Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 903

Yesterday's post was about Amazon pulling out of NYC. Today I thought we'd talk about another contentious city building debate that is happening closer to home. This week Sidewalk Toronto announced that it would like to expand its development focus beyond Quayside to the entire Port Lands district along the waterfront. To pay for all of this, the Alphabet company is looking for a share of the city's property taxes and development charges (impact fees), and they want to capture some of the increase in land value. Not surprisingly, many reacted poorly to this announcement. Some people are already grouchy about what Sidewalk is up to at Quayside and so this was inevitable. But sharing revenue and upside is not necessarily a pioneering idea. It is called a partnership. Perhaps the partners have different skill sets. That is usually a good thing. But regardless, the best partnerships are when all parties win. What Sidewalk allegedly wants to do is shoulder more risk upfront in exchange for a kicker on the backend. This, too, also has a name. You can call it real estate development. I don't know the specifics of the deal being proposed, but the question that comes to mind is: What is the net present value to the city -- both quantitative and qualitative -- with and without Sidewalk? (No links in today's post because I'm writing on mobile while standing at the airport.)

As I am sure you have all heard, there's a lot of debate in New York right now (city and state) about whether they should reject Amazon's decision to open up a new headquarters in Queens.

Urbanist Richard Florida has been arguing that one of the richest companies in the world shouldn't be receiving taxpayer subsidies and that Amazon should do the right thing here. They should open up in New York but without any inducements.

As a counter argument, Kenneth Jackson, professor of history at Columbia University, recently opined that this is actually business as usual. American cities have a long history of competing for companies because the benefits outweigh the costs over the longer term.

Here is an excerpt from his op-ed in the New York Times:

They are right about one thing. It is absurd that any city would agree to such a deal. But this is how the game is played. Paying companies to relocate has been the American way since 1936, when Mississippi established the nation’s first state-sponsored economic development plan. Under that plan, since followed by many other jurisdictions, cities and states agreed to pay companies to relocate by promising them new factories and low or nonexistent taxes. With those inducements, numerous businesses relocated in the decades after World War II, usually from the union-dominated Northeast and Midwest to the business-friendly South.

Perhaps this would make a good debate topic for Kialo .

Update: Amazon just cancelled its plans for a corporate HQ in NYC.

Perhaps for obvious reasons, I am interested in how important issues get debated. I have written before about how I think the community engagement process for new developments is largely broken. I think it naturally incents certain kinds of feedback.

Recently, I've been playing around with an online platform called Kialo . They call themselves "an easy to use, yet powerful tool to engage in thoughtful discussion, understand different points of view, and help with collaborative decision-making."

The site works by trying to create a structured hierarchy of pros and cons around debatable questions. You participate by making claims (supported by links). Duplicate claims are neatly grouped together. And unthoughtful suggestions are moderated out.

The UI looks like this (top level question shown):

But you can then drill down into specific claim groupings (note the org chart looking graphic at the top):

I'm not yet convinced that it creates the "collaborative reasoning system" that they are after (maybe because I haven't used it enough). But I do really appreciate the structure and civility that they are trying to introduce to topics that are often vehemently debated.

Are any of you regular users of Kialo?