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: midtown toronto

  • Dupont Street to become a complete street

    The City of Toronto is proposing to turn Dupont Street — between Dundas Street West and Davenport Road — into a “complete street.”

    Here’s the area in question:

    It’s 4.7 kilometers long.

    And here’s how the city thinks about complete streets:

    “Complete streets” are streets that are designed to be safe for all users: people who walk, bicycle, take transit or drive, and people of varying ages and levels of ability. They also consider other uses like sidewalk cafés, street furniture, street trees, utilities, and stormwater management.

    Right now, the city is in the public consultation phase. If you’d like to provide your feedback, you can do that here. You have until October 30th. The online tool is also pretty neat. You can drop comments on specific areas of the street. And already the map has been totally filled up.

    This is an important and busy artery in midtown. I use it all the time as a pedestrian, cyclist, and driver. It’s not the best street, though. Yesterday it took me 45 minutes to drive from one end of it to the other. Along with better street design, this part of the city could use better transit.

    I’m looking forward to seeing how Dupont ultimately gets designed.

  • Three ways to optimize investments in transit

    Sometimes I’ll hear people in Toronto talk pejoratively about all of the development that’s been happening at Yonge & Eglinton (in midtown). They’ll say it’s too much density.

    But then you come across charts like the ones above (source previously shared here) and you realize that this location is the only section along the new Eglinton Crosstown LRT line that is actually starting to have enough people.

    Based on 2021 Census data, there were about 40k people within 800m of the future Eglinton and Mount Pleasant stations. In contrast, there are many downtown stations along the Ontario Line (also under construction) with around 80k people.

    Why this is important is because if the objective is to get people to ride this new transit and collect a lot of fares, then the single most important factor is going to be the amount of people that live, work, and play adjacent to each station.

    Now, I’m not a transportation planner, but in my mind there are three simple ways to think and go about optimizing for this:

    1. You can look at where population densities are already high and then add new transit to service these densities. This is what is happening with the Ontario Line and it was long overdue. We know that ridership is going to be relatively high because of the chart at the top of this post.
    2. You can look at where there’s existing transit and then work to optimize the land uses around it. This is what we should be doing a better job of along the Bloor-Danforth line, where certain station areas have actually lost people over the last few decades. This is the opposite of what you want next to transit investments.
    3. Lastly, you can also proactively plan new transit while simultaneously encouraging more density. An example of this would be the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre (just north of Toronto). Extend the line and encourage growth. This is good. The only thing with this approach is that it can seem a bit misaligned if you’re currently failing at #1 and #2.

  • Traffic counts at Yonge & St. Clair since 1984

    Matt Elliott writes a newsletter called the City Hall Watcher. And one of his features is something called Intersection Inspection. It is where he does a deep dive into traffic counts and modal splits for intersections across Toronto. This week, he covered Yonge & St. Clair in midtown, and so I thought it would be interesting to share it on the blog. (Thanks to Canada Record for the tag on X.)

    Here are traffic counts for the intersection going back to 1984:

    What seems clear is that Yonge & St. Clair is fairly evenly divided between cars and pedestrians. And it has been this way going back many decades. At the same time, though, the volume of cars seems to be declining. According to the above data, cars haven’t seen a count above 20,000 since 2014. There does also seem to be a slight spike in bike usage recently (this is broken out further in Matt’s newsletter).

    Data is crucial to good city building and I don’t think it is leveraged nearly enough. For example, take the intersection of Baldwin St and Kensington Ave in Toronto’s Kensington Market. If you look at the traffic counts (which can also be found in the above newsletter), you’ll see that 88% of traffic tends to be from pedestrians (79%) and bikes (9%). Only 12% of traffic is from cars.

    With this data in hand, you might, then, ask yourself: Should Kensington Market be mostly pedestrianized? And in my opinion, this is a lot easier to answer when you have numbers in front of you telling you how humans actually occupy the area.

  • 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.

  • Corktown Condos to launch sales this spring

    Earlier this week, I shared this image of Corktown Condos on my Instagram. It represents the first phase of Slate’s two-phase project in Hamilton, and I’m excited to announce that we’ll be launching sales this spring (both in Hamilton and in Toronto).

    We love Hamilton. It has walkability, transit, a wonderful stock of old buildings, and a dynamic and growing cultural scene. In other words, it has all of the characteristics that we look for when it comes to new projects. And here, our approach to city building is exactly analogous to what we did in Toronto at Yonge & St. Clair.

    Those of you who are familiar with our work will know that Slate owns 8 office buildings in midtown, including all four corners of the Yonge & St. Clair intersection. And that we have spent the last decade investing in these buildings, investing in the public realm, investing in public art, and working to support businesses in the area. Then in 2021, we launched sales on a landmark condominium tower called One Delisle that is now under construction.

    Here in Hamilton, we are similarly investing in economic development and in housing. Last year, it was announced that we acquired approximately 800 acres of industrial land and buildings on Hamilton’s waterfront. This site alone has the potential to create up to 23,000 new jobs across the region and inject up to $3.8 billion into Ontario’s economy. It will likely also take some time and be measured in decades.

    We prefer to think of ourselves as city builders. And that means taking a long-term view and thinking about the broader city — not just about our individual projects. So for us, Corktown is part of a much larger and longer-term commitment to the City of Hamilton. And we couldn’t be more excited to share it with all of you in the coming weeks.

    Stay tuned. And if you’d like to register for Corktown, you can do that over here.

  • One Delisle has started the big hole part

    The most boring part of constructing a high-rise, like One Delisle, has got to be installing the shoring piles. Sure there are big rigs moving about on site but, for the most part, there’s almost no visible progress. That is, until you start excavating. Then you get to see said piles and you also end up with a big hole, which is something.

    Thankfully shoring works are now complete at One Delisle and we have started on the big hole part (see above photo from our rooftop cam). The next major milestone will be our “bottoming out,” and that’s when the tower crane will go up and our massive raft slab foundation will get poured. Visible progress is certainly more fun.

  • The Architect’s Newspaper — 2022 Best of Design Awards

    This week AN announced its 2022 Best of Design Awards, which is intended to celebrate outstanding built and unbuilt architectural projects from around the world. And this year I am excited to share that Studio Gang was awarded two editors’ picks: one for 11 Hoyt in Brooklyn (Built-Residential, Multi-Unit) and one for One Delisle here in Toronto (Unbuilt-Residential, Multi-Unit). Selfishly, it of course makes me very happy to see our project being celebrated for its architecture. Go team! But from a less selfish perspective, it also makes me very happy to see Toronto being recognized in these awards. Because this is about city building, right?

  • ONE DELISLE: Official launch video

    Last week was the official broker launch for One Delisle. In normal times, we would have packed the house and done a fun in-person event involving food, and probably some negronis. Instead, Lucas, Riz, and I did a livestream from the sales gallery at Yonge & St. Clair.

    That video is now available online (embedded above and here). You’ll have to get past our hair (Lucas and I are both in desperate need of a cut), but otherwise it’s pretty cool. Shoutout to Veronica for pulling everything together and making it awesome.

    If you’d like to schedule an appointment at the sales gallery, send a note to sales@onedelisle.com. Please also feel free to contact me directly (or copy me on the email to the sales team). If you’re interested, I would encourage you to act quickly as demand has been incredibly strong.

  • Introducing the One Delisle video series — a renaissance at Yonge and St. Clair

    Today I am excited to share the first episode in a new film series about One Delisle and the surrounding neighborhood of Yonge and St. Clair in midtown Toronto. Created for Slate Asset Management by the award-winning UK filmmakers, Raspberry and Jam, the series is about telling the story of how Studio Gang’s first ever project in Canada came to be. (Hint: It started with a neighborhood and not with an individual building.) Episode one is called “A Renaissance at Yonge and St. Clair” and you can view it over at onedelisle.com. Stay tuned for episode two and for the upcoming launch of One Delisle this spring.

  • Studio Gang: Architecture

    Phaidon — publisher of books on art, design, architecture, food, and fashion — has a new publication coming out this summer called, Studio Gang: Architecture. They are describing it as: “An in-depth exploration of one of the most important, innovative, and creative architecture practices working today.” As most of you know, we are working with Studio Gang on an important project in midtown Toronto. And so we are of course thrilled to see the firm’s work being celebrated. To pre-order a copy of the book, click here. They are supposed to start shipping around mid-May.