This is an interesting article about the neighborhood-based social network, Nextdoor, and how it has become a tool for housing politics: Overall, activists both for and against more housing regard Nextdoor as an increasingly influential and even critical tool in the fight, which conflicts with… Read More
Over the past few years, I have been writing about the fall off in public transit ridership that we have seen as a result of the pandemic. Most recently, I mentioned it in my predictions for 2023. This topic doesn’t seem to get a lot… Read More
The headline, here, is that “the US is running short of land for housing.” But if you read the article, you’ll see that the headline should probably read, “the US has land-use restrictions in place that make it unnecessarily difficult to build enough new housing.”… Read More
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just published its latest climate change report. Available here. As a follow-up to this report, Dezeen spoke with Hélène Chartier of the sustainable urbanism network C40 Cities. And she makes some very good points about the… Read More
Somebody on Twitter responded to my recent post about inclusionary zoning and asked: Aren’t all the upzonings that the City is already doing a kind of density bonus? In other words, and this is me elaborating here, why is there an economic “shortfall?” Why does… Read More
Vitalik Buterin — who is best known as the cofounder of Ethereum — recently penned this post on his blog where he argues that “crypto cities broadly are an idea whose time has come.” (Credit to Shamez Virani for sending the post to me this… Read More
There was a good discussion on Twitter this morning about small-scale commercial uses in residential neighborhoods, like the coffee shop shown above on Shaw Street. In most residential neighborhoods in Toronto, this kind of commercial activity is not permitted if you were to try and… Read More
A bunch of people have asked me lately about what they should do if they want to get smarter on land use planning and on the entitlement process for development projects. It was specific to Toronto, but I don’t think my answer is specific to… Read More
Jennifer Keesmaat – the former chief planner of Toronto – recently published an article in Maclean’s called: Toronto’s unaffordable. Why can’t Halifax or Saskatoon take advantage? Her argument: “The hard truth is that many mid-sized cities won’t win the future because they are stuck on… Read More
I have Richard Florida’s recent book, The New Urban Crisis, sitting on my bedside table. I’m only about ¼ of the way through it, but I’m really enjoying it. I’ll write more once I’m done. What I instead want to talk about today is a… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 