Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 203

I'll be the first to admit that I have an urban bias. I like walkable narrow streets. I like being able to cycle around. And I like not having to drive when I want to do things. But this can create a city-building blindspot and Paul Kulig , Principal at Perkins&Will Toronto , reminded me of that this week. Here's a tweet where he compares two streets, both of which have a right-of-way width somewhere around 40m:

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The image on the left is Prenzlauer Allee in Berlin. And the image on the right is Finch Avenue West in Toronto. Despite both having light rail running down the middle, one of these streets is walkable, vibrant, and generally urban, and the other is very suburban . What this reminds us is that a wide street isn't necessarily an insurmountable challenge. It's ultimately how we design that street that is the make or break.

Here's another look at Prenzlaurer Allee:

In addition to transit running down the middle of it, it also has a ton of on-street parking. In many cases, the cars are parked perpendicular to the curb. So it's not like this street isn't also accommodating to motorists. The key differentiator is how the buildings are placed. They come right up to the street and are accompanied by a great pedestrian realm (note all the patios below).

This is one of the things that Toronto needs to be focused on following the investments made in public transit on streets like Finch and Eglinton. We don't want generous setbacks on these streets. Make them 0m. Towers in a park kill any chance of street life. We can talk all we want about "active frontages" on our arterial roads, but who wants to sit on a patio on a street like Finch? Nobody.

But as Berlin shows, there's absolutely no reason why we couldn't change that. Thanks for the reminder, Paul.

Cover photo via Google Street View

If you're a longtime reader of this blog, you might remember this post from 2020 , which was about a cost comparison that developer Urban Capital had done between a project they completed in 2005 and a project they were doing in 2020. What they uncovered was that the biggest culprit in terms of rising costs was none other than development charges. This line item had increased by 3,244%!

Everyone in the development industry knows that this is the reality. Not only have developers needed to carry a big budget for development charges, but they've also had to carry allowances for escalations ; and that's because they have tended to jump multiple times throughout the course of a single project. It's frankly hard to keep up.

So for anyone to say that development charges have generally increased at the rate of inflation -- which some do say -- I'm guessing they don't know math, they don't know how inflation works, or they're lying because taxing new homes is politically easier than the other ways of collecting municipal revenue.

Thankfully, the Bank of Canada has an easy-to-use inflation calculator . And if one were to plug in 2005 and 2020, it would tell you that over this 15-year period, the average annual rate of inflation was 1.63% and that, as a total percentage change, this equates to 27.43%. So, 3,244% vs. 27.43%. It's not even close.

For a long time, nobody cared to listen to developers complain about this. The market was, you know, too good . Isn't this just developers being greedy? Well, that is no longer the case and consumers are waking up. Here's an excerpt from a Globe and Mail article published this week:

But cities started to enjoy that revenue stream too much. They began to gorge on development fees, a flow of money that allowed politicians to keep property taxes low. Who was going to complain? Future owners of homes are often people who don’t yet live in the city and can’t vote. It’s the city-building equivalent of that Monty Python joke about an innovation in how to raise government revenue: taxing foreigners living abroad.

But even more importantly, municipalities are now waking up. Last week, the City of Vaughan -- which previously had the dubious distinction of the highest DCs in the Greater Toronto Area -- announced that it would be reverting back to the rates they had in effect on September 18, 2018, and that these rates would remain in place until November 19, 2029.

This takes the development charge for a single-family home from $95,466 per unit back down to $50,193 per unit. This is significant! And given the current strains on housing affordability, these savings will almost certainly flow through to end purchasers. (FYI, all of the developers who have signed the CANT pledge have all agreed to pass on any tax savings dollar for dollar.)

Here's a quote from Vaughan Mayor Steven Del Duca:

Development charges have become an unfair tax burden on homebuyers. Too many of our residents, in particular young families in our community, have seen their dream of buying a home close to where they grew up, disappear completely as housing prices have spiraled out of control.  We have a housing affordability crisis and it’s time for us to get real about the solutions needed to solve it. Today’s decision by Vaughan Council to dramatically reduce our development charges for the foreseeable future is a strong step in the right direction. I urge other municipalities to follow our lead and do the right thing.

He makes a good point. It behooves other cities in Ontario to follow their lead.

Cover photo by Allen Y on Unsplash

Every year, the Canadian Armed Forces deploy soldiers to Canada's Arctic for a series of activities that are broadly called Operation NANOOK . One of the main reasons for doing this is to show that Canada is present and active in the area. And this is becoming increasingly more important to our country for at least two reasons.

One, climate change is making the area more accessible and navigable. So there's growing interest in it as a global shipping route. And two, the waters, specifically the Northwest Passage , are contested. Canada claims them as internal waterways, but many other countries continue to argue that the passage is an international strait.

This should not surprise anyone.

So I am of the strong opinion that this is a critically important operation for Canada. In fact, it's very possible that we're not doing nearly enough. The North can feel pretty far away from Middle Island in Lake Erie (which is the southernmost point of our country). And that's because it is. But it should never be out of mind.

If you're interested in this topic, I would encourage you to take a look at this photo essay by Gavin John , published in the Globe and Mail. Gavin takes incredible photos and you can find more of his work here and here .

Cover photo by Gavin John