Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 245

https://youtu.be/011TOfugais?si=85OchFBtjZAVp0Ez

Here is another great video from About Here talking about how breaking certain rules could make for better apartment buildings.

The basis for the video is a design competition put on by Urbanarium, called Decoding Density , which asked participants to propose creative solutions for "six-story plus apartment forms in Metro Vancouver."

More specifically, the competition asked: How might Vancouver intensify its single-family neighborhoods with small-scale wood-frame apartments?

The About Here video covers some of the common themes from the submissions and, not surprisingly, the first is single-stair buildings . Requiring only a single point of egress can really unlock small sites.

Some of the other ideas are, perhaps, a bit more adventurous; but these are valuable exercises. Many rules are dumb. So it's important that we continually question them and search for better ways.

Over the weekend, we spoke about how the " GTA condo market is in a state of economic lockdown ." What this generally means is that the math isn't making sense to build new condominiums. And so the market is necessarily pausing.

We spoke about what this will likely mean for supply in the coming years, but I think it's also interesting to talk about this in the context of something else: unfunded inclusionary zoning.

As a reminder, inclusionary zoning is, in its most basic form, a requirement to build a certain amount of affordable housing as part of new housing developments. And what I mean by "unfunded" is that there are no subsidies or other incentives being provided to the project.

This means that the cost of providing this housing -- and there is an additional cost -- needs to be shouldered by the project, which ultimately means the market-rate units need to pay for it.

Which is why if you look at most policy studies, you'll often find recognition that, because of this economic reality, IZ tends to work better in areas where home prices/rents are higher. And again, that's because the market-rate homes need to shoulder the cost.

We have questioned, many times , on this blog , whether this is the right approach to delivering affordable housing, but I think this question becomes even more critical in our current market environment.

If the entire market is, for the most part, in a state of economic lockdown, should we really be layering on additional costs and making it broadly more difficult to build any sort of new housing? It seems counterintuitive.

For more on this topic, check out this recent Sightline article by Dan Bertolet.

Since the modern Olympic Games were revived in 1896, no city has ever hosted swimming events in an urban river. Too poopy. But Paris, as we talked about , hopes to be the first. Starting on July 30, the Seine is scheduled to host the swimming portion of the triathlon competitions.

Except, it will depend on water quality. Today's training sessions (scheduled for Sunday, July 28) were cancelled because water tests showed that the Seine is currently below acceptable standards . This is due to heavy rain over the last few days, which I guess overloaded the city's storm network.

So what is clear is that -- 36 years after then-Mayor Jacques Chirac first promised to clean up the river -- the city has only been able to successfully achieve this, sometimes . It's not an easy task.

According to Bloomberg , the clean-up efforts have already cost €1.4 billion. This was spent on doing things like constructing a 50,000 m3 holding basin (about the size of 12 Olympic-sized pools) under the Gare D'Austerlitz. This now holds storm overflow during heavy rain events, in lieu of it going into the Seine.

But this doesn't provide any guarantees as evidenced by today's cancelled training sessions. Presumably, it just makes it less likely for overflow stormwater to get dumped into the Seine. So a cynic might ask: Why bother with all of this?

Well, for one thing, swimming in a river in the middle of a major global city is just plain cool. Look at how the Swiss do it . But another reason could be that you want to create one of the greenest cities on the planet. And if that's the case, then seeing athletes swimming in the Seine is a pretty powerful image.

It shows progress.

Photo by  J Shim  on  Unsplash