Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 503

What a beautiful day in Toronto. I love the heat.

I took the above photo this morning from the 7th floor of Junction House . It is a view south toward High Park . More specifically though, it is the view from the second and upper floor of what will ultimately become suite 607 (a suite that happens to be still available for sale).

Now that the building is almost topped out, I'm planning to run through a bunch of the suites with my camera and photograph all of the different views. I don't think I've seen something like this done before and I think it could be a pretty cool little photography project.

https://twitter.com/donnelly_b/status/1537138477569085441?s=20&t=NCyqwVsGA93Z15hdksJUaw

Buildings take a long time. Slate started investing in the Yonge & St. Clair area in 2013 and we acquired the first parcel for One Delisle in 2015. And here we are now in 2022. When it's all said and done, it'll be over a decade.

So it's important to celebrate the milestones when you can, and we did that today with the official ground breaking event for One Delisle. It takes an army of smart and dedicated minds to realize a project like this, so a huge thanks to everyone involved. You know who you are.

Today was a real milestone. But I'm looking forward to concocting some others so that we have more reasons to celebrate as we complete this very rewarding marathon.

Progress is happening slowly but surely.

Over the years we have spoken a few times about this nice little coffee shop on Shaw Street here in Toronto. It is a good looking and widely visited coffee shop that has made many guest appearances on urbanist Twitter.

The problem, though, is that it was a real battle to get it approved, thanks to the opposition of a single neighbor . That's all it takes to hold up a new project. In this case it was a coffee shop. But it could also be thousands of new homes.

But that was then. Today if you look on the City of Toronto's website you'll actually see this exact coffee shop on a page that speaks to the benefits and the historic role of small-scale retail, service, and office uses.

Right now these uses are only permitted in low-rise neighborhoods on major streets and through an amendment to the Zoning By-Law (unless the nonconforming use already exists). This is a lot of unnecessary work (see above) and it has translated into a steady decline in these sorts of uses across the city.

Thankfully, the city is now looking to change this and permit these uses on an as-of-right basis. So it looks like the good fight was worth it.

For more info, head over here . And if you'd like to attend the public meeting to talk about how brilliant this is, you can do that on July 5 over at City Hall.