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: transit oriented development

  • Toronto’s grand bargain gave us nodes instead of neighbourhoods

    Stephen Velasco maintains a wonderful set of models for Toronto showing existing, under-construction, and proposed/approved developments. Here’s his website and here’s an aerial he recently shared showing a large section of the city overlaid with subway and LRT stations.

    What is abundantly clear from this visualization is the “grand bargain” that has guided development in Toronto for over two decades: we won’t touch most of the low-rise residential land in the city, and instead we will create high-rise pockets next to transit.

    This was the path of least political resistance, and while building on top of and next to transit is obviously sound, the extreme density cliff we encouraged created several urban economic and city-building distortions.

    Land became artificially scarce, even though there’s lots of room within the boundaries of Toronto. And high density became our only option, eliminating many other housing typologies for Torontonians. But perhaps most importantly, it created an urban fabric of dense nodes that in many cases aren’t actually urban.

    What this means is that most of the city remains unwalkable, without urban amenities, and clogged with car traffic. The way to better use our existing transit infrastructure, create more amenity-rich communities, and reduce Toronto’s dependency on the car is to flank these isolated tower clusters with more evenly distributed density.

    Towers on top of stations are, of course, good, but there then needs to be a gradient of 4-12 storey buildings across the surrounding avenues, major streets, and interior residential streets.

    The good news is that we’re moving in this direction. It’s just going to take time for us to firmly strike a new grand bargain. But in my view, this city-building approach is going to guide the next two decades of development in Toronto.

    Aerial visualization by Stephen Velasco

  • The context behind the viral Edmonton multiplex site

    I’ve had a few people respond to my recent post about the multiplex battle underway in Edmonton, and so I now have a bit more information. The address of the house in the photo is 10014 147 Street NW. Here’s a post-construction photo from the street:

    Here’s a street view image showing the two flanking multiplexes under construction:

    Here’s how close the house is to the LRT station currently under construction at Stony Plain Road & 149 Street (this is the Valley Line West extension):

    Here’s the route map:

    And finally, here’s the station’s location in relation to downtown:

    Customarily, this is exactly what you want to do on top of and around new transit investments. You want to build density. Transit investment and land-use policy, as I like to harp on here, are integral to one another. And if you do everything correctly, you won’t have to worry about parking minimums.

    Happy Thanksgiving weekend, everyone.

  • Density vs. infrastructure in Liberty Village

    A beautiful new 43-storey rental building was just approved in Toronto’s Liberty Village neighborhood. More info about the project can be found, here. Not surprisingly, some people in the community were against it. Here is a recent article that blogTO published talking about people who live in high-rises not wanting a new high-rise next to them.

    One argument that is being made is that the neighborhood is already full. It has reached its density limit. We also hear this about the City of Toronto as a whole. But we know this isn’t true. Architect Naama Blonder recently did a study that found we could fit another 12 million people within our boundaries with more efficient land use policies.

    This particular site in Liberty Village is also about 400 meters from a future subway stop on the Ontario Line. So it is exactly where we should be putting more density. The problem today is that the area is suffering from a massive infrastructure deficit. The road network is inadequate and the King streetcar hasn’t been prioritized.

    It’s no wonder the area feels full. But the reality is that there are lots of examples of highly livable neighborhoods from around the world with much higher population densities. The difference is that they have the right infrastructure, the right public realms, and the right modal splits.

    Liberty Village will get there as well and it’s already underway. For a preview of the future, check out the City of Toronto’s Public Realm Strategy for the area. It was published in April 2024 and it includes things like new streets, new mid-block connections, and new parks. It is what the area needs and it’s exciting to see it happening.

  • Dangerously positive precedents

    This is the battle that is now playing out across Toronto — and many other cities — as we look to intensify our existing communities; even in the ones sitting on higher-order transit. Cities rightly want to see it happen. But local ratepayers do not.

    From the Globe and Mail:

    “This project is in no way gentle intensification,” said the architect Terry Montgomery, representing the powerful local group the Annex Residents Association. “It will set a dangerous precedent for all areas in the city which currently [are zoned for] low-scale residential-buildings.”

    It’s not clear whether that legal argument is true. At the meeting, City of Toronto planning manager David Driedger and director Oren Tamir – who, to their great credit, were supporting the development – said it would not set a precedent.

    But if it did, why would that be “dangerous”? It is commonsensical. The Lowther site has two subway stations within an eight-minute walk. Toronto’s Line 1 and Line 2 intersect right here. This is one of the best-located, best-connected places in all of Canada.

    Alex Bozikovic is, of course, right. This is commonsensical. 

    If our goals are to create more homes, improve housing affordability, reduce traffic congestion, and make us overall a more sustainable city, then there’s no better place to build than on top of transit within our already built-up areas.

  • 25 years of transit-oriented development

    When we build next to transit, we often call this transit-oriented development. 

    What’s interesting about this moniker is that it implies we’re doing something a little special — something out of the ordinary. And I guess that makes sense because, in many cities, it is often out of the ordinary. 

    That’s why you don’t hear people at real estate conferences saying, “check out this new cutting edge car-oriented development that our firm is developing.” That doesn’t need to be specified.

    But at the end of the day, I’m not sure how special transit-oriented development really is; it’s basically just urban development. Meaning, you put density on top of and next to transit stations and then more people take transit. That’s how this works.

    On that note, here is an interesting study from the School of Cities that looked at Toronto’s transit network and how the populations around each station have changed (or not changed) between 1996 and 2021 (census data). 

    If you look at the various transit lines, you’ll see that, in some cases, like downtown, we have added a lot of new transit-oriented development. This is good. Populations increased. 

    But in many/most other cases, populations remained flat; or worse, they declined. This is a serious problem, and it shows how land use restrictions are forcing us to underutilize our existing transit assets.

    Maybe what we need to do is stop thinking about transit-oriented development as something special, and instead remind ourselves that this is standard operating procedure. It’s just what you do next to transit.

    Thanks to Sam Kulendran for sharing the above study with me.

  • Cruise ships of urbanity

    There are many ways to describe one of the prevailing urban forms emerging across the Greater Toronto Area. You could call it spiky urbanism. You could call it a collection of peaks and plains. Or — as it is referred to in this recent article by Alex Bozikovic about “turning the suburb into the city” — you could call it cruise ship urbanity:

    These megaprojects are where Toronto has chosen to cram much of its new growth – “cruise ships of urbanity,” as Mr. Giannone told me, in a sea of houses. As such they provide an opportunity to create citylike density and activity.

    What we are talking about is a dichotomous form of urbanism: high-density mixed-use nodes surrounded by low-rise car-oriented communities. And on many levels, this makes a lot of sense, especially if the cruise ship happens to be docked on top of a transit station. This is where density needs to go. If you have a transit station without much density, that should be addressed immediately.

    But it also presents a great challenge. If transportation planning is necessarily land use planning, then we are dealing with two very different kinds of land use patterns and, therefore, two very different kinds of mobility demands. You can address this by making the cruise ship as self-sufficient and pleasant as possible, but eventually someone will want or need to get off the ship.

    Does that mean they will then need a car?

    You don’t have this same problem with more consistent forms of urbanism. Consider, for example, cities like Paris and Barcelona. These are dense cities, but more importantly they are, for the most part, uniformly dense. Or at least, uniformly dense enough. Meaning that you can probably apply a more uniform transportation strategy. What works in one part of the city is likely to work in other parts too.

    Of course, we could also apply a uniform transportation strategy to our urban cruise ships. Given that they exist in a sea of low-rise houses, we could simply say that each urban cruise ship resident should also have their own parking space (1:1 ratio). The solution: everyone drives! But this, to me, seems like an insane long-term solution.

    In my view, the most impactful solution lies not in the ships themselves, but in the seas surrounding them. We need to look holistically at our entire city region and determine what it will take to turn suburb into city. And that likely means a whole host of things, ranging from leveraging the infrastructure we already have (i.e. upzoning around transit stations) to embracing autonomous vehicles.

    In the end, I don’t think we want cruise ships of urbanity. We need more density, everywhere.

    Photo by mkdrone_ on Unsplash

  • BC has proposed building more housing near transit

    These days, it is cool to be pro housing.

    Unaffordability has apparently gotten so bad that we are now seeing a groundswell of support for increasing overall housing supply. So politicians are doing things. And this week, the Province of British Columbia proposed some new legislation related to transit hubs.

    As proposed, the legislation will require BC municipalities to designate Transit Oriented Development Areas (TOD Areas), mandate minimum heights and densities within certain radii (broadly 800m in the case of rapid transit stations), and remove parking minimums.

    Not surprisingly, a lot of people are excited about this and, there’s no question, that this is directionally the right thing to do. But I have two immediate thoughts.

    The first is that the devil is always in the details. This all sounds good, but: Are the proposed minimum densities and heights going to be enough to stimulate development? For example, is 4 the right minimum FAR for 300m from a transit station?

    The second thought has to do with the level of excitement surrounding this announcement. (I’m going strictly based on Twitter, which admittedly could just be my bubble). The fact that city builders are so excited about this announcement tells us a lot about the current state of affairs.

    Because what this proposed legislation is more or less saying is the following: “Hey, here’s a great idea! Let’s build more housing around higher order transit and not force the market to build unnecessary parking.”

    Is this really something that should be considered novel? I thought this was just how cities should work.

  • Parking minimums are so last decade

    What is the case for having parking minimums? (i.e. Mandating a certain number of parking spaces in new developments.) I guess the argument is that if you don’t require developers to build it, they won’t build enough. And then people will not have parking and so they will be forced to park on the street somewhere. This might annoy the incumbent residents, who will in turn complain, and so it is best and safest to just to build a lot of parking.

    This is pretty much the only reason that I can think of for why a city might want to maintain parking minimums. Because, what’s the worst thing that could happen if you didn’t build enough parking? In the best case scenario, the developer builds fewer parking spaces and people are fine with it. This is ideal because it means people are getting around in other ways: walking, cycling, taking transit, and/or using car share. So it is the most sustainable outcome!

    A bad scenario would be that the developer builds too few parking spaces, nobody will rent the spaces, and then goes bankrupt. This would be very bad for the developer; however, it would be a lot less of a concern for the city. The developer is the one who screwed up. Too bad for them. So when I see new transit-adjacent developments — like this one here in Burnaby, BC with 14 levels of below-grade parking — one can’t help but think: WTF!

    To be clear, this is not a criticism of the developer. I don’t do that sort of thing on this blog. This is a criticism of parking minimums. They are so last decade. And I’m even being generous with this timeline.

  • Density is good, but let me explain

    I tweeted this out last week:

    Not surprisingly, the responses were divided. Some responded saying that beauty is more important than density, and a lot of people were quick to point out that there’s good density and there’s bad density. And because I can appreciate both of these comments, it made me think that I should probably elaborate on my glib tweet.

    The points I was trying to vaguely imply are the following.

    More often than not (at least for North American cities), I think our problem is not too much density, it’s too little. This translates into cities that aren’t walkable, aren’t conducive to transit, and that are overall less sustainable. Right now, every mayoral candidate in Toronto is promising to fix our crippling traffic congestion. I don’t know how they’re going to do it, but they’re promising it because they know it’s something people are pissed off about.

    But here’s my take: counterintuitively, the problem is not enough density. The problem is that too many people in our region have no reasonable way to get around without a car. So they’re forced to drive. The way you fix this not as simple as more traffic enforcement or better signal timing. Good luck! You fix it through density, because density is what makes other forms of mobility suddenly possible.

    All of this is not to say that density alone will render you a great city. Obviously things like beauty also matter a great deal. But in my opinion, density is a fundamental component. Because what good is beauty if you don’t have any urban vibrancy? The answer is that you probably don’t have a real city.

    The other point I was trying to make is that space and density are both relative and oftentimes difficult to understand. We think building height and density are correlated, but that’s not always the case. Look at Paris or Barcelona. We also like to make a lot of spatial rules that we think are right and make our cities better: streets should be at least this wide, buildings should be no taller than the width of the street, and so on.

    But here (pictured above) is a street that narrows to around 6 meters and has buildings that are probably 2.5-3x the width of the right-of-way. Sure, it also happens to be beautiful, historic, and Italian. But what would happen if you maintained this same beauty and made the street 5x as wide and lined up parking in front of the stores?

    Somehow it wouldn’t be as enjoyable as what you see here.

  • A national walk to work day alternative

    I just learned that the US has a “National Walk to Work Day.” And it happens to be today, Friday, April 7, 2023. It was started in 2004 by the federal government and the American Podiatric Medical Association — because, you know, walking is good for your feet — and the idea is that since so few Americans actually walk to work, we should encourage them to do it at least one day of the year. Back in 2019, the figure was that less than 3% of Americans do it on average.

    While I’m sure that there are some good intentions here, I’m guessing that the impact of this national day is probably somewhere between zero and “I guess I’ll park in a farther spot at the office park today.” The reality is that a day like this exists because we have spent the last 75 years, or even longer, making it exceedingly difficult to navigate our cities without a car. So it is equal to, “let me speak out of the other side of my mouth for a day.”

    But we also know that a real and meaningful solution is pretty simple to achieve (though clearly not easy). Build smaller streets and build more densely, especially next to transit. (Would you add anything to this?) So I think it’s time for a new kind of national day. Maybe it’s a day where every dense development proposal next to transit just gets automatically approved. It would be a national day for “this took too long, so here you go.”

    I don’t know, this probably needs some work. I’m open to other ideas here.