Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 271

I lived in my last condo for over 10 years. And since it faced east, I never got to see any sunsets while at home. Now that our new place faces south and west, I am amazed at how often there's a beautiful sunset here in Toronto.

This was last night's from my home office:

Naturally, this picture doesn't come close to doing it justice.

Back in March, we spoke about how Toronto wants to allow small-scale apartments on all of its major streets . Well today, this study -- known as the Major Streets Study -- passed at Planning and Housing Committee .

It still has to pass at Council. And the Committee did ask for city staff to look at certain amendments, such as reducing setbacks and increasing the maximum dwelling count from 30 to 60 suites. However, all signs point to this new policy being fully approved sometime in the coming months.

There's still work to be done. For example, I don't know why there even needs to be a maximum number of homes. Maybe one of you can explain it to me. We are already dictating the overall built form, so why not let people just build as many homes as possible.

It feels like we're saying: "We desperately want more homes on our major streets, but you know, we don't want the economies of scale to be too great. We'd rather see more, smaller projects. This way each home is more expensive to build!"

In any event, this is still meaningful progress. It is what so many urbanists have been clamoring for over the years; more homes in our low-rise neighborhoods. So I think it's important that we recognize today as such. Nice work.

I had coffee this morning with an engineer who is going back to business school in order to segue into real estate development. This is a fairly typical journey. Lots of people come into development from a related discipline. In my case, it was architecture (even though I never practiced architecture). It was also the case when I went to Rotman that something like a third of the class had a background in some sort of science or engineering field.

However, one thing I did mention this morning was that he will likely find that he will need to unlearn certain things as he moves forward. Every discipline tends to indoctrinate us with a certain way of thinking about the world. Lawyers tend to be a certain way. Engineers tend to be a certain way. And architects tend to be a certain way.

In my case, I found that architecture school taught me to be, among other things, an intense perfectionist. The modus operandi in design studios is that your project is never ever complete. The more you work on it, the better it will become. And as a result, you should feel a deep onus to work on it as much as humanly possible. But in business, this isn't practical. In the vast majority of cases, speed over perfection will serve you better.

I believe wholeheartedly in multi-disciplinary backgrounds, and maybe this is one of the reasons why. It shows you what you should unlearn. What would you say your biases are?