Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 256

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?

I would rather take a train to the office than drive. And given reasonable options, I would rather take a train than get on a plane. I like trains . So by default, it means that I'm interested in Christopher Beanland's new book, Station . In it, he profiles some of the best railway architecture from the 20th and 21st centuries. Places like Union Station in Los Angeles, Hauptbanhof in Berlin, and Byappanahalli in Bengaluru. But as cool as these places are on their own, I think it's important to keep in mind that trains exist as part of a network. And like all transport, they promote time-space convergence. This is part of what makes these spaces so interesting -- they're like a portal to somewhere else.

According to this report (2023) from the Centre for Cities, the UK has a backlog of about 4.3 million homes. This is in comparison to other Western European countries for the period from 1955 to 2015.

Said differently, these 4.3 million homes are effectively missing from the UK's national housing market because it failed to build and deliver at the same rate as some other rich countries.

The report also argues that this housing shortage started not at the end of the post-war period, but at the beginning of it in the 1940s.

So what do they propose? The following :

Increase housing supply where new homes are needed. More homes are built in Wakefield than Oxford. Building in places with fewer jobs won’t fix prosperous cities’ housing crises.

Planning reform to introduce a new flexible zoning system that would allow builders to build if they follow the rules, while maintaining special protections for National Parks, Conservation Areas etc.

Zoning of land in walkable distances around train stations in the green belt for suburban living and with protected green space, which would provide 1.8 to 2.1 million homes.

Increase the use of permitted development rights to cut the red tape that makes it hard to build upward extensions or infill developments.

Stop subsidising home ownership. Despite Right to Buy, home ownership as a share of private housing has fallen in every city since 1981. The Government should stop subsidising ownership, tax housing wealth increases by abolishing the Capital Gains Tax exemption for primary residences and treat owning and renting equally.

None of these proposed solutions should come as a surprise. We know that housing follows money/jobs . And we know that if we want more of it, we need to remove the barriers to building it, especially around higher-order transit.

Image: Bloomberg