Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1232

Someone recently asked me: “Why do you blog?”

I have lots to say whenever someone asks me this and I’ve written a few of those things down, here . Obviously I believe that there’s tremendous value in writing your own blog and reading the blogs of others.

It’s for these reasons that I really enjoyed one of Seth Godin’s posts this week called: Read more blogs . The post is about using an RSS reader (Feedly) to keep track of blogs (which I do), but it was the lead-in that caught my attention:

Other than writing a daily blog (a practice that’s free, and priceless), reading more blogs is one of the best ways to become smarter, more effective and more engaged in what’s going on. The last great online bargain.

Good blogs aren’t focused on the vapid race for clicks that other forms of social media encourage. Instead, they patiently inform and challenge, using your time with respect.

He then ends by arguing that we shouldn’t sit idle while powerful gatekeepers like Google and Facebook “push us toward ad-filled noisy media.”

The reality of many personal blogs is that they don’t live and die on clicks like other online media. It’s a labor of love and that makes it a unique place on the internet. I clearly like this place and, if you’re a reader of this blog, I suspect you might too.

Thank you for reading my personal journal.

One June 13, 2016 from 6:30 to 9:00 pm, the City of Toronto will be hosting a community consultation meeting for the proposed redevelopment of Honest Ed’s / Mirvish Village . 

The meeting will be held at the Bickford Centre Auditorium at 777 Bloor Street West (across from Christie Pits Park).

The purpose of the meeting is to present Westbank’s revised development proposal, which was submitted to the city last month. Their first proposal was submitted last summer (July 2015). 

Some of the key changes include a new on-site public park, the retention of additional heritage buildings (now 21 in total), more pedestrian porosity, and the retention of Honest Ed’s alley in its current location.

I consider Westbank to be one of the most thoughtful developers in the city and so I’m pretty excited to see this one evolve. I’m planning to attend the community meeting and maybe I’ll see you there.

Below are a couple of other renderings to give you a taste.

Alan Ehrenhalt recently published a balanced piece in Governing that largely reflects my own views on inclusionary zoning. It’s called:  Why Affordable Housing Is So Hard To Build .

His argument is that there are lots of cities trying to build more affordable housing, but that most strategies have not yet proven to be all that successful.

I’ve written a few posts on inclusionary zoning. The most recent is this one . And though I believe that a mix of incomes is a critical component of good city building, I am having a hard time believing that inclusionary zoning is the silver bullet that will get us there. Admittedly, it sounds like a great idea. But how does that translate into reality?

Here’s a snippet from Alan’s article (shout out to Daniel Hertz of City Observatory who seems to get cited in almost every article I read these days):

Just about every city that has tried an inclusionary zoning law in recent years has had a similar experience. In some cases, the results have been much worse. According to BAE, Chicago’s inclusion law produced $19 million in 11 years, but only 760 affordable units. Thirteen years of inclusionary zoning in Seattle brought the city $31.6 million in fees and a grand total of 56 units. As the urbanist Daniel Hertz wrote recently, inclusionary zoning has been “more powerful as a symbol than as a way of helping people.”

Of course, the devil is in the details. Many inclusionary zoning policies allow cash in lieu of actual housing:

San Francisco actually has had an inclusionary zoning law since 2002, and it has been a flop. It mandates a 12 percent affordable set-aside, but allows developers to escape the mandate by paying a fee to the city. As in Arlington, this is what they have done. A study by the research firm BAE Urban Economics found in 2014 that after 12 years the San Francisco law had brought in $58.8 million in developers’ fees and had generated 1,560 units. That’s better than nothing, but it’s a drop in the bucket for a city facing an affordability problem in virtually every neighborhood.

All this said, I’m still not so sure that it’s as simple as eradicating the cash in lieu option and forcing mandatary inclusionary zoning. As Alan rightly points out in his article, if we set the bar too high, then all of a sudden it starts making some market rate housing infeasible to build. 

And if this ends up lowering the overall supply of new housing, then we could be hurting affordability while at the same time trying to mandate more of it. Does that make sense? Clearly this is not as simple as it may seem.

I get the appeal for cash poor cities. It sounds like free affordable housing. But I’m always suspect of “free” lunches. In any event, I think we can all agree that this is an important discussion to be having.