Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 779

The City of Toronto is currently studying ways to increase housing options/supply and planning permissions in areas of the city that are designated as Neighbourhoods in the Official Plan.

These are areas that are sometimes referred to as the "Yellowbelt", because they are seeing very little intensification and, in a number of cases, actually losing population. (They're also colored yellow in Toronto's land use map.)

Ultimately, the goal is to encourage more "missing middle" type housing forms; housing that is denser than single-family homes but smaller in scale than say mid-rise housing like Junction House .

Here are a couple of interesting charts from the City. Based on Toronto's Official Plan, "Neighbourhoods" make up 35.4% of the city's land area.

In Toronto's Zoning By-law, the "Residential" category makes up 47.1% of the city's land area.

Digging deeper, 31.3% of Toronto's total area is zoned for only detached houses -- which would mean no missing middle type housing. But 15.8% of the city's total area is already zoned to permit other types of low-rise residential buildings, such as duplexes and triplexes.

So why isn't more of that happening?

As we've talked about before on the blog, the problem is that it is exceedingly difficult to make the math work on projects of this scale, which is why most developers don't want to do them. The web of bureaucracy that you need to navigate in order to build anything in the city is also imposing for non-developers (and developers really).

But to be a developer, I think you need to be an optimist. So I am going to remain hopeful that this study -- and the pilot they want to do in Ward 19 -- will result in a streamlined solution for housing of this scale.

Images: City of Toronto

A new 280 acre park is currently under construction in an old quarry on the westside of Atlanta. It's called Westside Park . When it opens this spring (that's at least the target), it will be by far the largest park in the city. But already there are concerns that this investment in new public space could be triggering "rapid gentrification" in the surrounding area.

So earlier this month, the mayor's office issued an executive order that put in place a 6-month moratorium on all new construction permits in the communities surrounding the park. The order read like this: “...refuse to accept new applications for rezonings, building permits for new construction, land disturbance permits, special use permits, special administrative permits, subdivisions, replattings, and lot consolidations for non-public projects."

The objective is to avoid displacement. And since new development means change, this is a way to stop change. (Don't you just hate when things go and change?) The problem, of course, is that a moratorium on new housing doesn't stop change and it does nothing to address the desire to live next to this new amenity. It only stymies the supply of new housing to meet this demand. (It's also incongruent with the park investment being marketed as a "catalyst for new development.")

In fact, Joe Cortright (of City Observatory) and Jenny Schuetz (of the Brookings Institution) have both argued -- either directly or indirectly -- that the above move could actually increase displacement in the surrounding area; because the moratorium on new housing could simply redirect demand toward the existing housing stock. The order does seem to suggest that you can still renovate an existing property.

I wonder if any studies have been done on the externalities associated with temporary housing supply moratoriums. If so, I would be interested in reading them.

This is an excellent article by James Hamblin about the coronavirus. He believes, along with many epidemiologists, that the disease (COVID-19) is unlikely to be contained, and may become endemic:

The Harvard epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch is exacting in his diction, even for an epidemiologist. Twice in our conversation he started to say something, then paused and said, “Actually, let me start again.” So it’s striking when one of the points he wanted to get exactly right was this: “I think the likely outcome is that it will ultimately not be containable.”

But here's the irony. It is unlikely to be containable because, comparatively speaking, the disease isn't as fatal as other coronaviruses. In James' words: The virus is deadly, but not too deadly.

As of right now, the fatality rate is believed to be less than 2%. SARS and MERS, on the other hand, were highly fatal to humans. H5N1 (avian flu), which emerged in the 90s, had/has a fatality rate of about 60%.

One of the problems with COVID-19 is that, for many people, the symptoms are mild or even non-existent. And that is precisely why it has been so difficult to pin down. If it affected everyone equally and as severely, then it would be far more containable.

But I am the furthest thing from an epidemiologist, so you should probably just go and read James' article over in The Atlantic.

John Hopkins University also has this live map showing total confirmed, total deaths, and total recovered. At the time of this post, the fatality rate looks to be about 3.4%. But if you believe that many people are asymptomatic, the denominator is probably understated.

Naturally, we are all taking precautions, doing what we can to make our communities safe, and trying to quash this virus. And that is what we should be doing. At the same time, I found James' article helpful at putting things into perspective.