Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 725

Well this is an interesting concept . One part allotment garden and one part summer home. Copenhagen's kolonihave is a community of small homes and gardens within biking distance of Copenhagen's city center. A place to get away and maybe plant some fresh mint for mojitos. It shares some similarities with the Toronto Islands ( land trust ) in that the owners own their home, but lease the land. Except in the case of Toronto you're not allowed to use your island residence as a summer home. If you want to live on the islands, you need to tough out the winters and make it your principal residence. Regardless of the ownership structure, there is something clearly endearing about these small homes and gardens. And I bet that there would be a lot of demand for something like this if it could be done at any sort of scale.

https://twitter.com/globizen/status/1291563335717203968?s=20

Well, it only took 11 years.

I still remember the first time I walked into Etobicoke Civic Centre and showed the lady at the counter my design for a laneway house. She didn't know what a laneway house was and she couldn't figure out where it fronted. "Wait, it's behind the main house? It has no frontage. Where's the street? Huh?" A lot has changed over the past decade, as I knew it would . All of the building permits are now in and Mackay Laneway House is under construction in Toronto's Corso Italia neighborhood.

Kilbarry Hill is overseeing the construction process. (Construction was supposed to start earlier this summer, but COVID-19 had something to say about that.) Regular updates will be posted on the Globizen blog and on the socials , with the goal of creating a kind of "how-to guide" for laneway suites. Expect detailed construction updates, a list of the individual trades that are being used, post-completion costing information, and probably a bunch more.

The first order of business is the site servicing work, all of which has to be done via the existing house. No connections off the mains because, remember, these are intended to be secondary suites , similar to basement apartments. This raises the question of how best to submeter the utilities. Thankfully, the good folks over at Lanescape were kind enough to share how they have done it.

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Recent job posting data from Indeed has revealed a bit of a paradox. The metro areas where more people are able to work from home -- i.e. tech hubs and finance centers -- have experienced larger job posting declines compared to all other US metros, as well as to tourism destinations such as Las Vegas and Orlando.

We know that the hospitality and tourism sector has been the hardest hit by the current environment. But that doesn't appear to be the biggest driver for overall job losses. In fact, one of the key takeaways is that job losses between February and June 2020 look to be correlated with metro size. That is, the bigger the city, the greater the job losses (% change).

So what's going on?

Well, according to Indeed, it's important to look at the local job mix. In "work-from-home metros" like Seattle, San Francisco, and Boston, there has been a relatively high percentage of people who were able to quickly transition to working from home. This is reflected in the anonymized mobile-device data for these cities. More people at home. Less mobility. And a seemingly stronger adherence to social-distancing protocols.

The problem with this outcome is that it crushes most of the in-person sectors and businesses that relied on this workforce moving about the city -- things like food prep and beauty & wellness. I mean, just think about all of the food businesses that survive off lunches in a CBD. According to Indeed , it is these sorts of local economic connections that have really been driving the declines in job postings and overall payroll employment during lockdown.