Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1521

As of today, Family Day Monday , you’re going to start seeing information released regarding TAS’s (in partnership with Main & Main ) newest community called Kingston&Co. It’s located on Kingston Road, just east of Victoria Park Avenue, in a neat area called Kingston Road Village. You can already register at kingstonandco.ca . And as part of the registration process, we’re also soliciting feedback as to the types of retail the community would like to see added to the area. Note: There’s already a Starbucks :)

At the same time, we’ve also launched a redesign of our corporate site ( tasdesignbuild.com ). The biggest change is that we’ve taken the blog–which was hidden under a “Neighbourhoods” tab–and made it front and center on the homepage. We see this as a pretty significant change. One that shows that we would like you to join us in a conversation around city building. We now allow comments on all of our blog posts and you can see right on the homepage who the author of the post is.

If you have any feedback on either Kingston&Co or the new homepage , we’d love to hear from you in the comment section below.

http://www.boxpark.co.uk/about/

Over the past decade, Toronto has seen a proliferation of condos across the city. And while I do think this intensification is a great thing , we’ve been much better at building towers than anything else. We’ve neglected medium density development and it has bifurcated our housing market: you’re either in the market for a condo or for a house.

And since we’re not really building anymore of the latter, Toronto has become accustomed to bidding wars and multiple offers. Every young couple I know is in the market for an “hip fixer-upper  in the city.” Problem is, that’ll cost you $700,000 or more and you may still need to gut it.

At this point, it’s not realistic to expect that we’ll be building anymore single family homes in the city—at least not at any sort of significant scale. We’re tapped out. But what we can reasonably expect is more medium density development. I’m talking about midrise developments along our avenues, laneway houses in people’s backyards and other creative infill solutions that sit somewhere between a house and a highrise.

If we’re concerned about creating equitable housing opportunities, then we’re going to need relieve some of the pressures on low rise housing. We’re going to need more diversity in our product offerings.