Solving your nearby housing crisis through participatory planning and angular planing.
May 17, 2023 • 20 tweets • 3 min read
Interested in how affordable housing RFP's work?
I got a request to explain how it might be that a city can overburden a project, to the point where land value is zero or negative.
This often sounds crazy to people who don't work is real estate.
Let me explain.
Assume your city has some surplus land and they want to sell it under the condition that a developer promises to build some affordable housing on it.
Assume you're a developer and you want to bid on the land.
We'll keep the assumptions very simple here, to avoid confusion.
May 17, 2023 • 17 tweets • 7 min read
CBC article by @michaelsme just dropped, about Toronto's Housing Now program.
The program was announced in 2018 but approved in 2019. And it's true that it's been a failure so far, with not one project having secured financing or started construction.
The paragraph about "handing back" projects is inaccurate, though.
Mar 18, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Imagine you are the captain of a large cruise ship.
There is a group of people within the ship’s crew who run around dismantling all of the furniture in passengers’ cabins.
They call this work “safety inspections.”
Passengers have generally been unhappy when they return to their cabins and find a mess of random furniture parts and hardware everywhere.
Jan 6, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Wild that MPAC assessments aren’t publicly available without FOI request.
Oh look here’s every property in NYC in a searchable database.
The first change is the OPA, which does have some good stuff in the first two bullets, but then goes off the rails by requiring Neighbourhood retail to not change the character of the area, or cause any substantial impact to neighbours.
Jul 29, 2022 • 34 tweets • 5 min read
Outsiders don’t really understand just how weird the planning process is.
Imagine you’re a master carpenter. You’ve been building furniture and casework for many years. You have a style that you’ve developed, and a loyal customer base that loves your products…
When building for commercial applications, there are code requirements around fire safety, VOCs, and other health/safety issues.
These are clearly written and you’ve always been able to document and adhere to them on your own without much trouble.
Jul 2, 2022 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Everywhere they’ve been implemented, “Growth Funding Tools” have made societies cruel and petty.
They go by many names.
Impact fees, development charges, linkage fees, mitigation fees…
What they have in common is a Big Lie:
That growth is a net negative for society, and needs to be “paid for” by newcomers.
Feb 9, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Let’s imagine a market for something that most people consume, such as vegetables.
Vegetables are fairly cheap, right?
Now imagine we create a veggie quota system where only 2/3 of the market demand for veg is produced at each harvest.
Veg would become…
1/n
Now imagine we create an Official Food Plan to address rising prices.
The province forecasts veg demand for 20 yrs. Their model supports the current level of production.
Farmers who want to grow extra veg need a permit, which takes 5 yrs and costs $100k’s.
Veg would become…
Feb 6, 2022 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Another poll storm this morning. 📊
Investors should have a right to see the future liabilities of a company that they own stock in.
It should be illegal for a large or publicly traded company to conceal future liabilities from its investors and regulators.
Feb 3, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
A few questions for you all:
Employees should be required to purchase their own office equipment and supplies when starting a new job.
Students or their families should be required to pay for new school construction, equipment, and supplies when moving to a new school district.
Jan 31, 2022 • 45 tweets • 11 min read
It's time for another policy review with your friendly Housing Crisis Ouroboros!
Someone leaked the draft recommendations from Ontario's new Housing Affordability Task Force (HATF).
Lots of interesting stuff here. Let’s run through it together.
👇
I want to start by saying this is a 6 page document that you can read for yourself here. I’m not going to cover every single point.
I’ll focus on what I think the best and worst recommendations are.
In my conversations with individual @CityPlanTO planners, they mostly seem to understand why housing is so difficult in the abstract. Density is good, unnecessary delays are bad.
But then start talking about individual projects and everyone turns into a “Company Man”.
🧵
“Sure it’s not an actual requirement, but it’s our policy to not allow anything to proceed at all until we’ve completed these 10 unrelated steps. Then we’ll give you Notice of Approval Conditions, which will have twenty more unrelated steps you need to do for actual approval.”
Dec 27, 2021 • 23 tweets • 5 min read
Let’s deep dive into a Toronto development issue that you probably haven’t heard of:
The City’s new Foundation Drainage Policy.
This policy is based on a Big Lie, so preposterous that virtually everyone involved knows it’s a lie.
Let’s go down the rabbit hole…
🧵👀
I’ll preface by saying that I’m not a geotechnical engineer, and I would welcome any feedback from professionals who have greater technical expertise than I do in this area.
I’m basing this thread on what my consultants have told me across several recent projects.
