Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 579

Toronto's new inclusionary zoning policy went to Planning and Housing Committee this week. Agenda item, here . The recommendations were approved, which means that the item will move onto City Council next month for final approval.

Here's a summary of some what is being proposed (though keep in mind that I am not a planner and you should probably do your own due diligence if you're looking to buy land and/or develop here):

• IZ to come into force next year in 2022.

• IZ to only apply on projects with 100 or more residential units.

• Three distinct market areas across the City with differing set aside rates (see below charts). This strategy acknowledges the fact that you generally need submarkets with expensive housing and rising prices to be able to absorb the financial burden of the affordable housing units. I've written a lot about this dynamic on the blog. Relevant posts, here .

• It's in the chart, but it's perhaps worth repeating: Purpose-built rental projects will not be required to deliver any affordable housing units at the outset of this policy. This is important to note because the margins on purpose-built rentals are razor thin.

• The set aside rates are planned to increase to 8-22% by 2030.

• The affordable units will need to remain affordable for 99 years. And the rents and prices are to be geared toward low and moderate income households, which are currently defined as those earning between $32,000 and $92,000.

• Clear transition period for the development industry.

• Ongoing monitoring of the policy to make sure it doesn't suck.

If you're interested, the full staff recommendation report can be found here and the draft OPA and zoning by-law can be found here and here .

OMA NY -- the New York office of OMA -- has just published its first monograph. It's called OMA NY: Search Term . For those of you who may be unfamiliar, Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) is an architecture firm that was founded by Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam in 1975.

The firm is considered to be one of the most influential in the world because of their projects, the writing and thinking of Rem Koolhaas, and because of how many notable architects developed their craft under his tutelage .

When I was in architecture school, OMA was a firm that people wanted to work at and I had friends who did. You weren't paid very much from what I remember, but people put up with that because you wanted OMA on your resume and you wanted to learn things from Rem (apparently he's a big fan of Raisin Bran in the morning).

The New York office of OMA is run by Shohei Shigematsu and Jason Long who are both partners. The practice started out as an American outpost, but it has become more independent over the years and, from what I can gather, it now prides itself on having its own attitudes and views on architecture and urbanism.

This monograph is about that. Twenty radical projects from the firm's new guard. It also includes interviews from people like Virgil Abloh ( Off-White ). I don't have a copy yet, but if you're an architecture and urbanism person, you probably want this one on your bookshelf.

Image: Rizzoli

I have started using my NFT collection as a rotating face on my Apple Watch. The one you see below is a Cool Bean , but I have many others in the gallery. Lately, I have been gravitating towards NFTs on the Solana blockchain because of how fast and cheap it is to transact. Though I am still much longer with ETH.

https://twitter.com/donnelly_b/status/1453406293256024074?s=20

This is all pretty geeky stuff, but it reminded me just how early we are when it comes to web3 . NFT art has exploded over the last year, but the broader ecosystem is still getting built out. We are all going to want mediums in which to display and experience this new form of art. And as soon as that happens, I suspect they won't be thought of as "just JPEGs" anymore.

(One of the nicest digital art displays that I have seen is the MONO X7 . It's currently available for pre-order but I haven't yet pulled the trigger.)

On a related note, I follow a human on Twitter who goes by 6529 , because that is the Cryptopunk number that she/he owns . 6529 is incredibly bullish on crypto and NFTs, and tends to write long and insightful threads about it. One of the most recent ones is about real estate and I think that many of you will find it a worthwhile read.

https://twitter.com/punk6529/status/1452797543478448129?s=20

What I particularly like about it is that it reminds us that so much of what we consider to be normal and the status quo is actually just a construct that people before us created. Usually it's not perfect and there are many inherent flaws, but it's the best that could be done at the time. That or it just worked.

And because it's the way it's been "always done", it just recedes into the background and most of us don't give it much thought. Of course, so much of entrepreneurship is about questioning the status quo and doing things differently. Why this way? Could it be better? And it's precisely during these moments of change where lots of value is created.