your phone. Because once you do find it, it’s an awful experience.
    • I struggled to make it from downtown up to midtown a few days ago. Can I blame the Bike Share bike instead of my lack of physical conditioning? I can’t see the majority of people wanting to do this sort of ride. This is where e-bikes and e-scooters come in.
    • Many of the bikes have something wrong with them.
    • We don’t have enough bike lanes and bike-friendly streets. I know that some you don’t want to hear this. But it’s the truth. There are a lot of streets in Toronto where it is terrifying to be on a bicycle. This is true even in the center of the city.
    • If you’re not familiar with Toronto, you won’t get this point. But Queens Quay is a seemingly complicated street for many people to navigate. Cycling along here in peak summer is an exercise in dodging people as they meander across the bike lane.
    • We need dockless bikes. I’m sure that the team is doing their best to load balance across the network, but it is often a challenge to find an available dock at the end of a trip. There are ways to do this that avoid bikes being left everywhere.
    • And while we’re at it, we should also add e-scooters to our roster.

    What would you add to this list?

  • Elevators in multi-family buildings

    One of the most important considerations for livability in a multi-family building is the elevators. And as someone who has lived in a condominium building for the last 10 years, I know firsthand that it can be frustrating when they aren’t working properly. So this is obviously something that we pay a lot of attention to in our own projects.

    The very general and crude rule of thumb is that you want at least 1 elevator for every 100 homes. For example, at Junction House, we have 151 suites and 2 elevators. So that means we have 1 elevator for every ~76 homes. At One Delisle, we have 371 suites and 4 elevators. So 1 for every ~93 homes. At the same time, I live in a building with 357 suites and 3 elevators (1 for every 119), and it works just fine.

    But again, this is a very general rule of thumb. There are many other factors that can influence performance such as the number of levels in the building, the number of suites per floor, the number of below-grade parking levels, and so on. In my building, we have all above-grade parking, so I’m sure that impacts things.

    If you have a building with a lot of below-grade parking, that will generally decrease performance all else being equal (i.e. increase weight times). Because now you have that many more stops, even if the number of homes remains constant above.

    One common way to mitigate these impacts is to add a parking shuttle elevator. This is a dedicated elevator for just the parking levels, and it’s something that you’ll often see in office buildings. This helps service levels. It can also help the overall building efficiency (saleable area/gross construction area) by potentially eliminating the need for another elevator shaft in the above-grade levels.

    But the trade-off is that you now need to transfer elevators, usually at the ground floor. Some people don’t mind this and think it helps with building security. If someone sneaks into the garage, there’s another obstacle to getting up into the residential floors. But it does mean that if you’re coming home with groceries in your hands, you need to take 2 elevators.

    I’d be curious to hear from all of you what you think about parking shuttle elevators in residential buildings. Because I suspect that as building heights increase and as parking ratios continue to decline, parking shuttle elevators will likely become more common in cities like Toronto. Let me know in the comments below.

    Disclaimer: I am not an elevator consultant! I am telling you just what I have learned over the years from speaking with actual professionals. So I recommend you speak with one before making any important elevator decisions on your own projects.

    Photo by Edwin Chen on Unsplash

  • The future of Toronto’s neighborhoods

    Yesterday evening I visited the future of Toronto’s neighborhoods. It is located at 367 Howland Avenue. And it takes the form of 10 homes on a lot that previously used to house only 1. Developed by Green Street Flats and designed by Craig Race Architecture, it is a near perfect example of what Toronto hopes to achieve with its new multiplex policies. As Craig put it last night, “we found the missing middle!”

    Now to be fair, this is a double lot, measuring about 10m wide in total. And so this is twice the size of what the new policies now allow on a single lot — a fourplex plus a laneway suite or garden suite (4+1). But it is still generally consistent with what you could do today if you had two contiguous lots.

    That said, this project predates the new multiplex policies, meaning it required a long list of zoning variances and it led to an inevitable fight with the neighbors. This small project required an 8-day contested hearing before it was granted approval! Start to finish, Howland took over 3 years.

    That is ridiculous and so I think all of us should view the new multiplex policies as meaningful progress in our city. What was once contentious and a huge pain is now permissible as-of-right. Isn’t it funny how rules and perspectives change? “No, you can’t do this! Okay, now you can. Please do a lot of it.” So for the purposes of this post, let’s talk about Howland as if it were built on an as-of-right basis and you could do the same on your own lot if you were so inclined.

    From a design perspective, the homes are organized as follows:

    There’s a full-floor basement suite, a full-floor suite on the main level, two back-to-back two-storey upper suites, and then a laneway suite at the back. One reason for this configuration is that it means you never have to walk up more than one flight of stairs to get to your main living space. This was one of the design criteria and I think it works very well. Here’s an example of what this looks like (this is a suite #3):

    For this particular site, the entrance to suite #4 is at the back of the fourplex and accessed via an adjacent laneway. But for the “inboard” fourplex, each suite is accessed via the main street. Once again, I think this all works very well. I just wonder if there could be an opportunity to shave additional costs by moving some of the circulation outside (kind of like this). I guess it would depend on the width of the lot.

    Of course, the big question remains: Do projects of this scale actually make any money? Because if they don’t, then people aren’t going to continue building them. Though, I would say there are two ways to think about underwriting a project like this.

    The first is from a 100% investment standpoint: build 5 homes, rent 5 homes, and then collect a reasonable risk-adjusted return. The second is a hybrid approach. Maybe it’s build 5 homes, rent 4 homes, and live in the other one. In this case, the math is likely a bit different. It could just be about subsidizing your living expenses as opposed to generating a commensurate return.

    But in both cases, we know that these are very skinny projects. You need to be extra careful with your costs. And from what I gleaned last night, 6 or more suites is a better underwriting starting point (compared to 5). We also know that these projects only pencil with CMHC financing. Period. Full stop. If CMHC financing were to go away or meaningfully change, so to do these missing middle projects.

    So as we look toward the future of housing in Toronto’s neighborhoods, we need to keep in mind that these projects happen very much on the margin (as does all development, but it’s an even thinner line here). Meaning it remains to be seen whether these will happen at scale across the city, which is now the hope. It’ll also be interesting to see if developers like Green Street don’t scale up over time. I suspect they will.

    Congratulations to Green Street Flats, Craig Race Architecture, and the rest of the team on helping to pioneer this new housing typology. It’s a glimpse of the future and, judging by the turnout at last night’s open house, Toronto is ready for it.

  • Canada’s tech talent strategy

    This past week at Collision Toronto, Canada unveiled a new “Tech Talent Strategy” that includes a number of initiatives designed to attract more human capital across the science, technology, engineering, and math sectors. (Sidebar: The STEM sectors are great, but I’m really a fan of STEAM.)

    At a high level, these measures are intended to continue to grow Canada as a hub for global tech talent. So they cover things like promoting Canada as a destination for digital nomads, improving the Start-up Visa Program, and dunking on US immigration policies by creating an open work permit stream for H-1B specialty occupation visa holders.

    Overall, it seems great.

    But there are people who are concerned about the pace of immigration in Canada. Over the past year (ending in Q2-2023), the country added about 1.2 million people. This is a record. And perhaps the greatest concern, is that we simply aren’t building enough housing and related infrastructure.

    But I don’t get this logic. Canada is a relatively small country. Attracting smart and ambitious people from around the world is good for us. And there are simple ways to address these concerns: build more housing and related infrastructure. I’m pretty sure that we can figure out how to do that.

  • A canyon as mid-block connection

    Tishman Speyer, the San Francisco Giants, and MVRDV have just completed a new residential building in San Francisco called “The Canyon.”

    The first phase of the larger Mission Rock masterplan (which also includes a project by Studio Gang), the complex got its name because of a walkway that cuts through the plinth of the building and that, well, looks like a canyon. You can see it in the above image if you look closely. There are even stairs that take you up as you walk through it.

    But what is most interesting about this walkway is not its geological reference. It would be how it performs at the ground floor and for the homes that face into it. It’s a way of creating a narrow mid-block connection (and we like narrow streets), while at the same time allowing more light into the center of the block.

    So I’d be curious to see/experience what it’s like in the middle of this canyon. Hopefully it’s interesting.

    Photo: Jason O’Rear

  • Exactly how gentle does gentle density need to be?

    This proposal by Dubbeldam Architecture + Design, called Incremental Density, is both an obvious step in the right direction and a problem. It is directionally right because it is exactly the kind of “gentle density” that we need and that many of us hope to see in our cities.

    Four to six storeys, prototypically built on an as-of-right basis all across city, possibly by small-scale owner/developers. In fact, this approach is one of the things that Toronto’s new mayor, Olivia Chow, has been speaking about on her first day in the office:

    Further, Chow said she wants to make it “easy and fast” for those who want to “build up” their single-family, often detached, homes to address what is known as the “missing middle” due to a history of “red tape” around zoning.

    “What I’m saying is ‘build, build, build, build,’ up to four storeys if you want to have four units,” she said. “You can rent out three of them and some money right. Then you are creating more housing, and you’re earning some extra dollars,” she continued.

    “So I want to unleash the power of the homeowner and say to them, ‘go build it,’ because we need housing right here now.”

    Here’s the problem, though. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that at least a few people will not want 6 storeys beside them and their backyard. I mean, I struggled with a 2.5 storey laneway house for many years. (11 to be exact.)

    So how do we get from where we are today to what you see above? It’s going to take some finessing. Maybe it’s only in specific areas and on certain sites to start, or maybe we need to gradually increase the massing over time. Either way, I too am ready to “build, build, build, build.”

    What do you all think of this proposal?

    Images: Dubbeldam