Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1159

Last week I picked up an Epson document scanner with the hope of going paperless in my home office. I know I’m late to this party, but just hadn’t gotten around to researching and selecting the right machine. Manually filing papers is passé, time consuming, and impractical in smaller living spaces.

Let me tell you: I am so impressed by how quickly I was able to clear off my desk and throw everything directly into Google Drive and Evernote. Now I have an empty desk and I can access any of these files from my phone. Decluttering is a great feeling.

I am sure that many of you are already doing this, but if you aren’t, consider investing in a quality scanner with a good automatic document feeder that does double sided scans. If the process is quick and painless, you’ll be more likely to do it on a regular basis. That was my rationale at least.

One of the things I like about living in a smaller space is that it forces you to live more minimally, which is something I am constantly aspiring to do. For me, going paperless is a step in that direction.

Lots sizes and dimensions vary from city to city, as well as from neighborhood to neighborhood. They come in many different shapes and sizes from long and narrow (common in Toronto) to rectangular or even wide and shallow. Charlie Gardner wrote a terrific post on this last year where he used Bing Maps to illustrate some of these differences. Tokyo, for instance, is shown as having more rectangular lots (32′ x 38′), whereas Buffalo is shown as having more long and narrow lots (30′ x 175′). Charlie then asks: why the prevalence of inefficient long and narrow lots? These dimensions obviously produce long and skinny houses.

As he rightly points out in his post, there are economic reasons for this. Assuming you’re starting with deep blocks and lots, then there’s going to be a natural tendency toward subdividing and going long and skinny. That’s because the key dimension is frontage onto the street. The more frontages you create, the more front doors can be built, the more lots with access to the Mississippi can be created, etc. And that’s how you end up with 10-12′ wide row homes, which also helps to address overall housing affordability. This is not a new phenomenon.

To further demonstrate this point, let’s look at how this phenomenon has translated into the condo market – specifically the mid-rise condo market here in Toronto. In this case street frontage morphs into window frontage (access to light). That’s now the guiding dimension. In a 1 bedroom apartment, that dimension might be something around 6-7m. That allows you to have both a bedroom and a living room with a window. So it makes for a great 1 bedroom or 1 bedroom + den apartment. (I’m ignoring corner suites for this thought exercise.)

However, a tension often arises when you begin to look at larger suites, such as 2 bedrooms and 3 bedrooms. The obvious response would be to simply give over more window frontage. So instead of 6-7m, the suite may get 10m. This would allow you to create a split 2 bedroom apartment (both rooms get windows) with a living room in the middle. This would be considered a highly desirable floor plan.

But up until now we’ve been ignoring the depth of the apartment. And as is the case with lot dimensions, this can have an impact on the amount of street/window frontage that gets designed. We’ve talked a lot about mid-rise buildings before on this blog and one of the challenges here in Toronto is that  the 45 degree angular plane  guideline produces deep floors on the bottom of the building and narrow floors on the top. Given this, it would not be unheard of to end up with 12m apartment depths on some of the lower floors.

The counter argument would be that nobody is forcing these larger floor plates. Simply carve the building back. But the economic reality is that the margins are so thin on mid-rise buildings, that it would be inconceivable to give up this floor area. You have to max out the envelope.

Why does this matter? Well let’s assume that the average downtown Toronto condo will cost you $857 per square foot . Using back of the envelope math, that means that the above 6m x 12m apartment (1 bedroom) could cost around $663,000 (774 square feet x $857 psf). And that the above 10m x 12m apartment (2 bedroom) could cost around $1,106,000 (1,291 square feet x $857). 

These are obviously big numbers. Question becomes: Who will be able to afford these?

So naturally the design exercise becomes about reducing the size of the apartments and often this means reducing the amount of window frontage. Of course when you do this, it means that one or more of the bedrooms will need to be pulled back from the front windows, which is how you end up with inset / recessed bedrooms (indirect light) and long and narrow apartments. These are often pejoratively referred to as “bowling alley suites”, but they are driven by a push for greater affordability.

Again, this is not a new phenomenon. It is simply a trade-off that gets made. It’s the long and narrow of property affordability.

My friend Randy Gladman, who is Vice President of Development at Triovest Realty Advisors, recently sat down for an interview with Alex Josephson , who is a founding partner of the Toronto-based architecture practice PARTISANS. 

The topic of discussion was the book that PARTISANS published last year ( Rise and Sprawl ) and, more specifically, why Toronto’s condominiums all look the same .

Firstly, let me admit that I haven’t read Rise and Sprawl from cover to cover. So take what you would like from my comments. Still, the book was very successful at spurring a lot of discussion within the industry and so I’ve been getting hit with it since it was released. 

Generally speaking, I fully support and commend their call for better architecture in Toronto. Here is an excerpt from Alex:

“There’s a subtle but critical distinction I think some people are missing about the book: We are not criticizing condominiumization; we are criticizing condo architecture. We support density and we support condos. Toronto has become a much more vibrant city as a result of the condo boom. But the values that are driving the designs are suburban. The virulent spread of homogeneous design? That’s practically the definition of suburban. The radiator balconies I mentioned? They’re the result of a hard-wired fantasy that, as Canadians, we all have some kind of God-given right to an outdoor space, namely a back or front yard. And parking lots. Why do we still own and drive cars in the downtown core? This is a serious problem totally born out of a suburban driving mentality.”

Where I struggle with the book is that it has always felt a bit idealistic, fanciful and, in some cases, elitist (as Randy mentions in the interview). Idealism can be great for spurring discussion (and drawing attention to a practice), but what are the root economic causes for what we are seeing? Virtually every building is a “spreadsheet in the sky”, not just the condo towers in Toronto.

That said, the discussion does acknowledge that profit will always drive projects. And I do agree with this particular comment about building heights:

“Anything above twenty stories is inconsequential from street level. So whether it’s twenty or a hundred storeys, I’m mostly indifferent. We are so obsessed in Toronto with height. But height equals money. If we can figure out a way to allow for more height in exchange for better design, we’ll end up with better buildings. But that kind of logic is just not embraced by the city planning culture here.”

Click here for the full interview in ArchDaily.