#17

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

Last month I floated the idea of a Missing Middle Summit—a one-day conference for builders and aspiring builders of missing middle-scale housing to connect and learn.

It’s happening.

I’ve booked the event space at the Broadview Hotel in Toronto for Thursday May 25th and am now working on a preliminary agenda.

It will feature talks from builders, of course, as well as urban planners, municipal lawyers, lenders, general contractors, and others. And some more fun stuff. Maybe a debate. We’ll see.

I’d like to crowdsource a lot of the planning, and have started doing a bit of that on twitter. You should follow along and share any feedback or thoughts you might have.

Since my last newsletter, John Tory has been re-elected as mayor. He’s also been granted strong mayor powers by the Province, which means that he has a greater ability to push his agenda through Council.

Ostensibly, that agenda includes the Exploring Housing Options in Neighbourhoods (EHON) program being lead by the Planning Department to allow for more missing middle housing development in more neighbourhoods.

If this is to be the term that he decides to get big things done, both because he’s now more able to, and maybe, if he’s decided it will be his last term, because he’s less concerned about any political blowback, we might actually see some progress on that file.

And if we do, we’ll need a new cohort of entrepreneurial builders ready to take action.

I think that the Missing Middle Summit can help with that in some small way.

business stuff

• August: We’re still not great at business development at August. I think that many agencies probably feel that way.
  
  The way in which we land new clients and projects still feels more random than it should. But I think that we’re getting better at it. We now have a few strategies that we’re executing that should lead to more consistent deal flow.
  
  I tell myself to “trust the process”. We’re either reasonably smart and doing the right things that just take time to bear fruit, or we’re pretty dumb and we’re not and they won’t. It’s hard to tell at this juncture, but I do think that pulling the plug on promising efforts prematurely is the cause of much failure. So we won’t.
  
  I do feel optimistic about the increased standardization of our processes and of the development and consistent execution of those strategies. Most of that credit goes to Alex, our head of business development, who’s leading the charge. Jeff (head of operations) and I mostly act to support him, when we’re not doing everything else that needs to be done.
  
  It strikes me that nailing agency business development is not a new problem. There are countless people who have gotten really good at it, including people who are no longer doing it. I’ll probably spend a lot more time going forward reaching out to some of them to see how much of their experience they’d be willing to share.

• Buildstack: I hinted last month that we were working on a couple of major updates that would change how people think about the product. Well, the first has shipped and the second will soon follow.
  
  Over the past month, we’ve introduced a feed of new projects. And by “new”, we don’t mean “newly added to our database”, as these are often actually quite old, but “newly submitted development applications to the relevant municipality ”.
  
  This now makes Buildstack both a great directory of the various designers, consultants, and trades that have contributed to various projects, as well as something like a news site informing you of new development applications in your city.
  
  I expect that this will help us drive a lot more traffic.

investment stuff

• FH1*: So we finally came to an agreement with our neighbour who had appealed our successful COA decision. It’s a funny story. We paid them 5-figures to drop their appeal about a week before the Province announced new legislation that would kill any ongoing third-party appeal. Well, now that I think about it, it’s not that funny. But it’s done. We can move on.
  
  We’re now on to our working drawings submission to the City’s Buildings department for review and permit issuance. Onward!

• MR1**: Our Zoning Bylaw Amendment application submission is imminent. The (potentially) big development this past month on this file is that we have a new ward councillor. I won’t say any more than that yet, but that should give some of you a better indication of where this project is located.
  
  With the new Provincial legislation mentioned above, we had expected to see some direction from the Province that the City was to relax (or kill) its strict angular plane requirements for midrise construction. For those of you who don’t know what that means: midrise in Toronto is expected to comply with the Mid-Rise Building Performance Standards. Among other things, these Standards prescribe that the rear of the building be built to fit within a 45-degree angular plane so that, as a whole, it looks something like half of a Mayan pyramid. This is to prevent or minimize any shadow impacts on neighboring properties. These requirements lead to a very inefficient built form that’s hard to build and insulate, and that leads to fewer and smaller housing units than otherwise. They very obviously prioritize existing residents over new residents and are broadly understood to be, on the net, a set of very bad ideas.
  
  In any case, we have not yet seen that direction from the Province. Rumour has it that it might be included in the updates to the Provincial Policy Statement and Growth Plan that are forthcoming. We’ll see. This would have a material impact on the City’s reaction to our application.

*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-twelve-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: There’s an ascendant political movement that’s broadly known as the abundance agenda. I wrote a bit about it in this piece. It’s made up of people who think that the future should be better than the present, and that for that to happen, we need to build more stuff, including new not-yet-invented stuff. This article does a good job of summarizing the movement, as well as describing in broad strokes what it will take to advance it.

• Book: I’ve just finished reading The Slight Edge, which I heard about in an interview featuring Dashiell Bark-Huss. It’s very self-helpy and centred on a very simple idea: that, in order to accomplish big things, you need to have the discipline and patience to make small incremental progress every day. I liked it. It didn’t break any new ground, and that’s the point. It’s a reminder of something we all basically know but also easily forget or ignore.

• Podcast: Here’s an episode of my favourite new podcast featuring one of my favourite newsletter writers: Brian Potter (the Construction Physics guy) on Dwarkesh Patel’s The Lunar Society. It’s great. This past episode discussing J. Storrs Hall’s Where’s My Flying Car? is also very much worth checking out.

• Video: I’m pretty excited about VR. Palmer Luckey calls it “the final computing platform. Not the next one; the final one.” I think he’s right. Many people don’t, as evidenced by Meta’s crashing stock price. In any case, this video covering Meta’s VR foray in general and the release of the Quest Pro in particular is really interesting.

***

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.