Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1505

I’ve written a lot lately about the Gardiner Expressway East. First to argue that I think it should be torn down and, second, to provide a counter argument as to why some people think North America’s urban freeways are here to stay. I wanted to avoid confirmation bias.

Well a recommendation has been made to City Council and it is, indeed, to remove the eastern portion of the Gardiner Expressway. They are now asking Council to approve it. The item will first go to the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee on March 4, 2014 and, subject to the results of that meeting, will then go to City Council on April 1, 2014. 

The recommendation to Council identified the following 4 key features of the preferred “remove” option:

1. Widening of Lake Shore Boulevard east of Jarvis Street by two lanes into an eight-lane landscaped at-grade boulevard;

2. The lowest overall public investment at $240 million net present value (NPV) because of significantly lower lifecycle costs despite a higher upfront capital cost than Maintain;

3. Public land disposition proceeds of approximately $80 to 90 million NPV from the release of about 4 hectares of land (which could support 260,000 square metres of development)

4. Highest compatibility with Official Plan and Central Waterfront Secondary Plan principles and objectives as well as approved plans, such as the Don Mouth Naturalization and Flood Protection EA, Lower Don Lands Framework Plan, Keating Channel Precinct Plan and the Port Lands Acceleration Initiative.

If you’d like to read more about what’s going to Public Works and City Council, click here .

One thing I didn’t mention in my previous posts is the land disposition piece (item #3 above). By removing the Gardiner East, roughly 10 acres of public land will be freed up which, according to their estimates, could allow for 2.8 million square feet of new development. That’s roughly the size of our 72-storey First Canadian Place .

I’ve been crystal clear about my position on the Gardiner East and so I’m delighted to see it seemingly move forward in that direction. I know a lot of people are concerned that the removal option could result in some commute times being 5 to 10 minutes longer by 2031, but I think we’ll have even bigger problems by 2031 if we continue with the status quo.

Urban theorist Richard Florida has argued many times before that when cities get to around 5-6 million people they come to a point where they have to make tough decisions about the way they’re going to continue to grow and prosper. Toronto is at that moment. Our car dependent ways are already crippling productivity levels.

What kind of city do we want to be by 2031? I don’t think that we can afford to just “maintain.”

I’m going to be turning one of my blog posts ( "Why Toronto should stop complaining about all its condos" ) into a talk at Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management on March 10th, 2014 at 6:30pm. But since it’s an academic setting, they wanted me to make it more impartial and so the talk instead, asks a question, and is called: "Should Toronto stop complaining about all its condos?"  

You can register for the event here . It’s primarily geared towards students, but I’m told it’s also open to industry and the public. I haven’t completely figured out what I’m going to talk about yet, but I plan to focus on the issues of supply and demand I raised in my blog post and then tie that into a discussion about the rise of midrise development—specifically through  DUKE and Kingston&Co (both TAS projects).

If you have any other suggestions, I’m all ears.

Earlier this week I wrote a post talking about how maybe developers need to position their homes as more of a “product” . After that post, somebody asked me about my thoughts on home automation and how I thought technology was going to creep into the home.

Then today, I came across this networked washing machine prototype from the folks over at Berg . If you can’t see the video below, click here .

Just like Nest , this is the start of taking really unsexy home devices—thermostats, smoke alarms and washing machines—and making them sexy and networked. The "internet of things" is a trend that I think we’ll definitely see a lot more of.

Because more broadly speaking, our homes today are actually really dumb machines. Swiss-born French architect Le Corbusier used to refer to the home as a “machine for living”, but the thermostat is really the only adaptive device most people have in their homes. And it’s not even very good.

When the temperature drops, most homes have one sensor (the thermostat) to tell the mechanical equipment that it should flip on the heat. It could be incredibly hot upstairs or in another room, but your home has no understanding of that. The decision is binary: heat on or heat off.

There’s a lot more we could do.

Zoned heating and cooling is an obvious solution, but I’m also imagining buildings that physically adapt and change to their environment. Designing buildings for climates like Toronto’s—where we have both extreme heat and cold—is incredibly challenging, particularly because our buildings are so static (other than operable windows in most cases).

So while I do think that networked devices are great progress, I also think that we need to be looking at the bigger picture. Let’s think about the actual architecture of our homes and how we can truly make them responsive machines for living.