Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 985

If you’ve been in the Junction lately, you have probably noticed some activity at the location of our proposed Junction House . Here is a photo that I took this morning of 2720 Dundas Street West. (Sidebar: What an absolutely gorgeous summer day in Toronto.)

We’re giving the front a coat of fresh white to mark the beginning of the registration phase. Pretty soon you’ll be able to leave your name with us so that we can send you insightful emails and get in touch with you when condo sales begin. 

At some point 2720 will become home to the Junction House sales office (maybe we’ll even call it something pretentious like a presentation gallery). But that point is not right now. 

I can, however, tell you that in addition to superkül (architecture), we are working with Paul Johnston / Unique Urban Homes (sales), Dialogue 38 (interior design), and Vanderbrand (creative agency). 

I am also personally spending a lot of time obsessing over kitchen details and other minutia. I think  Charles Eames once said, “The details are not the details. They make the design.”

If you’d like to be kept in the loop on Junction House, you can follow Slate Developments  (nascent account), the Globizen Group , and myself on Instagram. And of course, you’ll also hear all about it on the blog. Have a great weekend friends.

Earlier this week a 58 year old woman named Dalia was struck and killed by a car near the University of Toronto’s downtown campus. This tragedy has everyone talking about and questioning how to make our roads safer, though the answers are not difficult to find . Here is an excerpt from a piece that Richard Florida penned following the incident called, Toronto’s Deadly Car Crisis :

Today, more Torontonians die from being hit by cars than from being killed by guns. In 2016, nearly 2,000 pedestrians and 1,000 cyclists in the city were hit by cars. Of these, 43 resulted in fatalities. On average, a pedestrian in Toronto is hit every four or five hours, and a cyclist every eight or nine. This means that Toronto’s rate of pedestrian deaths was 1.6 per 100,000 people in 2016 — worse than in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, Washington, D.C., Portland, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Buffalo. It has risen to 1.7 deaths per 100,000 people in 2017 and is on track to rise still further to 1.8 deaths per 100,000 this year. And, children and the elderly face the greatest risk of being struck and killed by a car. The problem is only getting worse. Across Canada, pedestrian fatalities increased by more than 10 percent between 2010 and 2016; at time when they decreased by more than 25 percent in European countries like Norway, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.

The broader issue is what he refers to as Toronto’s “car-dependent spatial structure.” And it is detrimental to not only our public safety, as we saw this week, but also to our ability to grow as a global city. The Greater Toronto Area is projected to reach 10 million people by 2041. I agree with Florida that, for a number of important reasons, we are going to need to commit ourselves to a new model for growth.

My friend Jeremiah shared this ULI article with me this morning, which talks about Hong Kong’s land supply problem. The interesting thing about this problem is that only 9.3 square miles of the city’s land (out of ~424 square miles) is actually developed (and about 60% of the region’s area is water ). The rest has been preserved for parks, farmland, and so on. And that is certainly a remarkable characteristic of Hong Kong. It doesn’t take very long to escape its hyper-urbanism and be in the countryside.

Preserving greenspace is of course vital. But at what point do population and growth pressures justify the unlocking of some of that land for development? This is the question that Hong Kong appears to be asking itself . At the same time, it is looking at developing other islands (such as Lantau, which I understand is a pretty lush place); reclaiming (i.e. creating) additional land; and positioning the city as part of a planned “Greater Bay Area.” 

If it were up to you, how would you suggest that Hong Kong deal with these pressures? The city is already fairly adept at building up .

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash