Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 255

This past week, Toronto City Council approved the launch of a new affordable housing initiative called the Rental Housing Supply Program. Here's the agenda item if you'd like to dive into the details and read some of the supporting reports. There are a number of components to the program, and one of them is a subsidy that will be administered by way of a forgivable interest-free loan:

Subject to the adoption of the Rental Housing Supply Program, the City will continue to support RGI and affordable rental homes through the allocation of up to $260,000 per eligible affordable rental and RGI home . This is the maximum allowable funding allocation under the Rental Housing Supply Program. Actual funding per project will be determined based on the evaluation of applications on a site-by-site basis, in consultation with the Chief Financial Officer & Treasurer, and based on project parameters and additional sources of funding that can be leveraged to support the project’s financial viability. These funds will be provided as interest free forgivable loans to eligible and approved projects and will be tied to milestones and requirements in agreements with housing providers.

Total funding for the program is $351 million. And the intent is that these funds will be distributed in the near term to 18 affordable housing projects in the city, all of which are expected to start construction sometime between now and the end of 2025. In total, this is anticipated to create about 6,000 new affordable rental homes. That's a good thing.

Now, I don't know anything about these projects. I don't know if $260k is the right figure. And I don't know if a forgivable interest-free loan is the exact right mechanism to deliver these funds. But what the program does do is recognize this: Deeply affordable housing cannot be built without some form of subsidy.

Developers are often criticized for only building expensive housing. But the reality is that developers are, for the most part, takers of market pricing. In other words, we can't just decide to build for less. We can reduce build and finish quality to get costs down, but at a certain point, the cost to build is the cost to build.

And if that cost to build isn't what the market would view as affordable, then you're not going to get there without a subsidy. No developer is going to build if their expected revenues are less than their costs. Directionally, that's what this new program appears to recognize.

I hate driving (specifically in the city), but I am fascinated by the next generation of Apple's CarPlay, which I recently wrote about, here .

One of the reasons why I'm fascinated is because so much of our built environment is built around the car. And since the built environment tends to be very sticky, I think one can safely assume that -- for better or for worse, it's actually worse -- we're going to need a lot of cars for the foreseeable future.

According to Apple , 98% of new cars in the US come with CarPlay already installed. So, all cars. And the obvious reason for this is that many or most people want it. According to this survey , about 1/3 of new car buyers say that they wouldn't buy a new car if it didn't have Apple CarPlay or Android Auto.

Apple believes this number is much higher at 79% of US buyers . I don't know what the right number is, but I do believe the number is substantial and probably closer to Apple's than the 1/3 figure. I certainly wouldn't buy a new car without CarPlay.

The result is a suboptimal situation for carmakers. Apple is still going to do whatever it takes to make carmakers want to use CarPlay. My recent post was largely about the design efforts that they have undertaken. But in the end, I'm not sure the auto industry has much of a choice.

There's likely no way they're going to be able to compete with Apple (and Alphabet) from a software perspective and, in the end, consumers are going to want whatever pairs perfectly with their existing phone, since that's where their entire life already lives.

No wonder Apple killed their car project. They can just use everyone else's cars. Even if this is a departure from their typical approach of controlling both the hardware and software.

This afternoon, the team, including the Town of Lincoln , hosted a community open house for Project Bench . This is our upcoming development project in the Niagara Benchlands.

This was a follow-up to the pre-application community meeting that we held last November, and it is a precursor to the statutory public meeting that will be held in two weeks on July 8th at 6 PM.

If any of you would like to attend, this upcoming meeting will be held in the Council Chambers of the Town of Lincoln at 4800 South Service Road in Beamsville, Ontario.

Overall, the team feels that today went very well. We're looking forward to continuing the dialogue with the community and further refining our development application.

Community meetings are a critical part of the development process and, over the years, I have come to learn the following:

• Open houses, like the one that was held today, are a good format for encouraging dialogue. The typical setup includes presentation boards, representatives walking the floor, and some sort of mechanism for people to provide feedback (post-it notes on a site plan can work well).

• Part of why this is a good format (compared to a straight presentation followed by a Q&A) is that it humanizes the team and it gives the community an opportunity to ask all of their questions. A lot of concerns can be addressed through clear explanations.

• The most common concerns are usually (1) height, (2) density, and (3) traffic. There are obviously others, but this is a good high-level list.

• Many/most people tend to conflate height and density. But as we have talked about many times before on this blog, they are not one and the same. Density tends to be harder to grasp, which is why you'll often hear people criticize tall buildings, but not cities like Paris and Barcelona, despite being two of the densest cities in the world.

• A developer's job is to be creative. You have to manage a myriad of competing interests and then thread the needle as best you can. Community meetings are about listening, learning, and then trying to figure out where the needle might go.

• The objective should be to make as many people as possible excited about the development. In other words, do great work.

What else would you add to this list?