#27

Thoughts and life updates

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

I own and manage a digital agency in Toronto called August where we design and build websites, web apps, and mobile apps. We spend about 80% of our time on client work and the balance on internal projects. Most recently, we’ve been working on an AI-powered 311 platform for municipalities called 311AI and a directory of real estate development vendors called Buildstack (think: Builtwith for buildings). I also invest in and develop real estate with my two brothers.

some thoughts

My thoughts this month will take the shape of an ask.

I have to deliver a talk on federal housing policy ideas to some of the people that might be able to implement them and want to make sure that my list is as comprehensive as possible. I have many thoughts and ideas of my own but, to mix a couple of metaphors, know that much of the best and lowest-hanging fruit can only be found in the weeds. So I’d like to speak to as many people familiar with the weeds of federal housing policy as possible. If that’s you, holler.

Yimby Godfather Matt Yglesias has this concept of Secret Congress that refers to all the substantive reform that takes place quietly in government, with minimal coverage or politicization. This is generally how things get done in government, while the things that politicians talk and fight a lot about often don’t get done, or if they do, often get reversed by subsequent governments.

Secret Congress is underrated.

As it relates to housing policy, a federal government that rewarded or punished municipalities for land use liberalization would no doubt get a lot of coverage and its fair share of political pushback. But would anybody (other than the nerds) notice or care about a federal government that updated the National Building Code to allow for single egress up to six storeys along with a mechanism to encourage the adoption of that change by the provinces?

To be clear, the feds should absolutely do both of those things. But I think that there’s a lot more they could do along the latter lines that would materially move the needle on housing production without expending any political capital.

business stuff

• We’re now spending about 40% of our time and resources at August working on 311AI. That’s more than our typical 20% of time spent on internal projects and is partly due to a slowdown in client work. It’s also due to the scale of the undertaking—we’re building a comprehensive municipal CRM and work order management platform, and there’s a lot to that. I see this going one of two ways: 311AI could grow as a share of August’s business as we start onboarding clients and achieving some degree of product-market fit, or it could shrink as a share of August’s business as our business development picks up and we close new clients and projects. I’m betting on the former.

• The 311AI administrative dashboard is looking good. We’re continuing to make progress on new features as well as regularly refactoring our codebase. We’re also working on multitenancy to support multiple independent instances for multiple municipalities. The one upside to the slow pace of municipal procurement is that it’s bought us a lot of time to improve and expand on the platform.

• We’ve started co-hosting monthly Missing Middle Meetups under the Buildstack umbrella in an effort to grow the community of builders and aspiring builders in Toronto who are interested in this scale of real estate development, and to build anticipation for the larger annual Missing Middle Summit. The next one is being hosted tomorrow at Bier Markt on The Esplanade and it sold out very quickly. We’re probably going to need a larger venue that could accommodate 40-50 people for the October meetup.

real estate stuff

• Real estate development projects are slow and sensitive. With that said, I don’t have anything new to report this month. FH1* is still on pause for reasons described in July, while we have a lot going on though none of it is finalized with MR1**.

• For MR1, we have started meeting with municipal lawyers to select from and retain as part of our team for our next phase. We’ve managed the process so far lead by our urban planner but think that we’re going to need to beef up for a beefier application than originally contemplated.

*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 midrise multiunit residential building (tenure to be determined) in Toronto’s west end. We’re starting with Official Plan and Zoning Bylaw Amendments and we'll see where we take it from there.

stuff I’ve enjoyed

• Article: This month’s recommended article is mine, in The Hub, on federal housing policy. I’ve been invited to speak to some members of parliament on how the feds might best address the housing crisis and will expand on these ideas. That should be interesting.

• Book: I’ve always wanted to read a Nassim Taleb biography. He’s probably my favourite non-fiction author and has lived a fascinating and rich life. Chaos Kings is not quite that but it does introduce some new biographical details, including his activities relating to Empirica Capital and Universa Investments. The first two-thirds of the book was really interesting before the author started taking some liberties in introducing his own opinion on hot topics, which I couldn’t care less about (the opinions, not the hot topics),

• Podcast: Tyler Cowen interviewed Paul Graham and it was great. Paul Graham is very well known for his long-form essays where he takes his time to explore a big idea. His latest—How To Do Great Work—came in at over 10,000 words. Tyler Cowen on the other hand is well known for asking original and thought-provoking questions in a rapid-fire manner. You might not think that pairing the two would work all that well but it does.

• Video: When Peter Thiel shows up on a podcast or in a YouTube video, he’s generally either delivering a speech or being interviewed deferentially. This conversation between him and Alex Epstein is much more balanced. The discussion centers on humanity’s energy needs and how much of a role fossil fuels should play in satisfying them and gets into some fascinating points of disagreement between the two. It’s not quite a debate but it’s much more than an interview.

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

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