Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 906

At the end of last month, Toronto City Council adopted the "Housing Now" action plan . The first phase of the plan involves the public marketing of 11 city-owned sites for the purpose of finding non-profit and private sector partners to help redevelop the lands with new mixed-income housing. It is expected that these lands could accommodate about 10,000 homes.

Here is the list of sites:

As part of the offering, around 2/3 of the built units will need to be rental (the above chart shows more), and of these rental units, 50% will need to be affordable with rents set to 80% of Toronto's average market rents. All of this should translate into approximately 3,700 new affordable homes. (Mayor Tory's plan is to build 40,000 affordable rental homes by 2030.)

The City wants to ultimately retain ownership of these lands, and so the sites will be offered up through long-term land leases. It looks like they'll be for 99 years. The City will also be forgiving a number of fees and levies for the 3,700 affordable homes. They are pegging the PV (present value) of these development incentives at just over $280 million:

Making use of surplus public land to increase the supply of affordable housing certainly makes a lot of sense. But there's a cost burden associated with these affordable units, which is why discussions around inclusionary zoning often come back to offsetting measures. Who is going to pay for these subsidies?

The above "financial incentives" -- which in this case are simply foregone revenue -- speak to this cost burden.

Tables: City of Toronto

The MIRA Tower in San Francisco is one of my favorite buildings by Studio Gang and probably my favorite tall building under construction right now. Here's a video and a few photos from the San Francisco Chronicle's urban design critic, John King :

https://twitter.com/JohnKingSFChron/status/1092892541609926657

When we first met Studio Gang, this project hadn't yet started construction. They broke ground in April 2017 . But it was one of the designs that got us particularly excited about what a Studio Gang building could mean for midtown Toronto .

Now that the MIRA Tower is well underway, I have to say that it looks even better than it did pinned to the walls of their Chicago studio. I can't wait to see it in person once it's complete.

I finally did it. Over the weekend I ported this blog over from Tumblr to WordPress. I had been thinking about doing this for a while, but kept putting it off (1) because of the work involved and (2) because I was worried about my permalinks changing. About 35-40% of the visits to this blog come from organic search. I'm on the first page when you Google "real estate developer."

I had been using Tumblr since I first started writing this daily blog back in August 2013. But it started feeling increasingly limited. It isn't great for longish-form blogs like this one and it is terrible at handling photos and other embedded content. (I plan to post more of my photography now.) The last straw for me was the inability to blog from a mobile device. I tried that over the weekend and it was bad.

I was also starting to feel like the product was on the decline. Yahoo acquired Tumblr in 2013 for $1.1 billion. Tumblr hadn't yet figured out how to effectively monetize its platform and Yahoo needed a cool social product in their portfolio. But that deal doesn't seem to have gone as planned, at least not for Yahoo .

So here I am on WordPress. I'm still working out some of the kinks, but I think we're almost there. If you're reading this post in your inbox, it should be business as usual. If you're reading this post on the web, you'll notice a few differences (I'm still fine tuning the design).

Regularly scheduled programming will resume tomorrow now that we're just about setup.