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.
Back in 2019, Canada’s federal budget allocated $300 million toward something known as The Housing Supply Challenge. The overarching objective was, and still is, to reduce the barriers to housing supply and affordability, and the approach has been to find solutions through a series of “challenges”. So far, they — they being the CMHC Housing Supply Team — have completed four rounds. And right now, they are on round five. This is the challenge:
Increase the adoption of system-level solutions that transform Canada’s ability to produce more community and market housing.
This fifth round represents $65 million of the $300 million total budget. Meaning that $65 million will be awarded to groups and solutions that have the potential to accomplish the above. The funding will be distributed in three stages. First to 20 foundational solutions ($1 million per solution), then to 10 next-level solutions ($3 million per solution), and finally to 3 game-changing solutions ($5 million per solution).
If you have a solution (i.e. something that can be executed on), I would encourage you to check out their site. And if you’d like to apply, you have until December 18, 2023.
Sidewalk Toronto is currently looking for “12 smart, creative, and caring people who are interested in the future of Toronto’s waterfront and how we [Sidewalk Toronto] can responsibly incorporate technology to improve urban life.”
Each Fellow will complete a 2-day orientation session in Toronto; 6 days in Amsterdam and Copenhagen; 5 days in New York City and Boston; 3 days in Vancouver; and then do a final 2-day working session back in Toronto before presenting their takeaways.
This feels like a response to the criticism that Sidewalk Toronto wasn’t doing enough to listen to the community and that it simply wanted to build a tech-infused neighborhood that could serve us more ads – but it’s cool nonetheless.
If you’re between 19-24 years old and you live in Toronto, you can apply here. It sounds like a fun opportunity for young city builders. I know that I certainly would have been all over it when I was in that age bracket.
We all know that city building is a multi-disciplinary endeavour. That’s why I was incredibly interested to learn about a new “Artist-in-Residence” program that Los Angeles is launching:
The Honorable Mayor Eric Garcetti, is pleased to announce the first collaboration between two City of Los Angeles departments to place an artist in residence in a department to serve as a Creative Catalyst who will develop creative intervention strategies to achieve department specific goals. The Creative Catalyst Artist in Residence Program will serve as a model to stimulate creative thinking and innovative projects, while supporting Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Back to Basics priority outcomes: to make our city livable / sustainable, prosperous, safe, and well-run.
Cities are complex organisms. And some of you might be wondering how artists can help city build. But this is about bringing different minds together, thinking across disciplines and, hopefully, leveraging design thinking to solve urban problems. And LA is not the only city to try this approach.
In my view, it’s not that dissimilar from the trend around “Designer-in-Residence” programs at venture capital firms and startup incubators. Cities, businesses, and many other organizations are recognizing that the way artists and designers think can be of tremendous value.
So if you’re an artist who lives and/or works in LA, this might be something worth considering. You have until this Friday, November 6th, 2015 to apply.
It’s the tower on the right hand side of the picture above. The 2 towers on the left are existing, although they’re quite recent. The development site is currently a parking lot and it abuts a railway corridor to the south.
The reason I bring up this project now is because I recently saw this notice go out from the Gooderham & Worts Neighbourhood Association. It’s an announcement for a public meeting that I believe just happened earlier this week (I think they meant to say 2015 instead of 2014).
After I saw the notice, I decided to share the rendering on social media to see what people thought of the proposal. The general consensus seemed to be that the tower looked a bit cookie cutter (though to be fair it’s hard to tell from renderings like this) and that 57 storeys was simply too tall for the area. I got comments back like “enough is enough.”
Now, I’m not here to say that 57 storeys is exactly the right height for this building and this location (though it might be), but I am saying that I don’t think it’s as important as most people think it is. I think we’ve become over-fixated on height, at the expense of other important design issues.
Part of this has to do with how we communicate projects and how we tell the story. If you look at the city’s website for this project, you’ll see that this is how it’s explained:
The City has received an Official Plan Amendment and Rezoning application for a 57-storey mixed use tower and a 5-storey commercial building containing 496 residential dwellings, 5,048 square metres of retail gross floor area, and 21,243 square metres of office gross floor area. The 5-storey commercial building is within the Distillery District, and the 57 storey tower is immediately south west of the Distillery District.
About the only thing that I think most people (outside of the industry) would understand are the heights of the buildings. Everything else – from the Official Plan Amendment to the number of square metres of gross retail area – is likely lost.
So it’s actually not surprising that most people just look at one or two renderings and the number of storeys, and then make a judgement call about whether or not it would be a positive thing for the city.
Now, I know why we communicate projects in such a clinical way. It’s to appear impartial. But there are so many other considerations when it comes to great city building.
How does the building meet the street? What are the first couple of floors like at eye-level? What’s the materiality? What would the experience be like for someone having a coffee on a patio outside of the building? What kind of commercial tenants will there be? Is there a unique leasing/programming strategy? What’s the overall vision for the project?
Again, I’m not saying that height is completely irrelevant. I simply fear that we might be losing sight of the bigger picture. The Distillery District is a magical place in Toronto. It’s hands down one of my favorite places to be. In fact, I’ll be there this weekend for a Winterlicious dinner. But I honestly couldn’t tell you how tall the existing towers are. Are they in the 40s?
I could, however, tell you exactly what it’s like to walk down the Distillery’s intimate cobblestone streets and sit on a patio with a beer in hand. It’s a beautiful thing.
Last month Oxford Properties submitted a site plan application for the redevelopment of the rundown Cumberland Terrace in Toronto’s Yorkville neighborhood. If you’d like to browse the full application (including all the drawings), you can do that here.
The proposal is a departure from previous plans and now includes 3 buildings: a 4.5 storey building, a 2.5 storey building, and a midblock 54 storey residential tower (the lobby is shown above). There will be both retail and residential uses.
For those of you familiar with the mall, it should go without saying that Cumberland Terrace is in desperate need of redevelopment. So I’m not going to talk about that today. Instead, I’d like to mention 2 other points that stood out to me about the application.
The first is the 2 midblock connections on either side of the tower, running from Cumberland Street to Mayfair Mews in the rear (see below). Yorkville has a history of intimate laneways, and so it’s nice to see some of this being carried through in a new development. It also opens up the opportunity for an improved Mayfair Mews.
Secondly, it’s somewhat surprising to see that the 54 storey residential tower is being proposed as rental. Toronto doesn’t build a lot of purpose-built rental apartment buildings. There are some (from the likes of Morguard and Concert Properties), but we haven’t done it at scale for decades. And that’s largely because the demand for condos has been so great.
But recently I’ve been noticing a renewed interest from the real estate community in multi-family rental assets. Cadillac Fairview also proposed a 65 storey rental building at the north west corner of Yonge Street & Queen Street last year – though they later withdrew their application.
In the US, rental apartments as a share of all new housing is also at record highs – over 30%. And that’s partly because credit remains tight (certainly compared to pre-2008) and economic growth has been tepid. But also because of demographic changes. People are having fewer children, later in life, and so many are putting off buying.
So I think we’re going to see even more rental apartments being built in Toronto in the coming years.
