Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1507

This morning I’m going to a memorial service for a close family friend. His name was Ed Hung. You may have read about him in the Toronto Star , because on March 16th, 2014 at 11:00AM Central European Time he died by way of an assisted suicide. He was in Switzerland.

And the reason he was in Switzerland was because, in Canada, you’re not allowed to do what he did. You’re not allowed to seek help and decide when it’s your time to go. That’s supposed to be left up to some greater being.

But what if you’re like Ed? What if you have Lou Gehrig’s Disease and your body noticeably deteriorates within the span of a few months? What if you’ve just lost the ability to do what you love most: play the guitar?

Ed was a lawyer. And a successful one at that. But he loved music. The first time I met him was at my mother’s house one Christmas where he was playing the guitar and singing songs all night. He had a band and that’s what he loved to do.

Sometimes I think it’s a shame that people often don’t get the chance to just do what they love; they have to do other things in order to make enough money. But I suppose that’s life.

Nonetheless, it is somebody’s life. And I agree with Ed in that quality of life is a subjective concept. If you’ve just lost all ability to move your left hand, then it’s you who are going to have to deal with that new reality—not anybody else.

Which is why I fully support Ed’s decision. I didn’t know him as well as I would have liked, but I have a lot of respect for what he did. He took matters into his own hands and did it his way—as he beautifully expressed in his farewell YouTube video .

I know that my family will miss Ed dearly, but he’s left us with something important to think about. Before he passed he wrote a letter called Approaching Death. You can read it here . And in that letter, he delivers a powerful set of lines about the laws in our country:

“…my pride as a Canadian has somewhat diminished after having been on my knees begging to die in another country. This is not fair and I certainly do not wish it upon any of my fellow Canadians.”

I know that this may not sit well with some of you, but I believe in a country built on personal freedoms. And this, to me, is a case of personal freedom. I’m not sure what I would do if I were in Ed’s position, but I know with certainty that I would want the ability to do whatever I decide.

Last night I attended the kick off party for a new loft / laneway / condo development called Lanehouse . It’s in the Bloor and Dufferin area of Toronto, which is an area I know quite well as I used to hang out there when I was living off St Clair West. I used to go to 3 Speed, Bar Neon, Tall Boys and Bassline.

The project is located at 50 Bartlett Avenue . It’s a renovation of an existing 2-storey laneway structure, as well as the addition of a new building fronting onto Bartlett. In total there will be 16 units. For the 13 “loft houses” going into the existing building, a third floor will be added containing indoor space and a terrace. I’m not exactly sure what the balance of the other units will be like.

It’s a really neat project. But what I’m also excited about is that it’s a type of laneway housing. As many of you will know, I’m a big fan of laneway housing –however difficult they may be to achieve in our great city. But one of the ways you can often build them, is if there’s an existing laneway structure in place–which is the case at 50 Bartlett.

It’s also helpful to have frontage onto a street with a proper name. Otherwise you have a “house behind a house” condition. Most laneways aren’t named and the city doesn’t consider them to be a real street. They’ll ask: what would your address be? So even though you may be able to access them from a laneway, the city would view those houses as having no real frontage.

There are of course many other obstacles, but those are some big ones.

While I would love to see the city actually jump on board with laneway housing (and develop proper policy around them), I’ll take this project as evidence that we’re headed in the right direction–towards a city where laneways have been rebranded, repurposed and entirely reimagined. That’ll be an exciting time.

A friend of mine who lives in New York recently sent me this interesting article: “ The Perverse Effects of Rent Regulation .” And he sent it to me, because he wanted me to take note of this stat:

There are, effectively, two rental markets in Manhattan. Roughly half the apartments are under rent regulation, public housing or some other government program. That leaves everyone else to compete for the half with rents determined by the market.

50% is a big number. I would never have guessed that the New York rental market would be split in such a way. But it is split because it’s fairly clear what would happen if it weren’t: 

“Poor people would be priced out of Manhattan,” he says. “Period.”

This, as the article argues, could threaten the diversity that has made New York the economic and cultural hub that it is today. But at the same time, there are a number of important questions: Is 50% the right split? And are the control mechanisms in place the right kind of mechanisms? Should rent controls be attached to people as opposed to apartments, which is how it’s typically done today?

Diversity is hugely important and there will always be a portion of any city’s population that cannot afford market rents. But intuitively, and I could be wrong, 50% seems high. It seems high because these types of rent regulations achieve the exact opposite for the balance of the market that has to pay market rents: their apartments become more expensive.

I’ve been having a lot of discussions lately about affordable housing and rent control always comes up. I think that in a lot of cities there needs to be some sort of intervention in the market to keep them from becoming homogenous playgrounds for the rich. But I also believe that many policies–which may sound great in theory–can have unintended market consequences. These need to be seriously looked at.