Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 736

Currently, if you're building an Ancillary Secondary Dwelling Unit (such as a laneway suite ) in the City of Toronto, you can defer the payment of any development charges for 20 years from the date that a building permit is issued for the unit. But really what this means is that, if you don't do anything bad for 20 years (event of default), you won't have to pay anything. The payable charge goes to $0 at the end of the term and the agreement goes away. Cool.

So what are some of the bad things that you're not supposed to do?

Well the main thing is that you're not allowed to create a new lot at any point during the 20-year deferral period. This is because the laneway suite policies are designed to encourage the creation of new rental housing and not new for sale housing. So you can't sever off the back of your lot. The other thing you need to do is make sure that if you were to ever sell your property that the new owner(s) assumes these same obligations.

This all makes sense.

There is some fine print to consider. The payable development charge amount that the City enters into these agreements is the rate for single detached dwellings . Currently that figure is $76,830. This is more than double what you would have to pay if you, well, just paid the DCs for your ancillary secondary unit instead of deferring them. The reason for this is because, if you do do something bad such as sever your property, you've now no longer built an ancillary secondary unit . You've built a detached dwelling. Rates go up.

Moral of the story: Don't create a new lot. For more information on the program, click here .

P.S. I'm not a lawyer. Please don't take this post as any sort of legal advice. This post was also revised from its original version to correct a misunderstanding on my part.

As many of you already know , the City of Toronto is currently studying ways to increase the supply of "missing middle" type housing in our low-rise neighborhoods. This week they published a new report called, " Expanding Housing Options in Neighbourhoods ." The Globe and Mail has already written about it over here , but I would like to share some numbers from the report to help put things into context. All of these are verbatim from the City's report. I'm just arranging them neatly into blocks.

Development applications active between 2014 and 2018 were reviewed to identify those representing "missing middle" housing typologies, i.e. more than 1 proposed residential unit and 3-6 storeys. 144 "missing middle" applications out of 508 total active applications in Neighbourhoods were identified during this time frame .

The missing middle applications represent 5,090 units approved or built in Neighbourhoods. The vast majority of these applications—94% of applications and 89% of proposed residential units—are 4 storeys or less , consistent with the general height limits for Neighbourhoods in the Official Plan.

Of the 5,090 proposed residential units, almost half were part of large site redevelopment projects , often townhouse subdivisions on former school sites in inner suburban areas of
Scarborough, Etobicoke, and North York. The remaining half of proposed missing middle type units were in lowrise intensification and infill of existing housing, with activity clustered primarily within the former City of Toronto.

The approximately 5,000 missing middle type units in development applications represent
approximately 1% of the 400,000 total proposed residential units in projects active between 2014 and 2018 , while the approximately 2,500 net new units added through as-of-right building permits from 2011 to 2018 represent only 0.6% of the total proposed residential units.

One percent. I guess that's why it's called the missing middle.

Back in February, I shared a presentation by Benedict Evans about the macro and strategic trends that have been playing out in the tech industry. (Of course, the potential impacts go well beyond tech.) Well that was February and lot has happened since then. So he has updated a bunch of his slides and it is now called, "Tech and the new normal." We know that things have changed, but we don't know what things will really look like when this is all over -- and which changes will have durability. Benedict doesn't necessarily prognosticate in his presentation, but he does provide valuable historical context and some great data. So there are a lot of conclusions that you might be able to draw from it on your own. It's also my kind of slide deck. Not a lot of text. Lots of graphics/diagrams. And really only one key takeaway per slide. Here you are .