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: john lorinc

  • Toronto’s laneways should be mixed-use

    Up until last year, non-residential uses within Toronto’s low-rise neighborhoods were typically legal non-confirming uses. Meaning, the use wasn’t technically allowed, but if it had been there for a long and continuous time, we would let it slide and say it’s legal.

    Then we decided that small-scale retail, service, and office uses might be kind of good in our neighborhoods. Especially if they empower people to perform their daily necessities without a car. So we agreed to allow these sorts of uses provided they don’t annoy too many people.

    But what about in Toronto’s laneways? Can and should they go there, too?

    Recently, we’ve spoken a lot about the case for bottom-up city planning, and the value of micro-spaces and micro-businesses (à la Tokyo). And my overarching argument has been that these are a positive thing for cities. They create opportunity by lowering the barriers to entry.

    But we need to get out of the way and we need small and affordable spaces. Which is why it’s hard to imagine a more ideal place than in our laneways, especially considering that there’s a long history of these spaces being used for exactly this. (Read this recent article by John Lorinc.)

    Fortunately, this idea continues to gain positive momentum, thanks to people like the late Michelle Senayah (co-founder of the Laneway Project) and Blair Scorgie (a partner at Sajecki Planning). So in my mind, it’s only a matter of time before we start getting out of the way.

  • Thoughts on Dupont Street in Toronto

    This morning I spoke to the Globe and Mail about the evolving nature of Dupont Street here in Toronto. The impetus for the discussion was this: Dupont Street is now seeing a lot of residential intensification, but the street itself remains a bit of a crosstown highway. It’s not yet a “complete street.” And since Junction House is effectively on the west end of this midtown artery, John Lorinc asked to get my thoughts.

    The point I tried to make is that, in my opinion, this is first and foremost a zoning issue. Dupont Street is seeing intensification, but it is largely happening on the north side of the street, abutting the rail corridor (purple and red in the above Official Plan map). The south side of the street is, for the most part, a low-rise neighborhood (yellow in the above map).

    This kind of edge condition is somewhat unique in the city: low-rise on one side of the street; higher density housing, retail, and office on the other. But it is particularly problematic if you’re trying to create a great main street, because single-sided retail streets generally don’t work very well.

    We could certainly have a discussion about sidewalk widths, bike lanes, and other streetscape improvements; but in my mind, there is nothing inherently bad about the cross section of this street. The right-of-way width is 20 meters, meaning there are generally two lanes going in each direction. This is a dimension you’ll find all over the city, including on beloved streets like Queen Street.

    The problem here is what is abutting the street, and it is something that is systemic across the city: we have too many arterial roads that only allow for low-rise housing. So if you were to ask me what to do next, and I was asked this morning, the first thing I would do is up-zone the south side of Dupont and allow for non-residential uses at grade.

    And once this is done, I am certain it will snowball many other positive improvements.

  • Rail + property — let’s try it again, okay?

    The Eglinton Crosstown line is going to open, here in Toronto, sometime next year — I think. And I’m sure that it is going to be a massively beneficial addition to Toronto’s transit network. But at the same time, we should be talking about this:

    Urban transit stations shouldn’t look like this. It’s a missed opportunity, both in terms of the foregone housing (and other uses) that could be on top of these stations and the additional value that could have been captured from these air rights. Transit is a crucial lever for land values and development overall, and so it’s no wonder that many of the best transit authorities around the world think in terms of “rail + property”.

    So what happened here?

    I don’t know exactly. But I do know that nearly a decade ago I called up Metrolinx and said, “Hey, so I’m a developer who can build things. I see that you’re building a number of exciting transit stations along Eglinton. Want me to build on top of them for you?” Now obviously Metrolinx wasn’t going to be able to sole-source to Brandon, but regardless, I thought it should happen and I just hoped to be in the mix.

    In 2015, things did start to happen. Avison Young, on behalf of Metrolinx, issued a request for proposal to developers for 4 sites/stations along the line. There were two at Keele Street, one at Weston Road, and one at Bathurst Street. And at the time, it was thought that these sites could generate somewhere between $14-22 million (speaking of reasonable).

    I think it was also being viewed as a bit of a pilot. If things went well with these 4 initial sites, then this same approach was going to be rolled out across all suitable sites on the line. I’m not sure what happened with the RFP or the broader intent — maybe some of you know — but it clearly didn’t pan out as planned.

    That’s too bad. But I suppose done is better than perfect. Plus, now we’re building the Ontario Line and so we have another opportunity to get it right. And right means lots of density on top of stations — both directly on top and all around it.

  • [Video] City building to achieve our carbon emission targets

    Today was the SvNSpeaks event that I blogged about last week. As a reminder, the conversation was about how best to remove overly prescriptive and rigid development policies in order to better achieve our climate change goals. John Lorinc and I ended up agreeing on a lot of points, so maybe that suggests there’s a relatively clear path here. Now it’s just a matter of taking action.

    It was a recorded event on LinkedIn, so if you’d like to have a listen, you can do that over here.

  • SvNSpeaks: How to remove overly prescriptive and rigid development policies

    This event poster has reminded me that, every now and then, I probably need to pull out a cooler headshot. In any event, next week I’m going to be a guest on SvNSpeaks, along with John Lorinc, talking about the obstacles that overly prescriptive and rigid development policies are creating for our climate goals. This is obviously a really important topic. Because if we were singularly focused on reducing carbon emissions, we wouldn’t be building the way we are building today.

    For more information and to register for the virtual event, click here.

  • Unpacking the family condo

    John Lorinc has a piece in the Autumn 2018 issue of University of Toronto Magazine that is worth a read. It covers families in Toronto being priced out of the low-rise housing market and/or making the conscious decision to live in an apartment or condo.

    He raises an important question:

    The big question hovering over this generational transition is all about city-building, and whether increasingly dense metropolitan regions such as Toronto and Vancouver can figure out how to turn all those newly sprouted forests of highrises into true communities that are both affordable and appealing to the wide range of people who call these cities home.

    The reality seems to be that more people in this city – out of economic necessity and/or because of a lifestyle preference – are choosing to raise a family in multi-dwelling housing. I live in a condo and my neighbors are raising a child two doors down from me.

    I am sure that we will continue to see more of this and I am sure that we will get better at designing for families. We are trying to do our part with the 2-storey homes that we have incorporated into our Junction House project. 

    I would, however, like to respond to the underlying tone in the article that but for developers being stubbornly resistant to larger 3-bedroom apartments in this city, we would have a myriad of new condominiums filled with families.

    The reality is that there are market and structural forces (including cultural biases) that steer what gets built.

    There are affordability considerations. Larger condos cost more money than smaller condos. And that prices out many families, particularly if there are cheaper alternatives available in the form of low-rise housing. 

    The reason we appear to be at an inflection point today is because the cheaper alternatives are disappearing. (This of course returns us to the broader question of overall housing affordability.)

    There are also timing and financing considerations that likely create a supply-side bias. Most lenders require that a certain number of condo units be pre-sold before construction starts. 

    This means that, as a developer, you need people that can both afford what you’re selling and that are willing to buy three to five years out, and perhaps even longer. That can be difficult for many families.

    Lastly for this post, there’s the GST/HST New Housing Rebate in Ontario, which I have argued before on the blog could be incentivizing smaller suite sizes and could use a refresh for today’s home prices.

    All of this is not to say that we shouldn’t be designing for urban families and that we shouldn’t be focused on delivering more affordable housing to this and other cities. Those are two very important things.

    It is simply to say: there’s a lot going on here that needs to be unpacked. 

  • Subways – except the downtown relief line

    Politics rewards consistency. Even if you’re wrong, it’s better to be consistently wrong than come across as wavering – however noble and rational the intentions may be. And that’s exactly what happened with Rob Ford and his commitment to subways, subways and subways.

    John Lorinc of Spacing wrote an interesting piece yesterday on how, despite all the debating that went on, Ford is delivering what he said he was going to deliver: a subway. It doesn’t matter that all technical and financial considerations were thrown out the window, he got it funded.

    As I said earlier this week, I think the Scarborough line is the wrong subway to be building and that the downtown relief line is infinitely more important for the region. However, Lorinc makes a good case in his article for why this line will not be funded despite the current focus on subways, subways and subways:

    “Fourth, it’s important to recognize that there will be one notably perverse exception to the foregoing, which is the [Insert Euphemism Here] Relief Line. I do admire Josh Matlow’s advocacy on this front. But Ford will never take up the DRL cause because (i) he doesn’t get the purpose of said extension; and (ii) because the project doesn’t butter his bread, electorally speaking. I’m guessing it will be years before someone with the mayor’s block-headed tenacity emerges to champion a line with a politically inconvenient name and an eye-bulging price tag.

    In fact, the sheer heft of the relief line will allow marginally useful yet politically supported subway projects — extensions in the west end to Sherway Gardens or up Yonge to Richmond Hill – to continue to elbow their way to the front of the line, just exactly as the Scarborough subway project did. Indeed, because we no longer care, at any level of government, about subjecting our transit investment choices to a rational policy framework, the most crucial project in the GTA will always lose out in the funding lottery because it has the most diffuse constituency and the most conceptually complicated purpose.”

    The disparaging thing about these two paragraphs is that it’s a sad reality.