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.
I took the above photo this morning from the 7th floor of Junction House. It is a view south toward High Park. More specifically though, it is the view from the second and upper floor of what will ultimately become suite 607 (a suite that happens to be still available for sale).
Now that the building is almost topped out, I’m planning to run through a bunch of the suites with my camera and photograph all of the different views. I don’t think I’ve seen something like this done before and I think it could be a pretty cool little photography project.
We knew that central banks would tighten the money supply at some point and that it would have a negative impact on asset prices.
Many of us believed that a lot of people were making a somewhat long-term decision (flee the city) because of something that would ultimately prove to be short-term dislocation (a ~2 year health crisis).
So one of the things I think you can glean from Daniel’s tweet is that our best urban centers are resilient. Notwithstanding the fact that we have things like Zoom and previous pandemic-suffering generations did not, the core value propositions associated with centralizing in cities hasn’t gone away.
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.
Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum has an exhibition on right now that is all about sneakers. It’s called Future Now: Virtual Sneakers to Cutting-Edge Kicks. I haven’t been to it yet, but it’s on the list. Because this is interesting to me for a few reasons.
One, shoes are important and, as a general rule, I always wear them when I leave the house. Though there may have been some exceptions to this general rule.
And three, sneakers are such a great example of a clothing device that went from utility (we need to protect our feet) to fashion (we all have a desire to express our unique identities) to art collectible (yes, lots of people buy shoes that they never actually wear).
So if you’re looking at stuff like NFTs and digital fashion and scratching your head as to why they have any value, sneakers are probably a good place to look to help you understand why many of us seem to have a need to collect things that help us define our sense of self.
What do you think of this beautiful low-rise apartment building? It is called Spadina Gardens and it was built (allegedly illegally) on Toronto’s Spadina Avenue in 1906, shortly before the City enacted an outright ban on “disease-breeding tenements” (i.e. apartment buildings) in all residential neighborhoods.
This, of course, is a form of exclusionary zoning. Our predecessors had decided that apartments were bad, they promoted disease and immorality, and that they were likely to destroy or at least corrupt Toronto by making it, you know, less waspy.
Important studies are underway here in Toronto, and across North America, to determine whether we should do something about this longstanding city building tradition. Should we allow a mixture of different housing types in our residential neighborhoods, or should we keep things just the way that they are? That being low-rise and single-family.
In the meantime, we are implementing things like inclusionary zoning, which I guess makes some people feel better about themselves and the current state of affairs. But in the end, it sits very much on top of our exclusionary past.
Low-rise single-family home neighborhoods remain off limits. Apartments should only go in select locations (provided they don’t bother the single-family homes). And any efforts to create greater affordability and diversity should only impact the new apartments and not the low-rise single-family homes that already exist.
I would encourage all of you to have a listen to 99% Percent Invisible’s recent episode about Toronto’s “missing middle.” It does a great job explaining why Toronto looks and performs the way that it does today, and why it’s time that we do something about it. It’s also highly relevant to not just Toronto, but many cities across North America.
Toronto has a way of irreverently disregarding spring. Oftentimes we go from winter right into summer. And this past weekend was one of those magical times when summer just appeared and Torontonians far and wide decided to showcase their pasty bodies after a long and dark winter.
But now that the warm weather is upon us, it’s important to keep in mind a few very important things. Don’t ride an electric scooter. They’re too dangerous. You might hit a car.
Make sure you use the washroom before leaving home. Most public washrooms aren’t open yet because peeing season obviously hasn’t started yet. I think it starts sometime in late May. Or maybe it’s early June.
Purchase all of your alcohol beverages from the liquor control board. That’s the safest way to do it. And whatever you do, don’t consume said alcohol beverages in any of the city’s public spaces. That is strictly forbidden.
If you have a backyard, that is an acceptable place to drink responsibly, or irresponsibly. But if you don’t have a backyard, you’re out of luck. I would encourage you to simply crack a window and linger next to it. But of course, be mindful not to get too close to it.
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) just published its latest housing supply report for Canada’s 6 largest city regions (downloadable over here).
One figure that stands out is the increase in housing starts in the Calgary CMA — it was up almost 63% last year compared to 2020. This is a positive indicator for that market.
It’s also worth mentioning that Calgary’s supply is more evenly split between low-rise and apartment housing. This is in contrast to markets like Toronto, where 3/4 of all new housing is now “apartment”, and in Montreal, where the percentage is even higher.
My view is that it’s time to get more granular with our reporting of higher density housing. In the above example, we are showing 3 categories for grade-related housing and only 1 for anything outside of that.
This is our national bias toward low-rise housing coming through.
Slate Asset Management, RAD Marketing, and the top producing brokers for One Delisle were fortunate enough to be able to tour a Studio Gang-designed project in Amsterdam today called the Q Residences. A huge thanks to the developers — Kroonenberg Groep and Neoo — for their time and hospitality this afternoon.
Here are two photos of the exterior:
The building, which is a mixed-income rental apartment, is still under construction, and occupancy is expected sometime this fall. The structure is poured-in-place concrete, but the balconies were all pre-fabricated and installed on site. You can tell this by looking near the top of the above photo.
Here are a few other interesting takeaways from the tour:
– 40% of the complex is social housing (which is housed in an entirely separate but similarly impressive building); this is a mandatory requirement
– The land is owned by the city and is being leased to the developers; the lease rate was discounted to account for the social housing requirement
– The entire building uses in-floor heating and cooling, so there are no ducts or bulkheads in any of the suites (slabs are all about 300mm to accommodate this)
– The balconies all have a rainwater collection system, which is mounted and concealed on the exterior of the building (it rarely goes below freezing here I am told)
– The parking ratio for cars is very roughly about 0.5 per unit and the bicycle parking ratio is very roughly 3 per unit (remember this is the bicycle capital of the world)
– Structural system is mostly shear walls; they also have some post-tensioning in the slabs
– Less reliance on metal wall studs; instead they use a more expensive block-like system that offers more rigidity and better sound attenuation (I will look for the exact specification)
– There is also this odd/interesting requirement that all of the suites have an operable window that can provide both natural ventilation and sound attenuation; in other words, it needs to let air in and block sound at the same time
Here’s what that looks like at Q Residences:
We don’t have a requirement like this in Toronto and so that’s why I used the word odd. We have ventilation and sound requirements, but they don’t need to be solved simultaneously in this same way.
Why I also think this is interesting is because I think it speaks to a greater reliance on natural ventilation over active mechanical systems. In Toronto, the underlying thinking is that if it’s too hot and noisy, it’s just a matter of shutting your windows and turning on the AC.
Of course, we obviously we have to manage around a very different climate, so I don’t mean this as a criticism of Toronto codes. It’s just an observation.
If you aren’t familiar with the Q Residences, or the work of Neoo and Kroonenberg, I would encourage you to search around online. The project is gorgeous and so is the rest of their work.
One of the things that I notice about people from Paris is that they’re always very clear on whether they live in Paris or outside of Paris in the banlieues (the suburbs). They’ll say things like, “No I don’t live in Paris. It’s too expensive. I live in such and such a place in the banlieues.”
I suppose this isn’t entirely different than saying you don’t live in New York, you live on Long Island, or you don’t live in Toronto, you live in Burlington. Except that there seems to be a greater sense of division when they say it here in Paris (although it’s entirely possible that it could be my rusty French that is leading me to believe this).
There is a sense that you’re either inside the Boulevard Périphérique, or you’re really not. And this seems like a shame. Cities regions care less about administrative borders and more about the movement of people, ideas, and goods.
And as much as I love Paris (the central part), it is, from what I can tell, far more static than some of its surrounding areas in terms of new people (immigration), new buildings, and probably new ideas.
Paris can sometimes feel like a perfectly curated museum. It’s beautiful and precious and should not be touched — please stand behind the ropes mesdames et messieurs. But perhaps it’s time to equally celebrate les banlieues and recognize what they have to offer.
One of the things that is common in Europe is that building floors often start with zero for the ground floor and then go both up and down from there.
This is different than most of North America where the ground floor is usually floor number 1 (regardless of what it might be called) and then the floors go up from there.
Using the pictured example (above), the key difference is that, with the ground floor as zero, you end up with the above-grade floors being off by 1 and the top floor being 6 instead of 7.
There is a certain rationality to the European approach that I like, but I am curious how suites on ground floors get typically numbered. I will seek this out and report back.
At Junction House, our ground floor residences follow 101, 102, 103, etc. Following the exact same logic, the European equivalent would be 001, 002, 003, etc. This, admittedly, feels a bit odd.
Which floor convention do you find more intuitive?
Either way, I’m thinking about adopting the European approach for no other reason than that height is a sensitive topic in the world of development, so one less “headline” floor could be helpful. (Half-joking)
