Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 569

Lately, I've become very interested in live/work uses. This is not something that I have written much about over the years, but it is now on my mind for a few reasons.

One, many of us tried working from home for the first time over the last 21 months or so, and my understanding is that some people enjoy it. It's not my preference, but I don't represent everyone.

Two, photography is a hobby of mine and I've always thought it would be super fun to have a studio space to play around with on the weekends. If any of you have any suggestions or spaces available, please let me know.

Three, there are lots of urban conditions where retail doesn't work, but a bit more ground-floor animation would be nice. This is commonly how live/work uses have been used. That said, I can think of a number of unsuccessful examples of this in Toronto. It's tough to execute on.

And four, there are lots of instances of older non-conforming spaces throughout our cities serving this purpose: inexpensive spaces for people to live, work, and create in. Though often "illegal", I believe they are important for fostering new ideas.

Here's an example that I was reading about this morning in The Spaces and that triggered this blog post. It's about sculptor Andreas Anastasis and his live/work loft on the west side of New York.

https://youtu.be/tZobmZnlvds

I don't know what building this is and whether or not work functions are technically permitted (presumably they are), but it's an example of what I'm talking about. Take a spin through the video embedded above. If you can't see it, click here .

Should we be designing and creating our new residential spaces with multiple uses and this kind of flexibility in mind? Is there a big enough market for it? Does it devalue the pure residential aspect of the building knowing that your next door neighbor might have an office in their space, an artist studio, or a short-term Airbnb rental?

These are some of the things that I've been thinking about and I would love to hear thoughts in the comment section below.

Photo: Maxwell Schiano via The Spaces

We are living through an inflationary hard cost environment. In speaking with one of our cost consultants the other week, he was predicting that overall we could see another 9-10% increase next year here in the Toronto area. Now, who knows what will ultimately happen. But this is top of mind for everyone in the industry and it will continue to impact how and what we build .

One of the challenges with construction -- and this is will documented -- is that unlike the manufacturing industry, which has seen sustained productivity improvements over the years, the construction industry has seen relatively little productivity growth over the last half century. In fact, you could argue that it's been mostly negative in recent history .

The obvious thought is why not just apply what we've been doing in manufacturing to construction. There is, of course, a long standing tradition of trying to do this, with varying degrees of success. But at the end of the day, building a house remains different than building something like a car.

Probably the key difference is that every construction site has unique constraints and conditions and so the process is constantly changing. Whereas the innovations that Henry Ford pioneered were centered around interchangeable parts and a well-defined process that could be repeated millions of times to generate the exact same output.

From what I can tell, there seems to be two ways in which we can think about improving productivity. One, we can try to be more Ford-like and drive standardization. This means more off-site factory construction and more standardization. This is the typical "pre-fab" approach and companies like R-Hauz , as well as many others, are already successfully doing this. The trade-off is less design flexibility.

The second option has to do with better software and hardware. What if we had significantly better "digital twins" for our buildings such that we could see and experience it in 3D before it is physically built? I'm thinking strap on VR goggles and do a walkthrough with the team. This could allow us to pinpoint all of the issues before they actually happen on the job site.

In parallel to this, what if we had far better on-site automation and robotics to then execute on the above digital twin? Think 3D printing concrete instead of using traditional forms. This is all happening and being worked on, but it doesn't seem to be at a point where it is changing our industry. But it is exciting to think that it may one day.

Photo by Di on Unsplash

I was having coffee with a developer friend of mine this morning and we got onto the topic of asking a lot of questions. We joked that that's what we do all day.

Development projects happen because of teams of very smart people all working together toward a common goal. It's a beautiful thing. And as a developer, there are certain expertises and competencies that you should have .

But for the most part, we usually sit in rooms as the least qualified person. We are not structural engineers. We are not geotechnical engineers. We are not architects ( though I sometimes pose as a fake one ). We are not planners. And we are not façade specialists, among many other things.

But we are the ones taking on most of the financial risk and trying to bring everything together . And what that means is that you end up asking a lot of questions. You collect information, you try and consider what could go wrong, you lean on past experiences, and then you make a decision -- often without perfect information or 100% certainty.

This is how projects move forward. You have to rely on others and you have to make decisions. Because not making a decision is even worse. It burns time, which is why too many cooks in the kitchen can be the kiss of death for development projects.

I'm sure the same thing can be said for many other things in life.