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.
Back in May, I happen to come across a 1912 copy of Michelin’s Guide to France. It was exceedingly cool to see and I’d love to find a copy for my own library. (For those of you looking for a reminder on how the Michelin Guide works, click here.)
After returning to Toronto, I then serendipitously learned that our city would be getting its own guidebook this fall, which will be a first for both Toronto and for Canada as a whole. A Michelin-starred restaurant means something to some people, and has generally been proven to drive tourism dollars — so this is perhaps a big deal.
But there’s a lot of opacity around how these guides work and how a restaurant gets awarded one, two, or three stars. Who are these secretive reviewers? And is it really worth the money that governments need to pay to the French tire company? South Korea allegedly spent US$1.8 million back in 2016 to get its guide.
Andrew Weir, who is the executive vice president of Toronto’s tourism marketing group, was recently interviewed about all of the behind-the-scene efforts that took place in order to make this upcoming guide happen. If you’d like to have a read, click here.
In my view, all of this is very much an act of city building.
Rooming houses or boarding houses are a divisive topic. Here in Toronto, they are permitted in the older parts of the city, but illegal everywhere else. Since 2021, we have been talking about changing that in attempt to increase the supply of what is typically the most affordable kind of housing. But there are lots of people who want to “protect the integrity of single-family communities”, and so a decision on this issue has been, as I understand it, punted until sometime next year. At some point, I suspect a decision will be made (though deferring is also a decision).
While we wait, this recent piece by journalist and photographer Samanta Helou Hernandez tells an interesting story of Los Angeles’ last Japanese boarding house. But as you’ll see from her article, it’s labeled as a boarding house, but it really acted as a kind of community center. Boarding houses in this community have, over the years, served as a place for people to get back on their feet (after returning from internment camps following WWII) and as a place where they could speak their own language and build community.
Looking back on the history of the area, it’s hard to fathom being comfortable with some of the exclusionary policies that were in place at that time, which effectively blocked immigrants and people of color from moving to certain areas. Then again, I’m sure posterity will look back on some of decisions being made today and wonder what we were thinking.
One of the most exciting city building projects going on in Toronto right now is the revitalization of the 715-acre Port Lands area (here’s a map if you’d like to get situated). Despite its massive scale, it doesn’t seem to be receiving a lot of attention. And that’s probably because, at this stage, it’s mostly infrastructure work. It’s just a lot of soil being moved around.
But it’s of course important work. The mouth of the Don River (where it meets Lake Ontario) was never properly engineered for resiliency, and so the entire area is at risk of flooding. That’s why this $1.25 billion effort to re-naturalize its interface is currently underway. The above video does a good job explaining just what that entails.
At the same time, it is creating a wonderful city building opportunity — new parks for the illegal drinking of craft beers, new wildlife habitat, new meandering rivers for kayaking, and of course new housing and new jobs. But when you look at what’s planned, it’s hard not to feel like we’re missing the mark in terms of density.
The plan for Villiers Island calls for some 4,900 homes (according to this Globe and Mail article). And the plan for the entire area calls for only about 20,000 homes (according to this recent Bloomberg article). Surely there’s room for at least a few more — especially if we’re hoping to support a new LRT line to the area.
Toronto’s chief planner, Gregg Lintern, published this piece in the Toronto Star over the weekend where he argued that “expanding housing options in [Toronto’s] neighbourhoods is the missing piece of the growth puzzle.”
What he is saying is that if we’re going to have any chance at reasonably accommodating the 700,000 or so people who are expected to move to this city over the next three decades, we’re going to have to evolve our low-rise neighborhoods. That includes more retail, more amenities, more density, and yes, built form that houses multiple units.
I immediately thought that this was meaningful progress in the right direction. It is acknowledgement that things need to change and that our low-rise communities need to change.
But others felt that this was a case of soft-serve ice cream, arguing that there’s “danger in praising incremental, belated change when dramatic change is what’s needed.” I also see this point.
To quote the late architect Daniel Burnham, “make no little plans.” But this is arguably a little easier to subscribe to when you’re rebuilding after a great fire has decimated your entire city (he was instrumental in the rebuild of Chicago following its fire of 1871).
The unfortunate reality today, at least in this environment, is that bold vision isn’t often rewarded politically. The status quo bias is simply so great. Change is painfully slow. That’s why we rely so heavily on pilot projects when it comes to city building.
So while I too am a fan of bold vision, I also see value in what Simon Sinek and others refer to as consistency over intensity. Small, repetitive, and compounding actions can have powerful long-term results. You just have to keep going in the right direction.
And I think that many of us, or perhaps most, will agree that the right direction is rethinking our low-rise neighborhoods.
It is obvious that Toronto needs to find new ways to increase housing supply. And I have written before about how I think our major streets are a good place to look.
The above proposal by Naama Blonder of Smart Density is one way to start thinking about how we could do that. Dubbed the “mini mid-rise”, the idea here was to show how a single lot might be intensified with a small multi-unit building.
This is a great idea. It was one of five projects that just won the Ontario Association of Architects’ annual design challenge. But for it to have a chance at working, we’re going to need to remove all of the friction associated with building this kind of housing.
These would need to be permissible as-of-right. No rezoning. No site plan control. Just straight to building permit.
We would also need to eliminate all parking requirements (which we are thankfully doing). The market will very quickly correct if these homes cannot be rented without parking.
We would need to ensure that these homes can be built without any cooperation from the adjacent neighbors. Because that cooperation may not always be there.
We would need to ensure that there are no funny code requirements that might serve as an additional obstacle.
And we will probably also need to look at subsidies and other incentives so that these homes are economically feasible to build. This might include development charge waivers and/or tax abatements.
None of this is, of course, impossible. It’s just a question of how bad we want this to happen.
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.
The Quebec City-Windsor corridor is the most densely populated region in Canada. The last time I checked Wikipedia, it was reported to house about 18 million people, or about half of Canada’s entire population.
So it is not surprising that there have been numerous high-speed rail studies for this corridor over the decades, as well as studies for other important links in Alberta (Edmonton-Calgary) and other parts of the country.
And yet, Canada remains the only G7 country without any high-speed rail. Though to be fair, the US doesn’t have all that much either; certainly with respect to the size of its population.
However, there is some good news. In March of this year, the Government of Canada announced a Request for Expression of Interest related to high frequency rail service between Quebec City and Toronto. More information, over here.
But from what I have read, it’ll be a faster upgraded service (~200 km/h), but not true high-speed rail (~250-300 km/h). I took the TGV from Marseille to Paris last summer, and this is how fast we were going:
If we’re going to do this, let’s be the absolute best in the world and not settle for mediocrity.
Toronto is number one. Los Angeles is number two. And New York sits just behind Winnipeg and Calgary. Huh?
The reason this is likely surprising to you is that when most people think of urban density they think of the urban core. And you are correct in thinking that the urban core of New York City is denser than the urban core of Winnipeg.
The difference here is that we are talking about “urban area” (or “population centre” in Canada). This is the continuously built up area around each major city. Think of it as the lit up area that you might see on a nighttime aerial photo.
Urban areas don’t care about municipal or other jurisdictional boundaries. And they don’t factor rural areas. Urban areas are a measure of continuous urbanization.
So even if you have the densest downtown on the planet, if you have a sprawling low-density urban area surrounding it, you can still end up with a relatively low overall population density. And this is precisely what is happening here with New York.
This is also why there’s only so much that you can glean from a blended average like this. Because you can have very different urban forms and very different mobility splits (think New York City vs. Winnipeg), and still end up with somewhat comparable averages.
This is a lovely little infill rental project in Tokyo by ETHNOS (architect) for Real Partners (developer):
The building is 4 storeys plus a rooftop terrace. From the plans, it looks like there are 8 units, all of which are two-storey suites.
The A and B suites are accessible from the ground floor. For the A suites, you enter at grade, and then go down into the first basement level. And for the B suites, you enter at grade and then go up to your second level. One of the entrances (suite B-3) is via an exterior walkway.
The middle of the ground floor is the lobby entrance and there’s a single elevator that services the second and third floors (it then drops off for the fourth floor). On the second level is a co-working space, and so the upper C suites (these sound fancy) are all accessible from the third floor.
The fourth floor and fifth floor terraces are all accessible from within the C suites, which means that the only real common area corridors in this building are on the third level. And it looks like they wanted this particular corridor to have a view to the street, because they could have easily reduced it even further to increase the building’s overall efficiency.
What is also interesting to look at this building’s dimensions. Based on the above section, the floor-to-floor heights are 2500mm, which is low compared to the 2950/3000mm that is typically used here in Toronto for new reinforced concrete builds.
In terms of the overall building, it is only about 10m deep and it is less than 10m tall if you exclude the stair popups on the rooftop terraces. For context here, our Junction House lot is about 30m deep and the build is about 30m tall, so actually a similar kind of box proportion.
But let’s scan more of Toronto.
If you move away from designated “Avenues” (which is where Junction House sits) and look at some of our other major streets (which is something the City of Toronto is in fact doing), you can sometimes/oftentimes find even deeper lots.
Below is a random area that I quickly panned too on Dufferin Street — these single-family house lots are around 36m deep:
Now obviously Toronto is not Tokyo and Tokyo is not Toronto. But my point with all of this was to demonstrate just how much space we actually have within our existing boundaries, should we ever feel the need to increase our overall housing supply.
At the beginning of this year, Globizen announced a new collection of city t-shirts. They have been very popular and we only have a few left from our original batch (which included some of the greatest places in the world: Toronto, Paris, and Park City). But we recently added a new city: Kyiv. This is obviously a really important one, and 100% of the proceeds from the sale of this shirt are going be used to support Ukraine. The plan is to allocate 50% to the Toronto Ukrainian Foundation, which has been helping displaced Ukrainians settle in Canada, and the balance to Ukraine directly (via cryptocurrencies).
