Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 336

The Quay Quarter Tower in Sydney has been just been awarded the "best new tall building" of 2023 by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH). Deigned by 3XN and BVN, it's a great adaptive reuse story.

The project is a renovation and expansion of an existing 1970s building. And the team managed to retain 65% of the original structure (slabs, columns, and beams) and 95% of the original core.

This results, according to their calculation , in 12,000 tons of embodied carbon savings. The equivalent of 35,000 flights between Sydney and Melbourne. At the same time, the team managed to add 45,000 m2 of new floor area to the site by grafting new slabs onto the existing ones.

But let's get back to these carbon savings.

According to this site , there are 37 direct fights between Sydney and Melbourne each day. That's about 13,505 flights per year, meaning that the carbon savings from not fully demolishing this building (and starting fresh) are equal to about 2.6 years of people not flying back and forth between these two cities.

If you consider how long buildings typically last (this one was relatively young at under 50 years), it kind of makes buildings seem less bad. Of course, we're only talking about and comparing embodied carbon. There's also the ongoing operation of the building.

In any event, a deserving project. Congrats to the team. For more on the project, click here .

Photo via Dezeen

Bill Gairdner of Gairloch Developments sent me this message the other morning:

He is talking about Junction House and he is, of course, right. It is a very cool feeling to create homes for people.

It's not easy building buildings. People get upset at you. They tell you that you're ruining their community. And broadly speaking, it can feel like every imaginable obstacle has been placed in front of you to make things more difficult.

But at the end of the day, once the dust settles, there will be places to live where places did not exist before. And then people will move into these places and transform them into homes.

They'll make them their own, create new memories, and, in the case of the people that Bill was referring to, they'll raise a family.

I'm not trying to make this sound more grandiose than it deserves to be. But I am being honest when I say that I know the team feels both a sense of honor and a great sense of responsibility because of the work we do.

You want people to be happy and you want the city to be a better place. So it's hard not to feel a little emotional when you see people moving into a place that you've worked tirelessly on for several years.

Yeah, it is a cool feeling, Bill.

Metro Vancouver, which includes the City of Vancouver and 20 other municipalities, is proposing to increase its development cost charges (DCC) :

Metro Vancouver is  proposing to increase DCCs  by roughly $23,000 per new single-family home; $21,000 per new townhome; and $14,000 per new apartment. For example, fees for a townhouse in Vancouver will rise from $10,027 today to $30,861 by 2027.

In response to this, federal housing minister, Sean Fraser, has just pulled $138 million in funding that was intended to accelerate housing permits and new affordable housing projects in Surrey and Burnaby.

This makes some sense. Because it is pretty weird to say, "Hey, we need more affordable housing. Give us some money for this and, while you do that, we're also going increase the cost of building new housing."

Of course, this is the whole growth-should-pay-for-growth mantra. And supposedly, there's growth-related infrastructure that needs to be built.

To be fair, Metro Vancouver is also proposing to increase its property taxes: 12% in the first year, 11% for the next two years, and then 5% for the next three years. So this is not all going onto new supply.

I don't know enough about the finances of Metro Vancouver to comment on these numbers specifically, but I do think it's important that policy makers understand what the current market environment means for new housing.

It is difficult, and in many cases impossible, to underwrite new housing projects today. Which means that even if all fees and charges were to remain unchanged, we are going to see a decrease in new housing supply.

Photo by  Matt Wang  on  Unsplash