Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 418

Last week, Sierra Communities (developer) and my friend Gabriel Fain (architect of Mackay Laneway House fame ) submitted the above development proposal for 2760 Dundas Street West in the Junction. It is a beautiful proposal. So not surprisingly, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Here are the first batch of comments from Urban Toronto :

It also happens to be one block west of our Junction House project, so I definitely would have been annoyed if somebody proposed something ugly here. I am 99.9% biased, but I think the Junction has some of the best new mid-rise buildings in the city . Presumably, this is what "Mrgeosim" was getting at with their comment about "the number of good proposals for this neighbourhood."

But here's the thing. This is a relatively small proposal. It's a 6-storey mid-rise building with 28 new homes on top of a tiny 482 square meter site (16m frontage). This makes it a challenging new development to execute on. So the fact that this is required to go through the typical rezoning and site plan processes is, in my opinion, a painful problem.

We should be doing everything we can to encourage these kinds of new housing developments all across the city. And that necessarily means removing as many barriers as possible. A pair of development applications and a few community meetings may seem benign, but they're not. They add time and real costs that then need to be passed onto future residents.

There is also a very valid question around what kind of development charges (or impact fees) we should be levying on projects of this scale. If you want to build a laneway suite in the City of Toronto, you can have the development charges deferred and eventually forgiven. Why? Because we want more rental housing and we have arguably recognized that it's important for project feasibility.

Should the same apply if you're building 2 new homes, or perhaps 28 new homes? At what point should the "impacts" kick in and the fees be levied? And might there be an argument that adding many new homes on top of small 482 square meter parcels is actually an incredibly efficient way of using existing public infrastructure? I think so.

Congratulations to the team on a beautiful proposal! I'm looking forward to this being our neighbor.

Image: Gabriel Fain Architects

It was pure luck, but we couldn't have timed this last week any better. It started snowing in the mountains around Salt Lake City on Tuesday, and it felt like it didn't stop until Saturday. On Wednesday morning, which was peak powder, the main resorts were reporting anywhere between 23" and 30" of fresh now. It was the stuff of magical dreams.

But snowfall is, of course, highly variable. SLC is having a record year, whereas many resorts in Europe weren't able to open until mid-January because of a lack of snow. And from a macro perspective, things are generally getting worse. According to this report , for every one degree increase in the world's average temperature, global snow cover is reduced by about 8%.

What this mean is that, even in low emission scenarios, many of the places that previously hosted the Winter Olympics, may struggle to do so again in the future because of "non-reliable" snow cover. Freestyle ski and snowboard, for example, typically wants a minimum of 1 meter of snowpack as a base, and sometimes more if melting is expected.

Things do not look positive for Vancouver, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and even Chamonix in the below chart . (And as a further blow, the authors of the report also don't know how to spell Vancouver.) Naturally, this is something that you might want to consider when looking at long-term investments that are dependent on fresh snow.

You can, however, ignore Sochi in the above chart. Because this was never a great place for the Winter Olympics and it's unclear to me why this place was ever chosen (other than for presumably nefarious reasons). It's like: "We are one of the largest and coldest countries in the world. We have a lot of snow in Russia. But for fun, let's choose one of the few places with a sub-tropical climate."

Excluding Sochi, though, this is an alarming chart.

The original Segway launched in 2000 and was supposed to revolutionize micro-mobility and the "last-mile problem" associated with getting around cities. Instead, only about 140,000 units were sold in the following two decades and, in 2020, the company stopped production on the namesake vehicle. In hindsight this seems kind of obvious. Segways are/were clunky and expensive. There's a learning curve. And it's infinitely difficult to look even remotely cool while riding one.

But one thing they did get right was the problem. There was in fact a need for micro-mobility solutions, which is why we have seen bike share and e-scooter ridership grow, like this , since the late 2000's. I think it remains to be seen just how ubiquitous things like e-scooters will become in our cities. But in 2021, there were 900,000 electric scooters sold in France alone . So we're already doing much better than the Segway did during its lifetime.

https://youtu.be/34k7UI-DR_8

As I have said before, I am a big fan of electric scooters. And I wish that Toronto would stop being so conservative with allowing them in the city. But I remain open to other ideas, so here's another last-mile solution to consider: $1,400 AI-powered electric shoes . Casey Neistat recently reviewed them in New York City and, I can safely say, that they look Segway-like in terms of their clunkiness and overall attractiveness. They're still in the prototype phase and they do make you walk about 250% faster; but I'm not yet convinced.

How about you?