Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1264

For the past week or so I’ve been seeing the proposed Kettle Boffo Project in Vancouver make the rounds online . Here’s a rendering of the project, which is located at Commercial Drive and Venables Street:

The reason it has been making the rounds is that a community group called NO TOWER  (written in all caps) has come out in fierce opposition of the 5 to 12-storey building. They have over 3,500 signatures.

As an outsider looking in, this is surprising. The scale of the project seems appropriate. The height roughly matches the existing building shown above to the right. It may even be lower. And the project will provide somewhere around 30 social housing units, as well as additional space for the Kettle Friendship Society non-profit, who are currently on the site. (Note: An application to the city hasn’t yet been made.)

What this has me thinking about is the push and pull between bottom-up and top-down planning. 

When architect Bjarke Ingels talks about his Dryline project in New York , he likes to refer to it as the love child of Robert Moses (top-down planning) and Jane Jacobs (bottom-up planning). In the case of this project, it’s because it’s a large infrastructure project that they are trying to root into the local neighborhoods. Makes sense.

But this same thinking could also apply to overall city building. Local communities rightly have their own wants. But at the same time, cities need to be thinking about the overall. The challenge is finding that right balance.

I would be curious to hear your thoughts on the Kettle Boffo Project in the comment section below – especially if you’re from Vancouver.

Last week Metrolinx slashed fares on Toronto’s Union to Pearson Airport express train (UPX), by a lot. From $27.50 to $12 for people without a PRESTO card and from $19 to $9 for people with a PRESTO card. They listened to the pundits . And there were a lot of them regarding this topic.

At these fares, the UPX is decidedly cheaper than a taxi or Uber, but more than regular transit, which I think makes sense given that it’s a better overall experience. I would take this train all day long.

But the other thing that Metrolinx did was also reposition the train service as an inner city commuter service by matching fares with GO transit for non-airport trips within the city. As one example, this means that you can now go from Bloor & Dundas West in the west end to downtown Union Station for $5.30 in cash or $4.71 with a PRESTO card. This is in comparison to $3.25 in cash on the subway.

But this is huge, because look at the options for this transit trip:

• UPX Train: 8 minute trip; service every 15 minutes
  

• GO Train: 12 minute trip (additional stop); service every 20-30 minutes during peak times and roughly every hour during off-peak times (so no drinks after work)
  

• Subway: 26 minute trip; most frequent service
  

This is a significant connectivity upgrade for the west side of the city. One that reinforces my belief that, next to Union Station, Bloor/Dundas West is the best connected mobility hub in the Toronto region. This now a perfect location for companies and people who need quick access to both the Financial District and the airport. Unfortunately though, I don’t think we’ve taken full advantage of this connectivity in terms of what we’ve allowed and disallowed to be built in the area to date.

I’ll end by saying that I think the pundits have been overly critical of the UPX train. Everyone loves to talk about it as a failure. But look, every organization and person makes mistakes. If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not pushing yourself hard enough. The key is to iterate and refine as you charge along. So go make some mistakes today :)

Image: UP Express

This week Strong Towns has been running a great social media campaign called #BuildHereNow . 

The way it works is very simple. They asked people to get outside and take photos of vacant and/or underutilized properties in their town or city and post them to Twitter or Instagram using the hashtag #BuildHereNow. The goal was to start to identify properties that could “use a little love" and to encourage city builders who might need a little push to develop a particular property.

I’m a big fan of crowdsourcing information and I love the idea of digitally annotating buildings and spaces. In this case, it’s about pulling together the desires of the community,

Hashtags are a great way to quickly make something like this happen, but I would love to see a purpose-built tech platform do this in a more permanent way. Of course, it doesn’t just have to be about developing. Buildings are rich in information; hopefully so rich that a platform like this could survive.

If you think about it, property titles are already a form of annotating real property. So this isn’t really a new idea. 

But now technology allows us to harvest all kinds of other information – such as what people would like to see built. Imagine the possibilities if we became more effective at collecting, organizing, and leveraging this data at scale.