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: small scale retail

  • The banana test

    One of the reasons why “new small-scale retail, service, and office uses” are now permitted in low-rise neighborhoods of Toronto — and why many are on to talking about these uses in our laneways — is because it’s a way to serve the “needs of residents” and “reduce local automobile trips”. But what are these needs exactly? And if you had to choose only one, what would it be?

    Let me provide some further background.

    According to this mapping, 94% of Parisians live within a 5-minute walk of a bakery. And according to this mapping, 94% of people in Mexico City live within a 5-minute walk of a taqueria. So in other words, these two cities seem to have the kind of “small-scale retail, service, and office uses” that satisfy at least some of the needs of their residents.

    People in Paris need bread. And people in Mexico City need tacos. But what do people in Toronto need? I’m not sure we have a perfectly parallel thing. But according to Instacart, the top-selling grocery item last year across both the US and Canada was — bananas. One and four carts typically contain them, and apparently this number has remained fairly consistent.

    So maybe this should be our small-scale retail and walkability test metric: What % of the population lives within a 5-minute walk of fresh bananas? (I’m open to other food suggestions here.)

  • 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.

  • Mississauga is the only major city in Canada that lost people in the last census

    The Globe and Mail published an interesting article this weekend talking about how Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto, is the only major city in Canada to have lost people in the last census. Here are the population changes for the top 10 largest municipalities in the country:

    There is a simple explanation for this and it is one we have talked about a number of times before on the blog. Many/most of our low-rise single-family neighborhoods are actually losing people. Empty nesters are becoming over-housed and young people aren’t backfilling in quite the same way.

    Mississauga has a lot of these neighborhoods and is heavily geared towards this kind of built form. But they are certainly not alone. The same phenomenon is happening in places like Toronto; there is just enough other growth to offset these negatives so that the headline number still remains positive.

    However, this is slowly changing. Toronto is working to “expand housing options” in its low-rise neighborhoods; it is considering how to better intensify its major streets; and it is re-introducing small–scale retail uses so that people living in a house can easily walk to a corner store for milk.

    It is a shift in mindset. But I believe that this trend will only continue, and eventually it will make its way to the suburbs.

    Images: The Globe and Mail

  • Small-scale retail is set to return to Toronto

    Progress is happening slowly but surely.

    Over the years we have spoken a few times about this nice little coffee shop on Shaw Street here in Toronto. It is a good looking and widely visited coffee shop that has made many guest appearances on urbanist Twitter.

    The problem, though, is that it was a real battle to get it approved, thanks to the opposition of a single neighbor. That’s all it takes to hold up a new project. In this case it was a coffee shop. But it could also be thousands of new homes.

    But that was then. Today if you look on the City of Toronto’s website you’ll actually see this exact coffee shop on a page that speaks to the benefits and the historic role of small-scale retail, service, and office uses.

    Right now these uses are only permitted in low-rise neighborhoods on major streets and through an amendment to the Zoning By-Law (unless the nonconforming use already exists). This is a lot of unnecessary work (see above) and it has translated into a steady decline in these sorts of uses across the city.

    Thankfully, the city is now looking to change this and permit these uses on an as-of-right basis. So it looks like the good fight was worth it.

    For more info, head over here. And if you’d like to attend the public meeting to talk about how brilliant this is, you can do that on July 5 over at City Hall.