Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 852

This a big month for laneway (housing) advocates in Toronto. Last week, City Council voted in favor of expanding the policy provisions for laneway suites to all Neighbourhoods within the city. ( Neighbourhood is a defined term in the city's Official Plan.)

Previously, the policies -- which allow laneway suites to be built as-of-right -- only applied to the Toronto & East York Districts. Here's a copy of the recent staff report in case you would like more information.

On Monday, my friend Alex Sharpe (of Lanescape) was on BNN Bloomberg talking about why this is a good thing for the city. Alex and the rest of the team at Lanescape have been instrumental in these policy changes.

If you're a Toronto homeowner with a property that fronts onto a laneway, I would encourage you to consider this opportunity. It's a way to increase the value of your home and it's a way to create more rental housing in this city.

Here are the results of a Global Consumer Survey that was conducted in Canada this year (2019) and that asked respondents whether or not they own a smart home device. That is, a device that can be controlled via a smartphone / internet connection.

Even with all of the concerns around privacy, virtual assistants (such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home) appear to be the most popular device with Canadians. Next are connected speakers and smart thermostats.

The vast majority of respondents (68%) stated that they don't own any smart home device. However, if you look at the trend lines for Canadian household penetration in the "smart home market," this is naturally changing:

Curiously, there appears to be a household penetration rate spread between Canada and the US, with the US exhibiting meaningfully higher numbers. Here is the US chart:

Based on these charts, the lowest penetration rate appears to be for "energy management" devices, which would include anything that helps households reduce energy consumption. The rates are the lowest in the case of both Canada and the US.

This is a bit unfortunate given that energy management is an important one. But it's also one that isn't best addressed with only a few smart devices. It should involve a more holistic approach to the way in which we design and build homes.

All charts and data taken from Statista .

The below chart from this morning's Wall Street Journal is perhaps a good example of our ongoing transformation from an industrial economy to an information economy. Just four stocks -- namely Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook -- have accounted for 19% of the S&P 500's total return this year. All of them are "tech."

And this is not new to 2019. Similar contributions were made by tech last year and in 2018. I have been used to hearing about the 4 horsemen of tech. But apparently there's even now something called the "FAANG stocks," which refers to Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google (Alphabet).

This shift is, of course, one of the reasons why every city is trying to establish a strong tech ecosystem. I saw that first-hand in Lisbon this past week. And frankly I think the city has many of the same characteristics that made Berlin a great place for tech. It's affordable. It's filled with young and smart people. And it's a fun place to be.

There's a reason that Lisbon now hosts the annual Web Summit , which is generally considered to be the largest tech conference in the world. (The North American offshoot, called Collision , relocated to Toronto this year in order to be in a more global city.)

Portugal only has a population of about 10 million people. There are some 3 million people in the metropolitan area of Lisbon. But that doesn't really matter because most startups today are immediately targeting a global customer base.

I learned more about Portugal and Spain's colonial pasts on this trip and I found it fascinating. In many ways, it was the start of globalization. But that was the Age of Discovery . Those centuries are over and done with. Our century is the Information Age. The above chart is part of that story.