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: planning

  • We should build more nice places to live

    Nice places to live — however you want to define that — tend to be expensive places to live. There are all sorts of reasons why this might be the case. Perhaps it’s on a body of water, next to a park, or it has some other redeeming qualities.

    Daniel Herriges of Strong Towns makes a cogent argument, here, that when it comes to nice and desirable places it usually comes down to one thing: scarcity. Demand > supply. But on top of this, he argues that in most cases, the supply constraint is artificial.

    Here’s an excerpt:

    In fact, our shortage of nice places is almost totally self-imposed. And it’s precisely because 98% of the North American built environment is so blah that the 2% of places that are really well-designed environments quickly get bid up by the rich and become inaccessible to the rest of us. The solution to this isn’t to stop creating such places, but to create vastly more of them.

    He goes on:

    The same story applies to the countless row house neighborhoods of the Northeast, Chicago, and San Francisco. In city after city, the mass-market, working-class housing of its time has acquired a distinctly bourgeois reputation today. In all cases, the reason lies in economics, not design. What’s abundant becomes culturally coded as middlebrow; what’s scarce becomes culturally coded as elite.

    We have talked before on the blog about how tastes change over time and how housing that was previously undesirable can sometimes/oftentimes become desirable given enough time.

    My sense is that there are a number of factors at play here and it’s perhaps a bit difficult to decode where new “cultural coding” truly starts. But I very much appreciate Daniel’s scarcity argument. Scarcity drives so much in markets (just look at the NFT art market right now and the fixation on rarity tables).

    But let me be the devil’s advocate. If we were to be successful at building no blah and all nice stuff, wouldn’t the rich just seek out a new 2% rarity? And if so, would the 98% still seem just as nice?

    Either way, more nice places to live should always be the ambition.

  • A solution by Brown + Storey Architects for Toronto’s Un-Avenues

    James Brown and Kim Storey, who are partners at Brown + Storey Architects Inc., recently put forward this intensification proposal for Toronto’s non-Avenue-designated arterial roads. (The term Avenue is an important designation in Toronto planning.) They call these streets Un-Avenues and here’s what they are getting at with this definition:

    The “Un-Avenues” are the city’s north-south arteries, where the standard residential street was widened in the mid-20th century to allow for more lanes for more cars and vehicular intensification. They are not generally lined with retail, but rather with the original houses that have been devalued because of their location on the arterial roads.

    These roads often serve as busy bus routes that connect directly to subways. The widening of the roads has meant there are no trees, narrow sidewalks, and negligible front. Four lanes of rush hour traffic are provided, with rare provisions for bike lanes.

    The Un-Avenues run silently through the single-family residential zones of Toronto. As countless articles have pointed out, the “yellow belt,” where the single-family house reigns, occupies a substantial swath of Toronto real estate on any zoning map.

    It is hard not to drive or move through Toronto’s “Un-Avenues” without thinking that they belong in a different era. They speak to a Toronto that was much smaller and that was not yet a global city. There’s little urbanity. And no grandeur. They feel a bit like forgotten streets in a city that has otherwise decided to grow up.

    Here’s what Brown + Storey are proposing as a solution (images via Spacing):

    I haven’t spent enough time going through the proposal to comment on whether or not I think this is exactly what should be done. There is also the minor issue of single-family homeowners accepting towers, or anything really, next to their backyards. But I do feel strongly that something needs to be done — for reasons of affordability, livability, urban beauty, and a bunch of other reasons.

  • Speed and simplicity in Vancouver

    This is a good follow-up to my recent post about the barriers to developing mid-rise here in Toronto. I have just learned (thanks to Michael Mortensen) that Vancouver has proposed some specific zoning changes that are intended to increase the supply of new rental housing.

    Oddly enough, some of these proposed changes are consistent with what I put forward in my post and include 1) streamlining the development approvals process and 2) simplifying the allowable built form. i.e. Fewer step-backs.

    Here’s a capture from the report that went to City Council:

    The report is dated May 2020 and I truthfully don’t know the current status of these proposed changes. I’m sure Michael would have all of the details. But regardless, the report very clearly acknowledges that lengthy entitlement timelines are a barrier to new rental housing, as are more complicated building forms. Speed and simplicity can go a long way.

    For the full staff report, click here.

  • Building cool things is not as easy as it may seem

    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 initiate it today. The small convenience stores and bodegas that remain are often legal non-conforming uses. And while generally considered desirable in their current confirm, if you were to try and make a change, you could get caught in some municipal red tape where your grandfathered status suddenly no longer applies.

    That is exactly what happened in the case of the above coffee shop and, from the discussions that happened on Twitter this morning, it is a problem that is not unique to Toronto. Alex Bozikovic wrote about this coffee shop and this project in the Globe and Mail over seven years ago. Getting it approved and built was no easy task. And my friend Jeremiah Shamess — who renovated a similar and formerly commercial corner building in the area — ran into the exact same challenges.

    But let’s consider the other side of this argument for a minute. It’s easy to look at a great and well-designed neighborhood coffee shop like this one and say to yourself that it is obviously a desirable use and that we should be encouraging more of them in our residential neighborhoods. But what if it was a noisy late-night bar, a nail salon, or a massage parlor? Would your opinion change? Would it change if you were an immediate neighbor? It is perhaps easy to see why the fear of the things we don’t want has led us to sterilize our neighborhoods to the point where we no longer allow the things that we may in fact want.

    And herein lies the immense frustration that many of us have with our land use policies. There are countless examples of obviously desirable uses and built forms that are exceedingly difficult to execute on because of the barriers that we ourselves have put in place. Whether it’s a cool neighborhood coffee shop or new affordable housing, there are far too many examples of these sorts of projects being stuck in some kind of planning ether — sometimes for decades. We say and know that we want these things, but then it is frequently the case that we can’t get out of the way so that they can actually happen.

  • Garden suites are coming to Toronto next year

    With laneway suites permitted as-of-right across the entirety of Toronto, the City is now looking to other forms of accessory dwelling units and other ways to increase the supply of rental housing. The next frontier is likely to be something that the City is broadly referring to as garden suites. And the timing is likely to be as early as next summer. Here’s how they’re defining it (taken from this recent report):

    Garden Suites are sometimes referred to by other names, such as “coach houses”, “tiny
    homes”, and even “granny flats”. However they are all effectively the same idea – a
    detached accessory dwelling unit generally located in the rear yard of a detached
    house, semi-detached house, townhouse, or other low-rise dwelling. It is generally
    smaller in scale, functioning as a separate rental housing unit. Garden Suites are similar
    in form and function to Laneway Suites, which are currently permitted across the City in
    all low-rise residential zones in the city-wide Zoning By-law, 569-2013. To avoid any
    confusion between these terms, the City is considering all types of detached-accessory dwelling-unit to be a Garden Suite, for the purpose of this review, with the exception of a
    Laneway Suite, which is already permitted and defined within the Zoning By-law.

    The above report will be going to Planning and Housing Committee on December 8, 2020. The goals are to kickstart the public consultation process and to come up with the necessary recommendations to permit garden suites by the second quarter of 2021. Like laneway suites, they are expected to be as-of-right. That means straight to building permit. No variances (and contentious Committee of Adjustment meetings) required.

    This is great news and I’m looking forward to seeing garden suites become a reality in 2021. For more information about what’s happening on December 8th, click here.

  • The art of the possible

    Architect Sheena Sharp, of Coolearth Architecture, tweeted something interesting out today:

    Improving this would be good. And it is the same gripe that I had with architecture school when I was there. Why is it taboo to talk about money and the market? Why must design exist, in many instances, within a vacuum?

    I can appreciate the value in not always constraining yourself with the status quo. To innovate, you have to stretch. And sometimes, or perhaps oftentimes, the best ideas initially seem dumb. It’s important to have room to experiment and tinker.

    But eventually, reality does matter. Plans that look good on paper, may not be suitable for the market. Constraints are a big part of what makes the city building industry so rewarding. Planning is hard. Building is hard. Getting consensus is hard. It’s all incredibly difficult and you have to be creative.

    The really elegant solutions usually need to weave across and through many different objectives and stakeholders. And so in my view, the more you can empathize with those other constraints, the more elegant your solution will be. Knowing more is good.

  • La ville du quart d’heure, but also the value of centralization

    These days, everybody seems to be talking about the 15-minute city — Bloomberg, Treehugger, the Financial Times, as well as countless others. While not a new concept, it is a moniker that is easier for most people to digest. COVID-19 has also created the right backdrop for the moment that it is currently enjoying.

    The 15-minute city is a polycentric and somewhat decentralized approach to urbanism. It is about encouraging and creating multiple centers of urban activity near where people live. The idea being that everybody should have most of their essential services within a 15-minute walk of their home. Put even more simply, it’s about creating an urban environment where people can live locally.

    The benefits to this are numerous. It encourages more compact forms of development, which in turn encourages people to rely more heavily on active modes of transportation such as walking and cycling. The result is less commuting, less carbon emissions, more time, and likely better health outcomes given the reliance on active mobility.

    Indeed, living in a walkable urban community is something that I personally put a huge value on. If I can’t walk out of my home to go grab a coffee and something to eat, it’s probably not the neighborhood for me. But at the same time, I don’t think we can ignore the fact that there are powerful centralizing forces present within our cities.

    As Natalie Whittle points out in this FT article from the summer, new technologies — from the telegraph to the internet — have always elicited predictions that humans would now flee cities and move to the countryside. While it is true that there are other technologies — everything from the streetcar to the automobile — that have allowed us to decentralize to a greater extent, most of us are all still bound to cities.

    In fact, you could argue that the opposite of decentralization has played out. As we have transitioned to a knowledge and information economy, the returns to being embedded within cities and within a particular place have only become greater.

    Take for example the phenomenon of “collab houses” that has been playing out in Los Angeles for some time now, including during this pandemic. Collab houses are typically LA mansions where clusters of young people come and live together in order to create content for platforms like YouTube and TikTok. It’s like a big dorm for creators. And supposedly the biggest one is Hype House.

    What’s fascinating to me about this phenomenon is that it reinforces two things. One, if you want to be rich and famous (emphasis on famous), Los Angeles is seemingly still an important place to be. And two, if you really want to be at the top of your game, it’s apparently not enough to be in the same city as other likeminded individuals; you also need to be under the same roof, bouncing ideas around and pushing one another.

    So what does this all mean? Well, maybe this time is different and we are all currently living through a reorganization of how we will live, work and play. Or, maybe this time isn’t all that different. And the 15-minute city, while an important goal, won’t be the be-all and end-all of modern city building.

    Photo by Lukas Geck on Unsplash

  • The resilient city and road pricing

    Joe Berridge’s recent opinion piece in the Globe and Mail is a good reminder — in the face of a whole lot of uncertainty — about the resiliency of our cities.

    Those previous decades saw a surge of people and jobs locating downtown, with consequent escalation in rents and prices of offices and housing. Why? Partly demographic, as the well-educated children of the baby boom reached adulthood, and partly lifestyle and work style. Young people go to big cities not just to work and live, but for sex, style, money and power. For ambition and anonymity. And for risk. All in the petri dish of downtown density. These drives have always been as powerful as their subsequent search for suburban security and community.

    The structure of the modern megalopolis is not an accident – the dramatic rise of tech employment, two-earner families, the decline of manufacturing, the later date of marriage, smaller households, lifestyle consumerism, teamwork cultures, serial re-education and training – none of these societal trends looks to be diminished by COVID-19. All of them seem to prefer high-density, high-interaction environments.

    For those of us in Toronto, it’s also important to remember just how quickly this city region was growing pre-COVID-19. That is unlikely to change on the other side of this.

    But Berridge does also point out some of the potential fallouts from this pandemic. The economics of urban transit, for example, could remain a problem for quite some time. This will strain public purses. (Car usage rebounded quickly, but transit ridership has not.)

    We are also likely to see increased traffic congestion as a result of people eschewing transit (and probably a bunch of other factors). Like Berridge, I am a supporter of road/congestion pricing, and have been writing about that on this blog for many years.

    The best things to tax/price are things that are generally viewed as bad and where demand is largely inelastic. That is, even if you increase the price, many or most people will probably still do it anyway. Think of things like smoking.

    Up until now, Toronto hasn’t had the moxie to make difficult (political) decisions like this one. Perhaps this pandemic will leave us no other choice.

  • An apartment dwelling city

    Toronto’s Chief Planner, Gregg Lintern, posted this on Twitter a few days (if you can’t see it below, click here):

    A couple things came to mind when I saw this.

    First, it’s a reminder that census data is painfully slow. Five years is a long time and a lot can and will change during that time period, including the kind of built form that people are living in.

    Second, I agree with Gregg. Toronto is in the process of transforming into a majority apartment/condo dwelling city (if it hasn’t already), and it signals a pretty important juncture in our city’s history.

    It also begs an important question: How should our planning response change and adjust as this percentage of urban dwellers continues to creep upward?

  • How homeowners cause gentrification

    Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron, Director of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic, and author of, Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in New Urban America.

    In his recent piece in Beyond Chron, he makes the argument that, from San Francisco to New York, homeowners who oppose new multi-unit housing are in fact the ones driving gentrification.

    He admits that there are some exceptions and cites San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood as a place that became upscale because of new development. (I think it’s more nuanced than that.)

    But the key point is that there countless examples of neighborhoods changing their socioeconomic position without the presence of new development. (There’s investment, but at a smaller or individual scale.)

    Here’s an excerpt from Shaw’s article:

    Banning apartments from single family home neighborhoods limits new residents to those who can afford to purchase a home. Banning new multi-unit construction also artificially reduces supply, driving up home prices for existing owners.

    That’s how most San Francisco neighborhoods, and those in other high-housing cost cities, gentrified. It happened with little or no multi-unit construction. Yet homeowners have adeptly shifted blame for the gentrification of urban neighborhoods from their own land use policies to builders—even when no building has occurred.

    But in the end, do these details even matter? What we have here are competing self-interests. Developers, obviously, want to build. And many people benefit when this does happen. But others don’t see it that way.