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: toronto

  • Subways – except the downtown relief line

    Politics rewards consistency. Even if you’re wrong, it’s better to be consistently wrong than come across as wavering – however noble and rational the intentions may be. And that’s exactly what happened with Rob Ford and his commitment to subways, subways and subways.

    John Lorinc of Spacing wrote an interesting piece yesterday on how, despite all the debating that went on, Ford is delivering what he said he was going to deliver: a subway. It doesn’t matter that all technical and financial considerations were thrown out the window, he got it funded.

    As I said earlier this week, I think the Scarborough line is the wrong subway to be building and that the downtown relief line is infinitely more important for the region. However, Lorinc makes a good case in his article for why this line will not be funded despite the current focus on subways, subways and subways:

    “Fourth, it’s important to recognize that there will be one notably perverse exception to the foregoing, which is the [Insert Euphemism Here] Relief Line. I do admire Josh Matlow’s advocacy on this front. But Ford will never take up the DRL cause because (i) he doesn’t get the purpose of said extension; and (ii) because the project doesn’t butter his bread, electorally speaking. I’m guessing it will be years before someone with the mayor’s block-headed tenacity emerges to champion a line with a politically inconvenient name and an eye-bulging price tag.

    In fact, the sheer heft of the relief line will allow marginally useful yet politically supported subway projects — extensions in the west end to Sherway Gardens or up Yonge to Richmond Hill – to continue to elbow their way to the front of the line, just exactly as the Scarborough subway project did. Indeed, because we no longer care, at any level of government, about subjecting our transit investment choices to a rational policy framework, the most crucial project in the GTA will always lose out in the funding lottery because it has the most diffuse constituency and the most conceptually complicated purpose.”

    The disparaging thing about these two paragraphs is that it’s a sad reality.

  • Wrong subway

    It was announced this morning that the feds will be contributing $660M towards Toronto’s new Scarborough subway line. While transit investment of any kind is generally a good thing, it’s a shame that we can’t get our priorities straight. Decisions are being made based on politics rather than rational thought.

    Here’s what TTC CEO Andy Byford said:

    “We all know that Toronto has a congestion problem, so it can only be good that we get more funding,” Andy Byford told reporters after the announcement. “I’ve said since the day I got here that the downtown relief line remains a priority for the TTC. I reiterate that point. But I think that, with the time scales available, it’s possible we can do more than one thing at a time.”

    This is Byford being diplomatic.

    The downtown relief line is absolutely the most important (planned) subway line in Toronto. For one, the Yonge & Bloor subway interchange is at capacity. Until these pressures are relieved, any extension of existing lines will only exacerbate the problem.

    At the same time, the density levels are way higher in the core, meaning that ridership levels will be higher and the required government subsidies will be lower. Not surprisingly, subway lines make more fiscal sense when you build them where demand is greatest.

    So the irony is that our Mayor – who ran on a campaign to “stop the gravy train” – is pushing to build a rail line that will ultimately cost taxpayers more money.

    Oh, politics.

  • Globe and Mail moving to the east side of downtown

    This past Wednesday the Globe & Mail newspaper announced that they signed a 15-year lease to be the lead tenant in a new office tower now under construction at 351 King Street East (just west of Parliament Street). This means that the newspaper will be leaving its current digs on the west side of downtown at Front & Spadina.

    I have to admit that I was pretty excited when I read the news. The design looks incredibly promising and, as some of you might know, I’m bullish on the east side of downtown.

    One of my favourite areas of the city is the Distillery District. But today it still feels very much like an island. And it’s because the city hasn’t really caught up to it. It’s a destination.

    However, between the West Don Lands and major office projects such as this one (it’s 500,000 sf), I think the east side of downtown is about to hit its stride.

    It’s continuing to “fill in” and this will make more and more people realize how central it actually is to the core – especially in comparison to west side neighbourhoods like Liberty Village.

    Amongst my excitement, I did however stop to think about the fact that a newspaper company was taking top spot in a new office tower. Will newspapers even be around for another 15 years?

  • Why the Pan Am Games are good for Toronto

    The Pan American Games are coming to Toronto in 2 years – 559 days to be exact. While not as high profile as the Olympics, some of you may be surprised to learn that the Pan Am Games will involve three times as many athletes as the Vancouver Olympics did.

    However, the big question with these sorts of events is always whether or not they create a lasting economic boon for the host city. History is littered with examples of economic disasters and lingering Olympic debts. I’d love to see a full analysis of what it costs to bid for a game, how much public money has to go up, how much private investment it spurs, and so on.

    At the same time, I suspect that some of the positive externalities might be hard to measure. How do you attach a value to the brand equity you get from hosting a major international sporting event? It’s hard, but for many people around the world the 2015 Pan Am Games could be the event that embeds Toronto into their psyche. 

    But there is another big benefit to playing host. It creates a real deadline. When cities bid for games they make all sorts of promises about the kinds of things they’re going to build and provide. In the case of Toronto, it accelerated the creation of a new mixed-income neighbourhood called the West Don Lands (which will be used to house the athletes during the games).

    “Originally, build out of the 32 hectare (80 acres) West Don Lands was planned to unfold in three strategic phases and take between 10 and 12 years, subject to market conditions. With the Pan Am Games, more than half of the community will be in place for the Games in 2015.” -Waterfront Toronto

    So in effect, we’ve leveraged the games in order to expedite capital projects that were already in the pipeline. I like this, because without a hard and fast deadline, I can almost assure you that these publicly run projects would have fallen behind schedule. Deadlines and goals are good.

    Here’s an example why:

    When I first started my MBA program at Rotman, we did an interesting organizational behaviour exercise involving origami cranes. The class was split into groups and each group was asked to go away and build paper cranes. If you’ve ever built one of these, you’ll know that they can be tough at first.

    But what each group wasn’t aware of was that they were all given different instructions in terms of the number of cranes they were expected to build. Their goals were different. At the end of the exercise, all of the cranes were counted and each group wrote their “production” levels on the board.

    What was discovered was that each group more or less built the exact number of cranes that they were asked to build. This is interesting, because presumably every group had the raw ability to produce the same number of paper cranes. All that changed was the motivation.

    Returning to the case of the Pan Am Games, the mandate is clear: We need to house 10,000 athletes and officials by the summer of 2015, or else we’ll look utterly incapable in front of the world. We have a deadline. And that’s a good thing.

  • DUKE

    As many of you know, I recently made the move to a new real estate development firm here in the city called TAS. Well, actually, it was a return for me. I interned here one summer while I was in grad school at Penn. I was always a big fan of the company’s philosophy around city building and so it felt then, as it does now, as a really good fit for me.

    As a returning member of the TAS team, I’m excited to announce the launch of our latest condo project called DUKE. It’s located in the Junction (near Dundas & Keele), which is arguably one of the hottest up-and-coming neighbourhoods in Toronto. And, it’s a stone’s throw away from Playa Cabana Cantina, which just so happens to be my favourite Mexican place in the city (although sometimes I think it could be Grand Electric).

    In all seriousness though, and with as much bias aside as possible, I think it’s a fantastic project. I obviously wasn’t around for its formative years, but I’m thrilled to be a part of it now. If you’ve read any of my blog posts over at Dirt (thedirt.co), you’ll know that I’m a huge supporter of more midrise development in Toronto. It’s a European scale of buildings that I think we’re largely missing in our fantastic city.

    So if you’re in the Junction area, I would encourage you to pop into our sales office and say hello to the team. We’re located at 2800 Dundas Street West. The tile as you walk in is awesome (I can say this because I didn’t choose it) and I think you’ll find that the design of the place is very much of the Junction. Much of the materials, fixtures and labour that went into the sales office were sourced locally from the hood.

    If you do go check it out, let me know what you think by commenting below, tweeting me, or tweeting @tasdesignbuild.

  • Tower renewal

    Before I went to bed last night, I stumbled upon this Globe and Mail article talking about Toronto’s Tower Renewal program. Here’s a snippet:

    “In the postwar period, Canadian cities, particularly Toronto, grew differently from those in the United States, following a European-style model of regional planning. Regional governments insisted on building suburbs that were dense and housed people of all income levels. Apartment towers helped balance out the pricier single-family houses that middle-class people preferred – and a generation of new Canadians, and those migrating from rural Canada, arrived to fill those apartments. It was good planning on a massive scale, in line with the market.”

    If you know Toronto’s urban landscape, you’ll know that this is true. The city is dotted with suburban tower clusters, many of which were built in the 60s and 70s during our last high rise boom. But these towers have now aged and the Corbusier style “tower in the park” planning ideology has proven to be a failure.

    The Tower Renewal program is designed to not only retrofit those buildings, but also reposition how those buildings fit in with the larger urban fabric. In most cases, that’ll mean adding more density to the site and activating the street level through retail and other uses.

    It’s absolutely the right move. I think that suburban intensification is something we’re going to have to do all across the board to correct some of the planning mistakes we’ve made in the past and to make our cities more livable.

    But the real question in my mind is whether we can transform the way people think about high rise living.

    If you take a look at the snippet I included above, what is basically being said is that we built towers for poor people and immigrants coming to Canada. We slapped a “park” on the end of the neighbourhood’s name (Regent Park, Flemingdon Park, Thorncliffe Park, etc.) and thought we had created something really quite nice.

    Some neighbourhoods, such as St. James Town, were initially intended to attract young and hip urbanites. But was it ever really the King West of its day? The middle class preferred single family houses and that’s where they went, leaving the tower communities to those who had no other choice.

    Today, many of these tower communities represent one of Toronto’s 13 “priority neighbourhoods.” These are neighbourhoods considered to be in social and economic need. Given this outcome, there’s no shortage of people comparing our new high rise communities, such as CityPlace, to older ones such as St. James Town. Is history repeating itself?

    But I think things are a bit different this time around. We’re building more condos than rental apartments and we know that housing tenure can matter. There’s been a return to cities. People genuinely like living in walkable communities close to amenities. The region is becoming increasingly harder to navigate by car. And the price of single family homes is no longer within the reach of many middle class families.

    What all this mean is that I think Toronto is in the early stages of transitioning to a city where more and more people actually live and raise families in multi-family dwellings. I disagree with the notion that we’re already there, because even though we have lots of high rises, they’re often viewed as a stepping stone towards a more desirable form of housing.

    The true test will be when this generation of condo dwellers grows up and decides to have a family. Will they stay put or once again search out the seemingly necessary single family home?

  • The Hungarian House on St Clair

    I was driving down St Clair West yesterday and I noticed that Urbancorp had erected a marketing sign on their site at 836 St Clair Ave West (former Hungarian House) and was in the midst of constructing a sales office.

    The project is called The Homes of St. Clair West and it looks like it’ll be a promising set of semi detached houses. However, if you look at the City of Toronto’s Development Application website, the site shows a mixed use project with almost 100,000 square feet of residential space and roughly 12,000 square feet of retail space.

    I’m not sure how to reconcile what’s planned for site, but I have two things to say:

    First, I think it’s a damn shame that the Hungarian House was even torn down in the first place. I’m not exactly sure when it was built, but I thought it was an interesting building with lots of potential to be incorporated into a new mixed use project. We really need to get better at preserving the history that we do have in this city.

    Second, if they’re planning townhouses along St Clair Avenue then I think it’s absolutely the wrong type of development for that street. St Clair deserves midrise. Let’s hope that’s what they have planned.

  • TIFF + TORONTO

    During TIFF is an awesome time to be in Toronto. The city is buzzing, the bars are open until 4am (that should be standard), and everybody is talking about films. I used to go to a lot more movies when I was younger, but that’s sort of fallen off in recent years. Thankfully, my good friend Meg was kind enough to invite me out last night. We saw Blood Ties, which I really enjoyed. It’s about a good cop and a bad brother.

    Before the movie started we started talking about the history of TIFF and it’s impact on Toronto’s economy. Curious, I looked it up today and the estimated annual contribution in 2011 was approximately $170M (which appears to be comparable to Cannes). That’s pretty impressive given that, even though there’s technically programming all throughout the year, it’s really only an 11 day festival.

    I was also reminded of Roger Martin’s book the Opposable Mind, where he talks about the founding of the festival and the dichotomy the founders were faced with. He argues that, at the time (1970s), there were 2 predominate film festival models in place: the elitist jury driven Cannes model and the sort of grassroots model. The problem with the former was that it didn’t feel inclusive for festival goers and the problem with the latter was that it didn’t attract the buzz of say a Cannes.

    image

    The solution was to do both – basically make the audience the jury. The solution was a People’s Choice Award. This made festival goers feel like they had a say and were a part of the process, and it served as an effective buzz machine. There were also a bunch of other benefits, including the fact that the industry could now get a clear sense of a movie’s commercial appeal prior to going to market. More insular festivals couldn’t do this as well.

    Here’s how Roger Martin put it:

    “The People’s Choice Award put the Toronto International Film Festival on the map. By 1999, Roger Ebert, America’s most influential film critic, was telling one reporter that “although Cannes is still larger, Toronto is more useful and more important.” By 2005, TIFF had booked the largest volume of sales in film festival history, and film critic Liam Lacey named it “the most important film festival in the world – the largest, the most influential, the most inclusive.””

    This is an incredible achievement and we’re lucky to have it in our city. Now let’s get out and create some more of the world’s best.

  • There’s no light rail in Toronto

    Next City published an interesting article this morning on the politics behind Rob Ford’s subway obsession. I encourage you to have a read if you’re interested in politics, transit and/or the increasing polarization of North American cities (core vs. suburbs). It’s called Canada’s Strangest Straphanger.

    There are a number of great take-aways from the article, but I’d like to highlight one that I’m not sure many Torontonians realize: There’s currently no light rail (LRT) in the city. We have streetcars, of course. But no light rail. There’s a difference.

    Here’s an exert from Next City:

    “It is true that most people in Scarborough don’t want a light rail. They want a subway, and the reason they want it is that there is no light rail in Toronto,” says Jay Young, SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. “We just have streetcars and subways and they think light rail is a streetcar, when actually it’s very close to a subway in terms of having its own right of way.”

    This may seem like semantics, but it’s not. Again, one difference is that light rail has its own right of way and streetcars compete with vehicular traffic. The other significant difference is station spacing. Streetcars stops are spaced similar to bus stops, which let’s say averages around 250m. LRT stations on the other hand are often in the range of 400-600m. This makes them similar to subways.

    It’s for this reason that even though the St Clair streetcar has its own right of way, I would not personally consider it a true LRT. As someone who lived in midtown for over 3 years, I can tell you that the stations are way too close together and that it’s highly inefficient during peak times – much like the rest of our streetcar network.

    Given the constant debates going on this city about light rail vs. subways, I think it’s important that we’re clear on definitions. Light rail has the potential to be an effective (read: cheaper and faster) way of delivering rapid transit to a greater number of people in the city. Before we dismiss that proposition, let’s please understand what it is.

  • I’d raise kids in an apartment

    One of the North American truisms that I often like to challenge is the belief that kids should be raised in a house.

    I’m interested in this topic, not because I’m planning for a kid, but because Toronto has gone through such a dramatic transformation over the past 15+ years to become a city where more and more people are living in multi-family dwellings (condos, apartments, and so on).

    However, there’s still the belief amongst many circles that condo living is merely a stepping stone on the way to a house. Since Millenials have effectively added a new life phase between University and marriage, condos have become the home of choice for many twenty and thirty somethings. But how long will they stick around? I see a lot of people in my network getting married and subsequently moving from a condo to a house.

    Why is this?

    Is it because of schools? Is it a cultural belief that families require a house and a backyard? As someone who grew up in the suburbs, I can tell you that I never played in the backyard. I played on the street with other kids. I used a shared public space rather than a private one.

    On a practical level, I think the condo-to-house tradition has a lot to do with the fact that condos are just more expensive on a per square foot basis than wood-framed houses. For the same price that you might pay for a small 2 bedroom condo in Toronto, you could still conceivably buy a 3 bedroom house in some inner city neighbourhood.

    But the supply of single family homes in the city is limited. We’re not adding anymore. So as the price of these homes continues to increase – at what is now a faster rate than high rise housing – we may eventually reach a point where there’s no longer a cost savings associated with low-rise housing. In fact, they’d just be a luxury for the well-heeled.

    In this scenario, I think we’d naturally see an increase in larger condo units – something the city has been trying to artificially encourage. And out of necessity, we’d see more and more families in condos. However, it’ll take a change in mindset. Are you ready for it? I’d like to think that I am.