Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1564

MaRS has just launched a Social Venture Exchange (SVX)  here in Toronto in collaboration with the TMX Group. And I’m proud to announce that TAS is a founding venture member.

Here’s the mission of the SVX:

"The SVX is a local, impact first platform connecting impact ventures, funds, and investors in order to catalyze new debt and equity investment capital for local ventures that have demonstrable social and/or environmental impact, including nonprofits, co-operatives, and for-profit corporations."

The focus of the SVX Is on  triple bottom line accounting . So it’s very well aligned with the philosophy of TAS. However, I like to think of our  "four pillars"  as a kind of quadruple bottom line framework. In addition to measuring social, environmental and economic impact, we also care about  cultural  impact.

According to Sequoia Capital, Americans spent $4 trillion on retail shopping last year - 95% of which was still done in traditional brick-and-mortar stores. I’m actually a bit surprised by how high this number is. I would have thought that a larger percentage of people would be shopping online.

For me personally, I’d say that my split might be close to 50/50. From furniture to clothes, to even a new bicycle, I buy a lot online, come to think of it. Part of the reason is convenience, but the other reason is that I like having easy access to a broader selection.

About the only thing I really prefer buying in person is groceries. However even there I’ve been exploring ways to regularize shipments of the items I typically buy. I can’t recall where I read it, but I remember seeing something about less than 1% of groceries in America being bought online.

Intuitively, the percentage of online sales is only going to rise, particularly given the shift to mobile. Consumers can now shop anytime, anywhere. Real estate companies and retailers certainly need to pay attention.

But just like the internet didn’t make cities irrelevant, I don’t think it’ll make shopping in person completely extinct. As Sequoia Capital points out in its article, mobile phones are creating new opportunities at the intersection of online and real world shopping.

So while I don’t know what the future online/offline split might be, I suspect that the two worlds will continue to blur together. I might buy a bicycle online, but when it comes time to service it, I’d like to be able to bring it into a store.

Politics rewards consistency. Even if you’re wrong, it’s better to be consistently wrong than come across as wavering - however noble and rational the intentions may be. And that’s exactly what happened with Rob Ford and his commitment to subways, subways and subways.

John Lorinc of Spacing wrote an interesting piece yesterday on how, despite all the debating that went on, Ford is delivering what he said he was going to deliver: a subway. It doesn’t matter that all technical and financial considerations were thrown out the window, he got it funded.

As I said earlier this week, I think the Scarborough line is the wrong subway to be building and that the downtown relief line is infinitely more important for the region. However, Lorinc makes a good case in his article for why this line will not be funded despite the current focus on subways, subways and subways:

“Fourth, it’s important to recognize that there will be one notably perverse exception to the foregoing, which is the [Insert Euphemism Here] Relief Line. I do admire Josh Matlow’s advocacy on this front. But Ford will never take up the DRL cause because (i) he doesn’t get the purpose of said extension ; and (ii) because the project doesn’t butter his bread, electorally speaking . I’m guessing it will be years before someone with the mayor’s block-headed tenacity emerges to champion a line with a politically inconvenient name and an eye-bulging price tag.

In fact, the sheer heft of the relief line will allow marginally useful yet politically supported subway projects — extensions in the west end to Sherway Gardens or up Yonge to Richmond Hill – to continue to elbow their way to the front of the line, just exactly as the Scarborough subway project did. Indeed, because we no longer care, at any level of government, about subjecting our transit investment choices to a rational policy framework , the most crucial project in the GTA will always lose out in the funding lottery because it has the most diffuse constituency and the most conceptually complicated purpose.”

The disparaging thing about these two paragraphs is that it’s a sad reality.