Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 981

I don’t know what it’s like in your market, but everyone is talking about it in the industry here in Toronto. Combine these rapidly rising hard costs with higher development charges and inclusionary zoning and you get significant upward pressure on condo prices and apartment rents. 

This is also one of the reasons – perhaps it is the main reason – why you’re seeing some projects get cancelled. These are projects that maybe sold in one market (lower revenues) and are now trying to build in another (higher costs). The math no longer works. Sorry.

I mention this today not to complain, although I’m always up for a good industry commiseration over beers, but because I often hear people lament that Toronto needs better design. Why aren’t developers using triple-glazed windows? Why aren’t developers thermally breaking the balconies?

I will always advocate for better design. That is core to my belief system. But everything costs money. There are very real limits in this equation. And markets have a funny way of telling you exactly what those are.

Photo by Filip Mroz on Unsplash

On Thursday, July 5th, Slate Asset Management , Studio Gang , and the rest of the project team will be hosting a community open house where we will introduce designs for a new block plan and mixed-use building at Yonge + St. Clair . This will be Studio Gang’s first project in Canada. We’re pretty excited.

It’s important to note that while the proposed design has been influenced by some of the early discussions we had with city staff and the local Councillor, we are still very much at the beginning of this process. Which is why alongside this community open house, we are also launching yongedelisle.ca .

This will be our “neighbourhood engagement” website as we go through the planning process. You’ll find updates from the project team as they become available, and you’ll also have a direct way to get in touch. We’re also testing out this interactive page where you can vote on the city building principles that matter most to you.

So hopefully we’ll see you on Thursday, July 5th. Invite details above. Please RSVP, here , if you can. But if you forget to do that, don’t worry, you can still just show up. For more on Jeanne Gang, click here .

Kevin Rose is an internet entrepreneur. He has built a number of consumer products, including Digg in 2004. Previously he was a venture capitalist with Google Ventures, but now he’s doing that with True Ventures. He also hosts a podcast .

This past weekend he posted the following photo to his Instagram :

Here’s the story. 

After begging his mom to take him to the printers, he got this business card made when he was 13 years old. Foliage Software wasn’t a real company, of course. But it had business cards and he was not only a Programmer and the Owner, but a Senior Programmer and the Owner.

I laughed as soon as I saw this post because it is exactly the sort of thing that the 13 year old version of me would have done and probably did. (The combination of upper and lower case letters on the card also helped with the humor.) I’m sure if I dug around my mother’s house I would find a trail of my failed business schemes and project ideas.

But that’s entirely the point he is trying to make. Try. Fail. Learn. Refine. All of these actions will increase your odds of success at the next go around. Nobody will remember the failures anyways.

Seth Godin perhaps said it best with:  “The tiny cost of failure is dwarfed by the huge cost of not trying.”