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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Tag: cityplace

  • Live/work in Oklahoma City

    I am really drawn to live/work spaces like these ones here in Oklahoma City’s new Wheeler District. (Additional project info can be found over here.) We have some examples of this in Toronto, but I wouldn’t say it’s commonly done. And oftentimes they don’t work at all. More often than not, these spaces seem to just get used as strictly residential (which is okay).

    But there are some arguably successful examples that we can point to. CityPlace is maybe one. When the area was first getting developed, retail would have been an extremely difficult use to underwrite. It was a development island. And so live/work suites were introduced at grade along much of the area’s main artery.

    The area did eventually get new dedicated retail, but its live/work suites also started taking on more “work” as demand in the area grew. Today, nobody is going to confuse it with Bloor Street, but importantly, the ground floor was able to change and adapt. And this is one of the great benefits, or at least promises, of live/work: you get additional flexibility.

    Personally, I would love to have a live/work space. I’d use it to incubate new ideas and sell random stuff. And I have a feeling that, given the opportunity, many others would do the same. So I plan to spend some more time thinking and writing about this topic. If any of you have shining examples of live/work successes, please share them in the comment section below.

  • Destructive development?

    Planner Sean Hertel shared this (embedded above) on Twitter over the weekend. It is a lawn sign from Toronto’s Junction neighborhood that is calling for a stop to demolishing family houses for high rises.

    From what I can tell, this law sign is trying to communicate a few key messages.

    One, high-rises are monstrous beings that enjoy praying on innocent low-rise houses and squashing them with their feet, and sometimes their asymmetric hands.

    Two, it is mostly impossible to conceive of a world in Toronto where families live in high-rises and don’t live in grade-related housing with a backyard.

    And three, there is little value in building more, rather than less, housing in order to help with affordability concerns. Perhaps the thinking is that it needs to be low-rise affordable housing, or nothing.

    With all of this said, let’s do a little thought exercise today on the blog.

    Let’s for a second assume that there aren’t any high-rises proposed in the Junction; only European-scaled mid-rise buildings that sit on the area’s main avenues and back onto low-rise single-family neighborhoods. Let’s also assume that these buildings will be sculpted in complete deference to their rear neighbors so that things like shadows are minimized.

    Let’s assume that more housing is better than less housing.

    Finally, let’s assume that, get this, noble families may actually be able to live in mid-rise and high-rise buildings. And that there are already many successful examples of this taking place in the city, such as over here in CityPlace.

    What key messages would this lawn sign be then communicating?

  • High-rise urban families in Toronto’s CityPlace

    The narrative in this fairly recent FastCompany article about Toronto’s CityPlace neighborhood is that the area was initially planned and built for young professionals who wanted to be close to work and party. But that it has since evolved to become a more mixed residential community. Over time, the young professionals started having children and now the area is filled with a surprising number of urban families. “Hundreds” according to FastCompany. In response to this shifting demographic, the Canoe Landing Campus was recently completed, containing a community center, two public schools, a public park, and childcare facilities. And apparently it was long overdue.

    This is interesting for a few reasons. CityPlace has long been criticized for its planning. Local Toronto lore has been that the area was destined to become a slum. But is that actually playing out? Anecdotally, it would seem that families are sticking around (and being attracted to the area) and that it’s settling in nicely as an urban residential community. In fact, I wonder if CityPlace might be emerging as one of the areas in the city with the highest concentration of high-rise urban families. I quickly tried to find some data on this but couldn’t.

    Something else worth pointing out: One of the objections that you’ll often here when it comes to new development is that there isn’t the infrastructure in place to support it. Where are the schools? Where are the community centers? And where are the hipster coffee shops? Because without these invaluable things, development should be stopped immediately. Now I’m not suggesting that these things aren’t important. But the CityPlace example is yet another reminder that cities and neighborhoods evolve — often in fortuitous ways. The best city building is nimble and entrepreneurial.

  • Golden hour cranes

    I was out this past Saturday evening with my Fujifilm X-T3. I usually always have it on me when I’m traveling, but less so when I’m at home. It can be harder to be a “tourist” in your own city because things don’t stand out in the same way. And oftentimes it is that novelty which sparks the desire to take a photo. But that’s no excuse. So here are two photos that I took right before sunset from CityPlace, Toronto. The cranes you see in the first picture (mostly) belong to The Well.

  • Fabricating a new urbanism

    image

    Last night I was in CityPlace, West Palm Beach. Completed in 2000, CityPlace is a quintessential example of New Urbanism. (For those of you from Toronto, this is a different kind of a CityPlace.)

    In case you’re unfamiliar with this movement, here’s a snippet from The Charter of New Urbanism (via Wikipedia):

    “We advocate the restructuring of public policy and development practices to support the following principles: neighborhoods should be diverse in use and population; communities should be designed for the pedestrian and transit as well as the car; cities and towns should be shaped by physically defined and universally accessible public spaces and community institutions; urban places should be framed by architecture and landscape design that celebrate local history, climate, ecology, and building practice.”

    At a high level, New Urbanism makes a lot of sense. American cities were sprawling uncontrollably and so advocates had decided that something had to change. The Congress for New Urbanism was founded in 1993.

    But the New Urbanism movement has had its share of critics. Here’s how Witold Rybczynski – professor at the University of Pennsylvania – talked about it on his blog:

    “What are the important ideas that have affected American cities in the last 20 years? The development of waterfronts. The renaissance in constructing urban parks. The move of genXers and retirees into downtowns. High-rise urban living and Vancouverism. The popularity of urban bicycling and bike-rental programs. Ditto for Zipcars. Urban farmers markets and community gardens. Urban charter schools. The dramatic expansion in attendance of urban cultural institutions, especially art museums. Urban tourism. Downtown trophy buildings. The emergence of influential big-city mayors. Have any of these been the result of the new urbanism movement?”

    Frankly, I have never been a big follower of New Urbanism. It has always felt artificial to me. But I recognize the immense challenge in transforming car-oriented cities and communities into walkable ones. It’s one of the greatest challenges in city building. You’re asking people to change their habits.

    If any of you are experts on New Urbanism (because I am certainly not), I would love to hear from you in the comment section below.

  • Tower renewal

    Before I went to bed last night, I stumbled upon this Globe and Mail article talking about Toronto’s Tower Renewal program. Here’s a snippet:

    “In the postwar period, Canadian cities, particularly Toronto, grew differently from those in the United States, following a European-style model of regional planning. Regional governments insisted on building suburbs that were dense and housed people of all income levels. Apartment towers helped balance out the pricier single-family houses that middle-class people preferred – and a generation of new Canadians, and those migrating from rural Canada, arrived to fill those apartments. It was good planning on a massive scale, in line with the market.”

    If you know Toronto’s urban landscape, you’ll know that this is true. The city is dotted with suburban tower clusters, many of which were built in the 60s and 70s during our last high rise boom. But these towers have now aged and the Corbusier style “tower in the park” planning ideology has proven to be a failure.

    The Tower Renewal program is designed to not only retrofit those buildings, but also reposition how those buildings fit in with the larger urban fabric. In most cases, that’ll mean adding more density to the site and activating the street level through retail and other uses.

    It’s absolutely the right move. I think that suburban intensification is something we’re going to have to do all across the board to correct some of the planning mistakes we’ve made in the past and to make our cities more livable.

    But the real question in my mind is whether we can transform the way people think about high rise living.

    If you take a look at the snippet I included above, what is basically being said is that we built towers for poor people and immigrants coming to Canada. We slapped a “park” on the end of the neighbourhood’s name (Regent Park, Flemingdon Park, Thorncliffe Park, etc.) and thought we had created something really quite nice.

    Some neighbourhoods, such as St. James Town, were initially intended to attract young and hip urbanites. But was it ever really the King West of its day? The middle class preferred single family houses and that’s where they went, leaving the tower communities to those who had no other choice.

    Today, many of these tower communities represent one of Toronto’s 13 “priority neighbourhoods.” These are neighbourhoods considered to be in social and economic need. Given this outcome, there’s no shortage of people comparing our new high rise communities, such as CityPlace, to older ones such as St. James Town. Is history repeating itself?

    But I think things are a bit different this time around. We’re building more condos than rental apartments and we know that housing tenure can matter. There’s been a return to cities. People genuinely like living in walkable communities close to amenities. The region is becoming increasingly harder to navigate by car. And the price of single family homes is no longer within the reach of many middle class families.

    What all this mean is that I think Toronto is in the early stages of transitioning to a city where more and more people actually live and raise families in multi-family dwellings. I disagree with the notion that we’re already there, because even though we have lots of high rises, they’re often viewed as a stepping stone towards a more desirable form of housing.

    The true test will be when this generation of condo dwellers grows up and decides to have a family. Will they stay put or once again search out the seemingly necessary single family home?