Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 464

So here's the thing.

Given the option, and assuming the weather is favorable, I think that most people would rather eat outside than inside. I know that I certainly would. And that is why one of the great silver linings of the pandemic has been the allocation of more public space toward outdoor dining. Here in Toronto that initiative is called CaféTO, and the impact has been significant :

Researchers for an association of local business improvement areas  estimated that customers spent $181-million  in the repurposed parking spaces in the summer of 2021. The same spaces would have generated $3.7-million in parking revenue,  according to the local parking authority , and even that modest figure assumed prepandemic levels of demand.

The above figure is based on the 940 restaurants that participated in the CaféTO program in the summer of 2021. And the estimate is that they served some 4.9 million customers on repurposed parking spaces in the 13 weeks that officially make up summer.

What I'm not able to figure out from the report, though, is how much of this $181 million is truly incremental. If you look at the breakdown of restaurant sales in the report , participating restaurants saw 36% of sales from CaféTO, 26% from indoor dining, 25% from permanent patios, and 13% from takeout/delivery.

It generally makes sense that CaféTO would make up the largest share of sales. It was summer. And outside is where people want to be. But again, to what extent did CaféTO drive additional revenue for restaurants? Did it induce more people to dine out? And if these patios weren't there, how much of the above 36% would have just shifted to indoor dining?

I don't know exactly. We would need to see historic sales. But I'm sure it has been a boon to restaurants. There is no doubt in my mind that CaféTO is a great benefit to the city and that it should be a permanent fixture for as long as there are humans who both need to eat and who enjoy being outside in the summer.

Photo by  Udara  on  Unsplash

Altus Group recently completed a study for BILD (Building Industry and Land Development Association) that looked at the various factors that might be contributing to housing affordability and supply issues here in the Greater Toronto Area. One area that they looked at was development approval timelines, and I thought these were two interesting charts:

What this is suggesting is that approval timelines don't seem to really vary based on project size. Whether you're rezoning for 3-50 homes or 400-500 homes, it's probably going to take you a similar amount of time. This in turn creates a strong incentivize to want to develop bigger projects. Among other things, it brings down the "number of days per unit" metric shown in this second chart.

I have spoken anecdotally before about minimum project size inflation , and here's some data to support why that is happening. But it really is too bad. We should be doing more to incentivize smaller infill projects. Our cities need development at all scales.

I was recently a guest on Aaron Cameron and Adam Powadiuk's Commercial Real Estate (CRE) Podcast . This is a podcast that they have been doing since 2016 (and it's "powered" by First National Financial ). In this episode, we spoke about making development projects work in this current environment, as well as a bunch of other things. If you'd like to have a listen, click here . It's about 53 minutes.

Thanks for having me on your podcast, Aaron and Adam.