Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1119

Today I am excited to announce that we are working with superkül architects on a new mid-rise condo project here in Toronto. Details about the site and project to follow.

I am excited about this for a few reasons.

It should go without saying that I love their work. Check out Compass House , SHIFT Cottage , Harbord Towns , and Oben Flats Queen East .

You may also notice that they work at a variety of different scales and have a lot of single-family / custom home work. This was important to us because one of our goals for this project is to create really great homes within a boutique building. Emphasis on home.

The other exciting piece is that one of the founding principals of superkül – Meg Graham – was one of my professors in architecture school. So there’s a sense of coming full circle.

This matters to me because when I became a developer I told myself that I was going to be the kind of developer that gave a shit about design and actively worked to improve the built environment.

I guess what I’m saying is that there’s a feeling of continuity. I haven’t forgotten where I came from, which was the world of architecture.

Image: Blok Design

Dezeen recently featured the above project in Philadelphia by Interface Studio Architects. It’s called Powerhouse and the goal was to provide a variety of different housing typologies and tenures within a dense infill project that, at the same time, remains in keeping with its context.

The full block complex contains 31 residential units, which are a mixture of apartments, duplexes (stacked towns), live/work units, and single-family townhouses. There’s also a corner retail space. 10 of the units are rental and the balance are for sale. The development also incorporates 3 existing rowhouses on the block. (Were these the holdouts?)

Here is a diagram from ISA to give you a sense of how these different housing types come together:

The project feels germane to Philly’s urban fabric and it is certainly interesting in its own right. But for those of us from Toronto, it’s perhaps even more interesting because it’s a scale of infill development that we don’t see very often in this city: low-rise intensification. (Also commonly referred to as “ The Missing Middle ”.)

Recently I’ve been speaking with a number of people about whether or not Toronto should be thinking differently about its low-rise neighborhoods. Because as it stands today, even this sort of gentle density can cause quite a stir . 

Two thoughts immediately come to mind – one of which will not surprise anyone who reads this blog. Firstly, I see laneway housing as an elegant way to intensify low-rise neighborhoods without changing their character. That’s why I’m proposing this house .

Secondly, I have long felt that we should rethink how we treat arterial roads that are not designated as “Avenues.” That is, we should encourage greater densities. An “Avenue” designation signals mid-rise. But absent this, our policies are frankly retrograde, given the way some of these arterial streets have evolved over the years.

What are your thoughts about this scale of infill?

Images: ISA

“A NEW commodity spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry, prompting antitrust regulators to step in to restrain those who control its flow. A century ago, the resource in question was oil. Now similar concerns are being raised by the giants that deal in data, the oil of the digital era.“

The Economist just penned an interesting piece arguing that the world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data . That’s why the five most valuable publicly traded companies in the world are all tech/data companies.

But the point they are really making is that current antitrust remedies are poorly suited to this new precious commodity. For example, in today’s world authorities need to be thinking not just about firm size, but about the extent of their data collection.

There’s a reason firms with no (meaningful) revenue get acquired for huge numbers. Yes, sometimes it’s just for the talent. But it’s also because of the data they control and the potential threat they pose.

So much of what we do today leaves a digital trace. And those traces are hugely valuable. I suspect we will be hearing more about this as the data economy continues to spawn tech giants.