In the wake of Bill 23, there has been a lot of discussion and concern around development charges and parkland dedication revenues. At a high level, the concern is that the proposed changes will reduce the amount of money that cities are able to collect… Read More
Deeply affordable housing is mostly infeasible to build. This is why you don’t see the market naturally building this kind of housing on its own. It, for the most part, doesn’t make any economic sense to do so. So this is also why the US… Read More
The big news this week for Toronto city builders is that the city has put forward a proposal to substantially increase development charges. Here’s a tweet storm that I published earlier today on the topic, and here’s a summary of what the new fees might… Read More
There are many development narratives that I don’t quite understand. (I’m thinking of Toronto, but you can probably replace Toronto with any number of global cities for this discussion.) One is the belief that our transit network is full and so no new development should… Read More
Currently, if you’re building an Ancillary Secondary Dwelling Unit (such as a laneway suite) in the City of Toronto, you can defer the payment of any development charges for 20 years from the date that a building permit is issued for the unit. But really… Read More
A colleague of mine sent me this Bloomberg article today and said, “Here’s an article about things you already know.” The article cites a recent report by Altus Group that compared government-related fees on new housing across Canada and the U.S. What they discovered will… Read More
Emily Badger’s recent piece on “how ‘developer’ became such a dirty word” has been getting passed around within the industry over the last few days. I had a chuckle when I read this bit: The notion that development is inherently bad, or that developers are… Read More
In Toronto we have something known as Development Charges. In the US, they are more commonly referred to as Development Impact Fees, which in my view, lends a certain precision to their intent. The idea behind these fees is that they account for some or… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 