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: infill housing

  • New acquisition for Globizen Flats: 571 Oakwood Avenue in Toronto

    This week, Globizen announced a new acquisition for our Flats division: 571 Oakwood Avenue in Toronto.

    This is an exciting moment for us because it marks the first project in our strategy of unlocking underutilized urban sites to create thoughtfully crafted, design-forward rental homes in walkable, transit-oriented communities across Toronto.

    The mission is simple:

    • Fill a Housing Need: We believe there’s a gap in the market for spacious, well-designed, family-oriented rental homes at accessible price points.
    • Support Toronto’s Urban Evolution: We believe that Toronto is at a unique turning point in its urban history, transitioning from a monocentric downtown surrounded by low-rise suburbs to a polycentric city that fundamentally rethinks its relationship to the car.
    • Invest in Renewable Energy: Canada needs more clean energy capacity. We see this as an opportunity to create a decentralized renewable energy asset alongside our communities.

    Globizen Flats is a response to these beliefs.

    Check out the full post in the Globizen Journal. You can also subscribe and follow Globizen Flats (@globizenflats) on Instagram.

    As an aside, I initially created the above toilet image as a joke. It’s a photo of the bathroom in the existing house on site. But my partners thought it was cool and that we should share it publicly, so here we are. I bet that toilet was the neatest thing when it was first installed.

  • How Tokyo fits 11 homes on 1,600 square feet

    Last week, Globizen shared this 11-unit condominium project in Tokyo on Instagram. Some of you may like the design by Ryuichi Sasaki Architecture, and some of you may not. But regardless, it’s an interesting case study in that the site area is only 152.27 square metres (or 1,639 square feet). The building footprint is 84.86 square metres and the total floor area is 416.68 square metres. If we divide the total area by 11 units, we get an average area per home of only 37.88 square metres, and so these are certainly on the compact side. Here are the floor plans:

    The unit composition is as follows:

    • Ground and basement: 2 x 2-storey homes
    • Levels 2-3: 6 x single-storey homes
    • Levels 4-5: 3 homes, 2 of which are 2-storey homes

    The other thing you’ll notice is that there’s a single access stair in the middle of the building. As compact as the homes may be, it is this point-access-block design that unlocks the site. To put the site area into perspective, it is almost certainly smaller than the average single-family lot in the central parts of Toronto. A 20′ x 100′ lot is 2,000 square feet, versus the 1,639 square feet we have here (though the proportions are different).

    I’m not suggesting that 37.88-square-metre homes are the objective; rather, I’m suggesting that reducing the barriers to developing small infill sites will unlock new housing opportunities that can then be tailored to the needs of the market. Had two egress stairs been required for this building, it would look very different, and may not have ever been built.

    Floor plans from Ryuichi Sasaki Architecture

  • Toronto is looking to remove garden suite zoning permissions from this street

    Toronto has been making great progress when it comes to allowing more housing in its low-rise neighborhoods. We now allow laneway suites, garden suites, multiplexes, and soon we’ll allow 6-storey apartments. But interestingly enough, there is one small part of the city that is looking to regress. This past summer, council asked planning staff to bring forward a zoning by-law amendment to remove garden suite permissions for some of the properties backing onto Craven Road, near Danforth and Coxwell.

    Here’s a community consultation flyer that went out to residents and that shows the affected properties:

    We’ve spoken about Craven Road before. It’s a relatively odd street with a unique history. Its most obvious characteristic is that it’s a kind of single-sided street. For the most part, there are homes on the east side of the street, but no homes on the west side. On the non-home side there is typically a garage, or the longest municipally-owned fence in the city. Here’s some of the backstory on Craven Road’s infamous fence (which occurs on a stretch further south), and below is what the study area in question looks like today:

    So why remove the garden suite permissions here? The answer is to block housing. The people who live on Craven Road like it the way it is and don’t want anyone to build new housing on the other side of the street. What’s interesting about this is that it roughly mirrors what happened over a century ago. We couldn’t figure out how to broker a deal between two adjacent streets and so we just said “screw it, let’s build a really really long fence and call it a day.”

    Today we’re saying, “yeah, we really need more housing in the city, but I dunno, somebody might get upset here.” There is nothing sacrosanct about the old garages, or the fence, that line the west side of Craven. It is a street, proximate to a major subway station, that is missing homes on one entire side. It’s low hanging fruit for infill housing. In fact, there’s an easy argument to be made that garden suites aren’t nearly enough density for a location like this. We should be encouraging a lot more.

    But this is just my opinion. If you’d like to share yours, the City of Toronto is hosting a community meeting this week on September 19, 2024 from 7 – 830 PM. To participate, register here.

  • Paseo Mallorca 15

    This is a beautiful apartment building in the center of Palma. Brutalist ground floor. Operable wooden slats up the rest of the facade. It feels right at home in this climate. It’s also a passive-energy building that uses 90% less energy compared to a “conventional” apartment building. The technical classification is nZEB (or a nearly zero energy building). It’s pretty amazing that with only 9 apartments, these kinds of projects pencil here. Perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s also a single-stair building.

    The architect is OHLAB. For more information, here’s their website.

  • XS in Philadelphia, not Tokyo

    This is the sort of housing project that you’d fully expect to find in Tokyo. Seven homes built on a small urban lot measuring only 11 feet wide by 93 feet deep. But in this case, it’s not Tokyo; it’s Chinatown, Philadelphia, where a residual lot that was created when the sunken Vine Street Expressway was carved through the middle of the city in the 1950s.

    Designed by Philadelphia-based Interface Studio Architects (ISA), the project contains 7 levels of livable space. What’s interesting, though, is that from a building code perspective this is still a 4-story building. There are two mezzanine levels that don’t get counted (and that create some great double-height spaces). This also seems to be what allowed them to get away with a single egress stair in the middle of the building.

    The other technique that was used to maximum density is facade projections. Philadelphia’s zoning code allows for projections up to 3 feet in the horizontal dimension. And if you look at the above plans, you’ll see that these were used to “top up” or extend the site’s 11 foot width to 14 feet, when it made sense to do so from a programming standpoint. The result is some very livable spaces.

    I am endlessly fascinated by these sorts of projects because they demand creativity and because you ultimately end up unlocking something that the market had been overlooking. Here is an example of a small leftover urban parcel that was previously used as surface parking for two cars. Now it’s seven beautiful homes.

    Photos/drawings: ISA

  • Project Profile: Iconik Apartments, Prague

    Today, let’s take a look at the Iconik Apartments in Prague.

    Completed in 2023 and designed by edit!, this mid-rise project is split into two distinct volumes — a 9-story one and an 8-story one. This was done to respond to both the surrounding context and the way that the parcels were divided on the site prior to redevelopment. In total, the building is 5,433 m2 and has 48 apartments.

    There are 3 levels of below-grade parking, which are accessed via a single parking elevator (pictured above). Based on the one example parking plan provided (which has 13 spaces), I’m guessing the project has somewhere around ~39 total parking spaces (13 x 3). This is a higher parking ratio (39/48 = 0.81) than I would have expected for what looks to be a central and urban location.

    The color of the traffic coating in the garage is nice, though.

    The lobby is simple. It contains one elevator and one staircase running up the building. I like how prominent and accessible they made the latter. It encourages you to take the stairs if you live on one of the lower floors.

    Above is what one of these lower floors might look like. There are two dual-aspect apartments on either end of the plate, meaning they have windows facing both the street and the rear courtyard. There are also a handful of studio apartments facing this same courtyard.

    Finally, above is what the outdoor spaces look like for the penthouses at the top. The clear heights appear a little low, but presumably they were working to an overall building height.

    I like studying this scale of project because it is a housing type that we should be building more of in our cities. So it is helpful to see how others are doing it. In the case, there are a number of obvious takeaways: no onerous loading/servicing requirements on the ground floor, a single parking elevator in lieu of a space-consumptive ramp (though less parking would would be even more ideal), and a single means of egress throughout the building.

    If you’re looking to build at this scale, these are good places to start.

    Drawings/Photos: edit! and BoysPlayNice

  • Building a home on a constrained site

    I’m so predictable. This is the kind of house that tends to grab my attention: modern design, relatively small footprint (~7.8m x 12.3m), narrow street (~4m), and panoramic views (of Seoul). But what does it take to actually build a house like this in an urban fabric as dense as Seoul’s?

    If you read TIUM Architect’s description (using Google Translate for those of us who don’t speak Korean), you’ll see that the house was built out of concrete and steel, but that concrete trucks couldn’t stage on the narrow and dead-end street.

    So what they ended up having to do was build a 100-meter concrete conveying pipe (~328 feet) and staging somewhere else. It was such a pain in the ass that they only wanted to do this for the foundations. The rest of the house was built out of steel. (I think because of the clear spans that they wanted.)

    Sometimes small infill projects aren’t as simple as they may seem. In this case, the lot size is 92 m2. The building footprint is 51.53 m2 (56% lot coverage). And the total floor area is 136.52 m2.

    Photo: Lee Hanul via ArchDaily

  • This is how many more people Toronto could house if it increased its population density

    As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about infill housing and overall urban densities, let’s look at some basic math.

    The City of Toronto has an estimated population of 3,025,647 (as of June 2023) and a land area of 630 square meters. That means that its average population density is about 4,803 people per km2. Obviously this number will be higher in some locations, and lower in others. But overall, this is the average.

    Now let’s consider how many people we could actually fit within the existing boundaries of the city (city proper not the metro area) if we were to simply match the average population densities of some other global cities around the world.

    Again, what this chart is saying is that if we took the same physical area (Toronto’s 630 square meters) and just increased the population density to that of, say, Paris, we would then have a total population of over 13 million people and we’d be housing an additional 10,011,573 humans on the same footprint.

    I am not suggesting that this is exactly what should be done. (Though, you all know how much I love Paris.) What I’m suggesting is that calling a place “full” isn’t exactly accurate. How would you even measure that? What someone is really saying is that they are content with the status quo in terms of built form and density.

    Note: The above population densities were all taken from Wikipedia, except for Toronto’s figures, which were taken from here.

  • We’re far from full

    I tweeted this out yesterday:

    What I was getting at is that there’s lots of available room within our existing boundaries for infill housing. We are nowhere near full, despite what some people will tell you. In fact, most areas are not dense enough to properly support modes of transport that aren’t the car.

    Of course, there are a number of ways that one could be offended by a statement like this.

    One, you could argue that more density would make the city unlivable. Two, you could get into the chicken-and-egg game of whether a more expansive transit system is needed before allowing more density. Three, you could say that we already have enough zoned and unbuilt housing supply — so why do we need more? And I’m sure that there are many others that I’m not mentioning here.

    Density can be a counterintuitive feature for cities. It can actually make a place more livable by encouraging more amenities adjacent to where people live and work, and it can also reduce traffic congestion by empowering alternative forms of mobility. If the only reasonable way to get around is by car, then of course most people will drive.

    We also need to avoid the chicken-and-egg mental trap when it comes to mobility infrastructure. Land use and transportation always work hand in hand and need to be thought of and executed on simultaneously.

    Finally, the objection of already having lots of sites zoned for new housing is an enticing one. But zoned and delivered are two vastly different things. And the unfortunate reality is that there are a lot of zoned sites that won’t be able to develop in the short and medium terms because the market isn’t there. But that doesn’t mean that other housing typologies couldn’t be built.

    At the same time, we need move away from “cruise ships of urbanity.” Broadly speaking, Paris — to cite just one of many examples– is at least and on average about 4x denser than Toronto. And somehow, people still like living and visiting there.

  • 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