#16

Thoughts and life updates

I write this letter to share some of the things I’m working on and thinking about. A little about me:

I own and manage a digital product studio in Toronto called August. We design and build digital products. We spend about 80% of our time on client work and the balance on internal projects. I also invest in and build real estate with my two brothers.

some thoughts

There are a few things that make me optimistic about the prospects for missing middle housing development in Toronto over the next few years.

First, Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government was re-elected provincially following its commissioning and publishing of a Housing Affordability Task Force Report that, among other things, included the following recommendations.

3. Limit exclusionary zoning in municipalities through binding provincial action:
a) allow “as of right” residential housing up to four units and up to four storeys on a single residential lot
b) modernize the Building Code and other policies to remove any barriers to affordable construction and to ensure meaningful implementation (e.g., allow single-staircase construction for up to four storeys, allow single egress, etc.)

12. Create a more permissive land use, planning, and approvals system:
a) Repeal or override municipal policies, zoning, or plans that prioritize the preservation of physical character of neighbourhood;
b) Exempt from site plan approval and public consultation all projects of 10 units or less that conform to the Official Plan and require only minor variances;
c) Establish province-wide zoning standards, or prohibitions, for minimum lot sizes, maximum building setbacks, minimum heights, angular planes, shadow rules, front doors, building depth, landscaping, floor space index, and heritage view cones, and planes; restore pre-2006 site plan exclusions (colour, texture, and type of materials, window details, etc.) to the Planning Act and reduce or eliminate minimum parking requirements;

27. Prevent abuse of process:
…
b) Require a $10,000 filing fee for third party appeals;
c) Provide discretion to adjudicators to award full costs to the successful party in any appeal brought by a third party or by a municipality where its council has overriden a recommended staff approval;

32. Waive development charges and parkland cash-in-lieu and charge only modest connection fees for all infill residential projects up to 10 units or for any development where no new material infrastructure will be required.

Will these recommendations all be implemented? Sadly, probably not. Will some? I think so.

Second, John Tory will undoubtedly be re-elected municipally as mayor and has, among other things, promised to continue and ramp up the ambition of his Exploring Housing Options in Neighbourhoods (EHOB) initiative that has the Planning department exploring permission for certain missing middle housing types in neighbourhoods. He’ll also being endowed by the Province with strong mayor powers that will make it easier for him to quell some Council pusback.

Given all of that, it’s possible that we see missing middle housing permitted in more parts of the city, including with a single point of egress up to maybe four or six storeys, a simpler and quicker approvals process, and reduced risk of a Committee of Adjustment (COA) decision being appealed (as one of mine was).

Hopefully. We’ll see.

I’ve been thinking a bit about other barriers to building missing middle housing, including the lack of knowledge sharing in the industry, which forces greater reliance on urban planners, municipal lawyers, and other consultants to guide you—at a cost, of course—through the various opaque and ever-changing processes.

There are probably a few ways to go about improving this, but one that’s been on my mind recently is the idea of a Missing Middle Summit: a full-day event featuring talks from urban planners, municipal lawyers, general contractors, and even local councillors and City staff.

It would give people doing this stuff an excuse to come together, meet each other, and maybe stay in touch to trade notes as they work through their respective projects.

What do you think? Good idea?

business stuff

• August: Most agencies like ours have websites similar to ours (some better, some worse). They include a description of services, a bit about the team, some client logos and case studies, and a call to action to get in touch. Very few include pricing, and I’m not exactly sure why that is.
  
  I suspect that it’s partly due to everyone just doing what everyone else is doing, but maybe also to a desire to maintain some flexibility to price descrimiante and charge big clients more than small clients and so on. And that might be the right move—though we’ve kept our lives simple by always estimating and quoting in the same manner across the board.
  
  The tradeoff however is that this introduces friction as potential clients need to get in touch and talk to someone just to get a sense of a project’s general price point. Many, I’m sure, don’t take that step. They drop-off. This opacity also removes a key mechanism for filtering out inbound leads with unrealistic price expectations.
  
  I’m starting to think that the benefits aren’t worth cost.
  
  I follow this guy Peter Kang on twitter who owns and manages three agencies, each serving a different niche. The newest (I think), Vaulted Oak, provides support and maintenance for existing websites and has very clear plans laid out for all to see: https://www.vaulted-oak.com/#plan
  
  I think we might include something similar in our next website update.

• Buildstack: More product updates, some mentioned here, more calls with prospective clients. We’re now working on two big updates over the next month that will meaningfully change how people think of the product and that I’ll save for later.
  
  Going into this project, I knew (and liked!) that it would be a slow burn. Our database gets better and more valuable with each new entry. It compounds. It’s less of a “will it work or not” thing and more of a “just keep doing it until it works” thing, I think. So that’s what I’ll do. At a minimum, I’m committed to making progress every day for two years without any expected outcome.

investment stuff

• FH1*: If you’ve been following along, you know that we’re stuck dealing with an appeal to our successful 4-1 COA decision on this project. Well here are some things I’ve learned over the last month. First, we can submit our working drawings to the Buildings department prior to the appeal getting resolved. Second, we can amend our drawings without returning the COA as long as the revised drawings reduce some or all variances and don’t increase any. Third, there is an avenue through the Toronto Land Appeal Body (TLAB) to pursue an appellant for costs if an appeal is deemed to be frivolous or vexatious.
  
  This new knowledge affects how we think about and strategize our response to our COA decision appeal.
  
  Setting the specifics aside, as mentioned above, it would have been great if I could have learned this (and more) earlier. And now that I do know this (and more), it’d be great if there was a way for me to more easily share it with other builders who might be facing similar challenges.

• MR1**: We are now, finally, after a longer-than-expected slog, a few short weeks away from our Zoning Bylaw Application submission to the City. I don’t love that it’s taken so long—and have much detail on that front to share in a less public venue—but do realize that a submission 6-8 weeks ahead of a municipal election is probably not the best idea. Much better to submit following the happy re-election of the local councillor, when they’re less sensitive to any potential nimby agitation.

*Forever Hold 1. A proposed four-storey multiunit rental building in Toronto’s west end that we plan on holding forever.

**Midrise 1. A proposed nine-to-eleven storey multiunit residential building (tenure to be determined) in Toronto’s west end. We’re starting with a rezoning and will see where we take it from there.

stuff I’ve enjoyed

This is some of the content I’ve come across over the past month that’s worth sharing.

• Article: In lieu of an article this month, you’ve got to read this Musk vs. Twitter exhibit of text messages. Among other things, it features Larry Elison committing to a $2B contribution for the Twitter acquisition like it’s nbd, Jason Calanacis lobbying to be either a board member or CEO with much unrequited enthusiasm, and Will MacAskill explaining who Sam Bankman-Fried is and how much money he has. Both hilarious and fascinating.

• Book: I’m reading Andrew Chen’s The Cold Start Problem on the value of network effects and the challenge of getting them going. Given the work I’m doing on Buildstack, I’m finding the book to be packed with actionable insights and inspirational anecdotes. It’s the right book at the right time for me.

• Podcast: Patrick Collison was recently on The Ezra Klein Show talking about civilizational progress. Patrick’s well-deserved reputation as a public intellectual is starting to catch up to his well-deserved reputation as CEO. I’ve enjoyed following his arc over the past ~decade and am looking forward to the inevitable turn to practical politics (a la Thiel) when he realizes that it’s not enough for an idea to be good or smart for it to be adopted and advanced by policymakers.

• Video: There’s a bit of a blurring of categories here where I know I’ve referred many videos that are really podcast-style interviews, just posted to Youtube. And this month’s is no exception. This conversation between Alex Karp (another one of my favourite tech CEOs) and Stanley Druckenmiller on global instability and software’s opportunity made me both slightly more concerned about the future and optimistic about Palantir’s trajectory—one of the few public equities I’ve bought outside of an index fund. I’m not sure where that nets me out on the optimism-pessimism scale.

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And that’s all for now. Here’s to a good and productive October.

Feel free to reply to this email with any comments or questions. I love chatting about everything mentioned above.