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.

Subscribe

Tag: the junction

  • Practicing what I preach

    In yesterday’s post I wrote about happiness vs. satisfaction (among a bunch of other things). And I mentioned that I derive deep satisfaction from the work that I do, which is real estate development. On the back of this post, I received a question from a reader this morning that more or less asked me if I think about the impact of my work on other people’s happiness / satisfaction. Part of the point that was being made was that while it may be a positive endeavor for me, I may be completely destroying the satisfaction, happiness, and lives of others. Do I give this any thought? Lastly, a point was made that very few developers seem to live in their own housing projects, which should tell you something.

    I thought these were all very good points/questions and so I’d like to respond to them publicly:

    • I do think carefully about the happiness and satisfaction of others. In fact, part of the reason this work is satisfying is that, in my opinion, it is both challenging and important work. Growing cities require new housing and the reality is that almost all of this housing comes from private developers.
    • This may sound cheesy, but I also care deeply about beauty. This is something that is of course in the eye of the beholder. But I do want things to be beautiful. I want our cities to be more beautiful. And I don’t think we talk about this enough. I mean, just look at the garbage bins we have in Toronto.
    • Some people may not like or appreciate the form that development usually takes in cities such as Toronto, but the housing needs to go somewhere. As a result of restricting development in most areas of the city, we are now forced to highly concentrate development in relatively few areas. Many are reacting to this.
    • There will almost certainly be tensions between incumbents and new entrants when it comes to city building. That’s part of what makes this work so challenging and rewarding. Everyone involved in the building of our cities has to constantly problem solve and manage competing interests. It’s not easy.
    • I am in fact moving into one of our projects (Junction House). I am doing this because (1) I think our team is creating an awesome and beautiful project and (2) I believe that living in multi-family buildings in walkable neighborhoods is a more sustainable (and enjoyable) way to live. I want to practice what I preach.

  • An undignified bus stop in Toronto

    I was driving to the office from the Junction last week, and I passed a brave individual waiting at this bus stop on Parkside Drive:

    I immediately thought to myself, “what an undignified and silly bus stop.” There’s a little bit of paving so you have a place to stand while you’re waiting, but how do you even get there?

    There are no sidewalks actually leading to said bus stop, and so you really only have two options: 1) jaywalk or 2) cross at some far away intersection and then walk unceremoniously on a narrow strip of grass and dirt on the side of a busy street.

    Not surprisingly, this was the first time I had ever seen anyone waiting at this stop even though I take this route all the time on my way to and from Junction House.

    I recognize that I was operating a motor vehicle when I saw this guy waiting for the bus. But I also took transit last week. And I know that we have it in us to do much better than what you’re seeing in the above street view photo.

    It’s also a reminder that while High Park is really great, we need to work on its edges. Both the urban edge that I’m describing above, and the built form that surrounds our magnificent park. High Park is an urban park, but we seem to be a little uncomfortable with that idea.

  • Destructive development?

    Planner Sean Hertel shared this (embedded above) on Twitter over the weekend. It is a lawn sign from Toronto’s Junction neighborhood that is calling for a stop to demolishing family houses for high rises.

    From what I can tell, this law sign is trying to communicate a few key messages.

    One, high-rises are monstrous beings that enjoy praying on innocent low-rise houses and squashing them with their feet, and sometimes their asymmetric hands.

    Two, it is mostly impossible to conceive of a world in Toronto where families live in high-rises and don’t live in grade-related housing with a backyard.

    And three, there is little value in building more, rather than less, housing in order to help with affordability concerns. Perhaps the thinking is that it needs to be low-rise affordable housing, or nothing.

    With all of this said, let’s do a little thought exercise today on the blog.

    Let’s for a second assume that there aren’t any high-rises proposed in the Junction; only European-scaled mid-rise buildings that sit on the area’s main avenues and back onto low-rise single-family neighborhoods. Let’s also assume that these buildings will be sculpted in complete deference to their rear neighbors so that things like shadows are minimized.

    Let’s assume that more housing is better than less housing.

    Finally, let’s assume that, get this, noble families may actually be able to live in mid-rise and high-rise buildings. And that there are already many successful examples of this taking place in the city, such as over here in CityPlace.

    What key messages would this lawn sign be then communicating?

  • Mass timber construction next?

    We poured the last section of our level 4 slab at Junction House yesterday. As I was leaving the site, I tweeted this photo out from Watkinson Avenue. What you are seeing is the northwest corner of the building where we have seven two-storey towns that front onto our rear laneway. In response to this tweet, Andrew Williamson asked a most excellent question: “timber next?”

    My response was that we would love to do a mass timber building. We have certainly looked at it in the past, and we will continue to look for opportunities to use more sustainable building materials wherever possible. But there are challenges to overcome and a project like Junction House would have been far more difficult to do in mass timber. I’m not an expert when it comes to wood construction, but I will offer up three items that have come up for us in the past.

    The first is trade familiarity. We are in a highly inflationary hard cost environment right now. Everyone is hyper focused on costs and the market is competitive. So switching to a construction method that is less common comes with some additional risks. But this will almost certainly change over time as the market evolves and more people adopt mass timber.

    The second is water. The Junction area, or at least parts of it, have a relatively high water table. That is certainly the case with our site. One of the things you need to do during construction is dewater, or draw down the water level within your site so that you can actually build. In our case, we built a watertight below-grade parking structure, though that isn’t always the case.

    Dewatering comes at a cost and so generally you want to stop dewatering as soon as it is feasible to do so. But you need to make sure that you have enough weight to counteract the buoyancy forces associated with groundwater returning to the site. Generally this means you need to wait until you’ve finished constructing a certain level in the building so that there’s enough mass. The engineers will say things, “we can shut off the dewatering once we complete our level 4 slab.”

    The thing to consider with all of this is that concrete is heavier than wood, which means that you may need to run your dewatering program for longer (increasing your costs). Or, if your building isn’t all that big, maybe you’ll never have enough weight to offset the below-grade water forces and so you have to look at other methods for keeping your building from floating away. Again, this will increase your costs.

    The last thing I’ll mention is that mass timber buildings generally have higher floor-to-floor heights compared to cast-in-place concrete. What this means is that a 9 storey building in timber is going to be taller, in meters, compared to a 9 storey building in concrete — even if the clear heights within the suites are the same. This is a massive deal when you’re operating in an environment that is highly sensitive to building height.

    In the case of Junction House, we were negotiating our final height in centimeter increments — literally arguing whether it could be 50cm to 1.3m taller than some perceived maximum height. This is, in my mind, absurd, but it became a hill that people were willing to die on. The result is that our laneway towns (pictured above) went from having an entrance that was a few steps up off the lane to having an entrance that is now a few steps down off the lane. That is how we ultimately solved our centimeter problem.

    This wounded me to my core because, at the end of the day, what are people going to remark: The additional meter at the top of the building or the relationship that these towns will now have to the street? It will, of course, be the latter. So please know that our hearts were in the right place. But what this also means is that had we been trying to build in wood, we likely would have lost a floor during this negotiation and that would have killed the entire project.

  • Construction update: Junction House

    This is a photo of Junction House that I took this morning after our weekly construction meeting. The team is currently preparing for the first concrete pour of level 4 (each floor has been split up into three pours). We’re now flying our forms, which means that we’re able to move a lot faster. This is the exciting part of a new build mid-rise like Junction House. The underground garage part is like watching paint dry.

    We’re scheduled to be topped out by this summer, so expect some gratuitous view photos on the socials.

  • The creative agency behind One Delisle

    We have been working with Vanderbrand for many years. They are the creative agency behind both Junction House and One Delisle. We love the work that they do. It’s beautiful, and they have always managed to get our vision behind each project.

    In the case of Junction House, we wanted something clean and simple that at the same time responded to the creative edginess of the Junction neighborhood.

    And in the case of One Delisle, we wanted something elevated but that wasn’t traditional or typical. One Delisle is all about pioneering architecture and the brand needed to reflect that (we ended up creating our own typeface that will be carried through into the completed building).

    If you’re interested in learning more, Vanderbrand has just updated their website to include a full “case study” on One Delisle. You can check that out over here. Below are a few of my favorite images.

  • In support of rubber chicken

    This morning I attended ULI Toronto’s annual “Meet the Chief Planners” event. (Some of my random tweets from the morning can be found here.) Now in its 7th year, it is a great event where all of the chief city planners from around the Greater Golden Horseshoe area come together with professionals from the land use community to network and discuss the future of our cities.

    Normally it happens in the evening over dinner and drinks, which is how I attended last year right before our first lockdown (we were at the elbow bump and foot tap stage of the pandemic). But this year it was of course online.

    First, I would like to say thank you to Multiplex Construction Canada (our partner on Junction House) for the invite. And secondly, I would like to say kudos to Richard Joy and the rest of ULI Toronto for coordinating such a great event with over 400 virtual attendees.

    However, the main point that I would like to make today is that I don’t know how anyone can attend a virtual conference and believe that this is some sort of “new norm.” I don’t know about all of you, but I am ready to go back to rubber chicken dinners and too many glasses of affordably priced wine — pronto.

    I say this not to criticize any of the groups that are working hard today to organize virtual events. I am a big fan of ULI and the work that they do. I would encourage all of you involved in the built environment to join immediately if you’re not already members.

    Instead, I say this as yet another piece of evidence for why I won’t stop writing and talking about the resilience of our cities. Video calls are such an awful substitute for sitting around a table with people and breaking bread. It’s not even close.

    And so as I sat at my home office desk this morning, listening to the conference and eating McDonald’s hotcakes (because, hey, Uber Eats and because, hey, it’s Friday), I couldn’t help but be reminded of how bullish I am on cities and city life. This, I thought to myself, is why cities are such a centralizing force.

    Ultimately, it is also why groups like the Urban Land Institute are so important. It is because our cities matter a great deal and because they’re not going anywhere. If you aren’t sick of me talking about the resilience of cities, you can also find me in this recent RENX article called, “Toronto residential tower boom shows no signs of slowing.”

  • New York City rolls out contactless fare payment at every single subway station

    I’m late to the party here, but I was reading this morning about how New York City recently completed the rollout of its One Metro New York (OMNY) fare payment system. What this does is allow you to use contactless payment systems, like Apple Pay, to get on the subway. ONMY is now available across the five boroughs on every bus and at all 472 subway stations (feel free to impress your friends at virtual parties with this stat).

    Metrolinx here in Toronto is similarly piloting contactless payments on the Union Pearson Express. You now have the option of tapping a credit card, a phone, or a watch. Maybe this doesn’t seem like such a big deal, but I still remember when the PRESTO payment card was first rolled out — it felt late to me. Apple added near-field communication (NFC) to iPhone in 2014, and at that point I think it was fairly obvious that standalone payment cards wouldn’t be around much longer.

    That time has arrived for New York City and will be hopefully arriving shortly for Toronto. And I think it will be particularly useful for tourists who may not have a Metrocard (NYC) or PRESTO card (Toronto) and just want to jump on a train. I’ve only taken the subway a handful of times during this pandemic, but I’ll be back at it once the world fully resumes. And I definitely can’t wait to take the UP Express to the airport again (and to the Junction).

  • The crane is now up at Junction House!

    Today was an important milestone for Junction House: The construction crane was erected! The crew started early in the morning and we ended up having a perfect bluebird day (I don’t know where this expression comes from but it’s used all the time by skiers and snowboarders).

    It’s been a tough winter for most of us. And so in my view, it is particularly important to celebrate these kinds of milestones and achievements. Thankfully, there seems to be a general optimism in the air these days. I think it’s going to be a great summer.

    Now that the crane has been installed, it’s time to start building up.

  • Latest artist collaboration: Juanita Lee-Garcia x Slate Asset Management x Junction House

    Today I’m excited to announce the latest artist collaboration at Junction House. (For a background on the others, click here.) Bogota-born, Toronto-based Juanita Lee-Garcia has created a series of hand-cut collage panels for the construction hoarding at Junction House (the background color is the project’s signature electric blue color).

    In this installation, Lee-Garcia uses repetition and image repurposing to investigate the limits and the potential of decor in consumer culture. Her work uses simple gestures such as slicing, inserting, folding, and layering to build these new and abstract forms. They are intended to feel both fresh and unfamiliar, as well as comforting — perhaps because of some of their cultural associations.

    We love these sorts of collaborations because we want every single one of our development projects to be more than just a new building. We want it to be a catalyst for positive city building change. So the next time you’re in the Junction, I would encourage you to stop by 2720 Dundas Street West and take in Juanita’s work. Limited edition prints of the panels are also available on her website.