Behind the Build: Kelly Alvarez Doran - Ha/f Climate Design

In this episode of Behind the Build, Kelly Alvarez Doran joins, both architect and co-founder of Ha/f Climate Design. Based in London and working internationally, Kelly shares the journey that led him from growing up in Winnipeg, studying at the University of Manitoba and the University of Toronto, to practicing across Africa and Europe before launching his practice.

Ha/f Climate Design emerged from teaching and research at the University of Toronto and early collaborations with the City of Toronto. Kelly explains how the studio helps architects, builders, and policymakers understand the carbon and financial impacts of design decisions. The conversation explores life cycle assessment, embodied carbon, and the pressing need for Canada to catch up with global standards on reporting and reducing construction emissions.

Kelly’s experiences working on mining resettlement projects and later with MASS Design Group in Rwanda profoundly shaped his approach, teaching him to rethink supply chains, materials, and local labor. He describes how constraints there led to innovative solutions, reinforcing the importance of provenance, low-carbon design, and supporting local economies.

From residential housing to embassies abroad, Ha/f Climate Design now advises on policy, benchmarks carbon footprints, and trains architects and engineers nationwide. Kelly uses vivid analogies—like the “food pyramid of construction materials”—to reframe how we think about aluminum, steel, wood, and locally sourced alternatives.

The discussion also touches on density, infrastructure, and the need for cultural and political shifts in Canadian housing, urging us to embrace “farm-to-table” thinking for buildings and design cities prepared for a hotter future.

Ha// Climate Design: https://halfclimatedesign.com/

Curated Podcast Sponsors:

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The Doors: https://thedoors4u.com/

Aquanta Pools: https://aquanta.ca

Henry Rotberg Steel

To connect with our sponsors, email me: [e-mail]

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Episode Transcript

(00:08):
Welcome to Behind the Build. I have your house drawn in
Jacobs, and today I have with megentleman who is in town from
out of town, Canadian living abroad, running a really
interesting practice called HalfClimate design.

(00:32):
I have with me Kelly, Alvarez, Doran.
Thank you. Thank great to be here.
Kelly and I were introduced via kind gentlemen Evan Saskin at
Blue Lion Building and we had aninitial conversation.
It was a couple was a couple months ago and he has been
integral in many things, none ofwhich I will describe, I will

(00:56):
allow him to do. So Kelly, why don't you tell us
a little bit about start off actually by telling us what your
practice is and then from there,let's go back and do what I
typically do and kind of go through the.
Trajectory. Trajectory of life.
Yeah, sure. So I'm, I'm an architect and,
and started a cofounded Half Climate Design three years ago

(01:17):
and as a company kind of emergedorganically from some of the
research and policy work that wewere doing at the University of
Toronto and with the City of Toronto.
And we recognize that there was a real need in the marketplace
right now to help architects andcities and governments really
understand the full, the full impacts of construction.

(01:41):
And, and so the work we do is work, work with designers and,
and, and, and help understand, you know, the carbon impacts and
the financial impacts of, of your design decisions and, and
with builders and with policymakers as well.
How can policies change and how can we get the right policies in
place that encourage a lower carbon and lower cost form of

(02:03):
construction? One thing that you anticipated
to do when you were three. Not at all.
Yeah, very roundabout. I never thought I'd become a
sustainability consultant, that's for sure.
OK. So I understand largely what it
is at the practice does and in some capacity how you fulfill
that. We'll go more into that.
So why don't you take us back tothe kind of the beginning of

(02:25):
life and what did your interest look like?
What, what what? What path did you take to get to
where you are? Yeah, I'm born and raised
Winnipegger. I think coming out of high
school I was not totally sure what I want to do.
I went to university for a couple years and then took a
year off and moved to Ireland toto travel, travel Europe and

(02:47):
learn how to work hard and spenda good year abroad.
And then came back and and entered the the department of
the University of Manitoba in the architecture departments.
Kind of when I realized I wantedto design it, was always
interested in it. And I think I'm thinking about
why and how I became an architect.
I think, you know, my dad would always watch This Old House,

(03:08):
which I think was a TV show thatI loved, like seeing how things
get built and the people that are engaged in them and the
factory tours they would take. And I think overtime, you know,
I realized like, I, I was a decent at drawing, you know,
like was interested in these things.
And so, yeah, good entered architecture school at the
University of Manitoba and then eventually moved here to Toronto

(03:30):
to do my grad school a Toronto. And I think, yeah, the real what
drew drew me towards towards us was that my my desire to help
make things. I think, yeah.
And so when you were when you were young, like were you you
playing with Lego or automobile or?
Definitely had a lot of Lego, a lot of a lot of boats that

(03:52):
didn't float in bathtubs made out of Lego.
My my former boss Alan always joked like he was the one person
that wrote his letter for grad school that didn't start off
with a story about Lego. Like like every.
I imagine like 3/4 of the applications to to architecture
schools have some form of a Legostory.
So I had a lot of Lego, certainly.

(04:14):
There was also there was also the other form of construction
wasn't Lego Poly. I can't member what it was
called. It's like it was like Lego but
you could build bigger things and had like shocks as a part of
like some of the I care what was.
Called the Mechano. Oh yeah, No, there wasn't.

(04:34):
You know, wood blocks and I think, I don't know, we just
growing up my parents business, they have a they were with a
stained glass company, OK. It's always making stuff, you
know, building, building windows, building layouts, you
know, doing that kind of thing, working with your hands.
So I think always making things,you know, or I think that making
or drawing, you know, that we're, that's probably what

(04:57):
Jeremy did, doing what I'm doingnow.
Before we go any further, I justwant to tell you something
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(05:19):
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(05:41):
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(06:04):
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(06:25):
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(06:46):
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Doors, but for now, back to Kelly.
And were you always proficient with science and math or?
This guy is good at math. Yeah.

(07:07):
Decent at math, good at math, good at science.
Decent student, I guess. But finally, finally, finally
found something I wanted to apply myself in.
You know, eventually. So yes, so, so you, you were
saying before so you came back to Toronto UFT and what was that
like had at that point because Iknow you're living abroad with
your wife and. Kids, Yeah.

(07:27):
Had you met at that? Point.
So I guess, yeah, short timeline.
I I came and started grad schoolhere.
I graduated in 2008 with, with Evan, with the other people you
know, And then I spent the better part of three years
working here with a couple firms.
Then I moved abroad. I'd met my wife who's from
Toronto and and she wanted, she was starting her PhD in London

(07:49):
and I was like, well, I could move with you and worked there.
But then the firm is working forwhich is now SVN formally Plenty
Alliance and Replan. So won't you just keep working
for us with all this work overseas with the mining sector?
And I'm like, well, yeah, that's, that's let's do that.
So I spent the better part of two years basically working on

(08:11):
mine sites around all Canadian owned companies in Zambia,
Mongolia, Turkey, Panama, Ghana and in all these places
basically the question was we'rebuilding a new mine.
Inevitably there's people that live there, we're going to
resettle them with there's like really kind of ways that has to
be done through World Bank requirements.

(08:32):
And so part of that resettlementprocess was helping to envision
with the new community would look like and designing the
community, designing housing or on the other side of of it is
like, oh, we have a mine and nowour workforce is going to like
double or triple, right. And now where are we going to
house all the people that are moving to work here?
You're redesigning essentially 2different communities every

(08:54):
single timeline is going to. Go exactly like around every
mine as a community. I mean, you know, Sudbury,
Timmins are two great examples of that.
And the work was, yeah, fascinating, I think beginning
to kind of really understand therole of resource development and
urbanism and architecture and how they're connected.
And then after that, I, it's been a stint teaching and my

(09:19):
wife was wrapping up her PhD andwanted to move to Africa,
southern Africa for her field. Like, OK, like, well, let's move
to Africa. And I, and I've I met, I met one
of the guys that started at thisfirm called Mass Design Group in
Boston. And like, we're looking for
somebody to lead our office in Rwanda.
OK. That was not the country I had

(09:40):
on my list. You know, what I knew about
Rwanda 15 years ago. So I think most people at that
time thinking about Romeo Dallaire and the genocide and
then that. But then the more I looked into
the company and the more I thought about what what Rowan
had to offer, we ended up movingto Rwanda 11 years ago.
Wow. And then lived there for the
better part of five years working across Africa.

(10:00):
And that was just transformativeof really thinking about how
what it means to build and how to build and how and who's
involved and things are completely different context.
Or access to materials you couldnot imagine.
Everything completely. Force all of everything.
Everything completely had to unlearn everything I'd learned
up until then. And and then we moved back to

(10:22):
London seven years ago, our first child and my wife job
space there. So I've been kind of.
I've been working on Zoom now for the better part of 7 1/2
years, first with Mass and now no one 1/2.
OK. One of the big takeaways from my
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(10:43):
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(11:05):
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(11:26):
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(11:46):
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(12:08):
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team to get you started. Now back to Kelly.
And what of the time zones that exist?
Which is the most common time zone for your for your life?
Greenwich Mean time? Yeah, it's good, It's good.
You're 5 hours ahead of Toronto,so you get the morning to
yourself to work and then you do, you know, 3-4 hours of calls

(12:31):
in the afternoon. It is a lot of the work that
you're dealing with in Toronto or is it also your Ras or do you
have stuff in Europe? That's some stuff.
And we've had a couple of projects in the UK, have a
project in Rwanda right now as well.
But the bulk of our work is, is in Canada.
I think primarily what we're doing is helping Canada catch up

(12:53):
with a lot of practice that's happening elsewhere.
I learned a lot all about this and life cycle assessment and
body carbon, whole life carbon, passive ventilation.
These are all things that I learned through practicing in
Africa and then moving to Europeand seeing it's happening there.
A lot of countries require are requiring, you know, these kind

(13:14):
of reporting, reporting on thesethings as part of as a
requirement of, of, of building.And then looking back at Canada
five years ago in the middle of COVID or COVID just happened.
So it was basically bring 2020 in this moment where I'm like,
OK, I have a lot of climate anxiety right now.
I personally have cause I got a young son.

(13:35):
Uh, there's a few things that like had come across in my, in
my inbox, you know, in the previous month or so from my
professional body. You know, basically that one,
one e-mail really sent me off, which was an e-mail saying, hey,
to meter 2030 targets here are like 4 different ways of
building the walls in a residential project.
And you know, one of them was just completely filled with

(13:57):
petrochemicals and I kind of sawthis document.
I'm like, well, clearly there's a real big blind spot right now
in our collective understanding a random body carbon and the
emissions related to the materials we're building with,
and we need to change this. And so I wrote the OAA like we
have to, how do we get this as part of our continuing

(14:19):
education? And then I approached University
of Toronto. So I'd really be interested in
teaching students how to how to do this.
Teaching a Rolly. Teaching the remotely.
And because it was COVID, as theinterim Dean Robert Wright said,
yeah, sure, we'd love that. And it was an opportunity to
kind of like, don't tell me, show me so.
So was was the course that you you end up teaching, was it a

(14:40):
net new course or was was it modified from an existing
course? It was an option studio.
So at the at the at Daniels, it's the third year of your of
the masters degree last year themain course of studio.
And so I got to teach one of thestudios and they bring in people
from around the world, around the city typically.
And so COVID, they opened, you know, geography wasn't a problem

(15:02):
at that point at all. So they gave me an option
studio. So I had 10 students or so.
Yeah, 10 students in a year for the whole year for eight hours a
week basically in that, that wasthe first year of called it the
half studio, which the idea of the studio was OK.
We it's 2020. There's overall the Paris

(15:22):
agreement is predicated on to get to net 0 and 2050, we need
to have our emissions by 2030. And so I was like, well, forget
any 0 by 3030 years. Like that's far too far away.
Humans are procrastinators. If we just think about the
decade we're in right now and the action that has to be
immediate, how do we have the emissions of of like

(15:44):
construction of buildings in this 10 years?
Because they have all the clues how we might get to 0, right?
So that's the idea of Half and the Half Studio, which started
out as a academic project. And the City of Vancouver had
recently put together a benchmarking study, which is the
first question if you're going to have anything is like half of
what right, if you're gonna die anyway yourself.

(16:07):
And so the city of Vancouver waswas weighing itself and it went
out and commissioned A benchmarking study of I think
roughly 30 multi inner residential buildings, which,
you know, by and large is what'sgetting built.
And I saw that I'm like, well, when we just do that for Toronto
and called up, you know, 10 firms, couple of friends help me

(16:28):
connect with couple architects. BDP was one of the ones in the
first year. And I said, can you give me a
building? Can you give me one of your
recently completed or in the ground buildings for our
students to look at them? And that semester was amazing
because I think for basically for the students, it was new for
me. I had taught myself how to do

(16:48):
this and teaching them and then for all every practice that we
engaged had never heard of this before either.
Like the the words embodied carbon were not a part of my
education, you know, in 2008. And you know, all the people we
are working with had no idea what this was either.
So it was a real group learning experience.
And then through that, you know,at the end of that semester, we

(17:12):
had like we had some data, we had findings and we took it to
the city of Toronto and said, right, here's the elephant in
the room. Like you know, we've done a lot
of great work to the green standards on operational
omissions. But like in in Ontario right
now, if you're doing the right things like you've done with
your house here and get a near full Electra electrified, you

(17:34):
know, the emissions of your house is not its operations,
it's just in its construction. Yes.
And so we need to, you know, howdo we do this and then that,
that ultimately, I don't know, it's kind of snowballed into a
company three years later, right.
Yeah. So when you were when you were
creating the company, you kind of established for yourself what
the March of the company is going to be.

(17:56):
Had you, had you thought about, you know, here's where we'll
we'll be able to get our first few clients.
Well, so we I took the data of the origin story here to answer
that question a bit. We took the data from that first
ten buildings and took it to thecity of Toronto.
And so, yeah, here's that elephant in the room.

(18:17):
And and Lisa King said, yeah, you're right, let's do something
about this and let's take your 10 buildings and let's make it
50. Kind of broaden the
benchmarking. I mean, what?
We cowrote a grant to the Atmospheric Fund and over the
course of a year engaged the broader industry, other
architects, other engineers, other developers.

(18:37):
If you've done a life cycle assessment, can you give us your
data? How do we begin to benchmark
those and? What do you quantify?
Sorry, I apologize for digressing, but yeah, qualify as
life. The life.
The life cycle of So what we, a lot of what we've been doing is
bring life cycle assessment to, to construction.
And so life cycle assessment is a basic methodology to

(19:01):
understand anything about something's life.
And so my coffee cup here, for example, you know, one of the,
one of the things we measure is it's, is this carbon footprint,
right? And so you can measure the
carbon footprint of this, of this coffee cup.
And for those listening, the glass beautiful glass coffee
cup, I think is a bottom or, or something like that that's got a

(19:22):
bit of a vacuum in it. O how the carbon footprint of
this glass you would do through a lifecycle assessment
methodology, which really beginsto say, OK, well, what's, what
is it made of? Where did that material come
from? What is the, how is it processed
and made into this coffee cup? What transportation did it take
to get to the store, to your house and every one of those

(19:43):
things over the life of the glass.
And then what happens to the glass during its use?
And then ultimately at some future stage, hopefully it
doesn't get thrown out because you don't throw things out, but
you recycle it, et cetera, right?
And that like we have life cycles.
Your guitar has a life cycle. Everything in this room has a
life, right? And you can measure the impacts

(20:03):
across that life through a life cycle assessment.
And so with a coffee cup, you can imagine that's fairly
straightforward, this glass one or you know, a porcelain one or
what you might have at home and building that was got hundreds
of more things in it, right? And so it's the aggregation of
all of that. And so right now, like the main.

(20:24):
Rivers of, of a buildings cost or its emissions or its
structure, it's envelope, you know, it's, it's mechanical
systems. And so in the very, it's very
analogous to cost. So, you know, if you put in a
cost estimate together, instead of putting dollar bills per
square foot or per cubic meter of this or that or linear linear

(20:45):
foot, you just have a carbon coefficient for that, for that
same quantum. And so that's why cost and
carbon are really analogous. And it's really, really not
complicated. And what we're trying to do is,
I mean, a big part of what we'redoing is training people how to
do this because it's not hard. And if we're all doing it, we're
all going to be making better decisions together.

(21:07):
And the more we're all doing that, then we can really drive a
market towards lower carbon materials.
And does that mean though that it over the course of the
construction of the products aregoing to cost more because
they're more what you'd call what the buzzwords sustainable?
Well, so I think there's there'sa somewhat widely held belief
that a greener building is goingto be more expensive.

(21:29):
And I fundamentally disagree. I think they'll ask the
question, yeah, what's yeah. So I think the the main things
that are going to drive the costof your building is how much of
them, how much materials you're putting into that building for
every square foot or square meter you're building, right?
And so the things that can drivedown the emissions related to

(21:51):
your building are, are through design and through engineering
is to go, you know, leaner, moreefficient structures and using
lower carbon materials. I mean, those are basically the
two principles that you want to employ, right?
And so, you know, limiting, you know, the, the, the materials

(22:11):
that are most carbon intensive are metals.
You know, they are, you can imagine all the mines I used to
work on in Africa and Mongolia and Asia, what are they?
They're producing copper or zinc, aluminum, steel, They're
all coming from a hole in the ground.
And you can imagine it takes a lot of energy and a lot of
emissions related to, you know, digging that or out of the

(22:33):
ground and smelting and processing it and turning,
extruding it, etcetera. So the highest carbon material
in our buildings is aluminum. For those wondering, he Kelly is
currently pointing at the door. Bring your doors and windows and
we we use it, you know, we use there's a lot of aluminum for
the reasons it's lightweight, it's strong and it's non
corrosive. And you know, that's why it's so

(22:55):
it's kind of ubiquitous. Wasn't though wasn't really, you
know, not not 100 years, about 100 years ago, you wouldn't see
aluminum in your building. So that's the highest on the
kind of food pyramid of carbon that's metals are at the top.
Same with copper, though, since steel with all these things like
the like to talk like a food pyramid, you know, they're the

(23:16):
they're the kind of beef and, you know, red meat at the top of
the food pyramid in terms of, you know, the you know what, you
shouldn't be eating it every day.
Like necessarily have a way you steak, but don't eat it for
three meals a day, right. And then at the bottom of the
food pyramid in in construction terms are things that grow,

(23:36):
right, like wood and straw and hemp, and then are materials
that can grow on farms and forests.
And you don't have to mind, you don't have to overly process
them, right? So those are the lowest carbon
materials. And then in the middle, you
know, it's like cement and mineral walls and things like
that. So it's kind of spectrum.
And so you see it that way and it's like like any diet, you

(24:00):
want to kind of a balanced diet,but you should probably eating
more fruits and veg and how do we get our buildings, you know,
to do that? And you know the scale of small,
small residential in Canada, that's really straightforward.
I mean, we used to most house construction, you know, 100
years ago. I was thinking, you know this,
the houses on your street here, you know, wood framed houses

(24:23):
with brick exteriors and probably a wood frame windows
initially they're caught quite low carbon in their
construction, so you know the brick would be there.
And really well built. Yeah.
Well button obviously built to last.
And so like we have, we have this in our DNA like we we used
to insulate. I don't know what you took your
building back down to the studs.I'd be curious to know what was

(24:44):
insulated with not much and whenit when we used to insulate the
brick was doing the work. A lot of older homes used a lot
of like cellulose or paper or oreven wool and horsehair.
Newspaper here and there, yeah. Yeah.
So we, we used to build out of this stuff and I think how how

(25:05):
we get back, I think how we workwith the materials of our
grandparents, with the technology of today is really
where the future construction could be going.
Well, so you said something pretty much almost passing there
I think will resonate with me probably could resonate with
anyone else that may or may not have heard it.
And that was that you think of it the way you what you're
eating, you got even more fruitsand veggies.

(25:27):
You think about that those are ones are growing under the
ground and the Lego beef is not if the process.
And so when you think about yourconstruction, you just again to
go back and think about it, whenyou're speccing a product, are
you expecting something that hasto be manufactured like
something that could have grown?Exactly.
Yeah, I think the food analogy is really useful because you

(25:48):
kind of understand the processedfood or the carbon intensity of
beef or the calories. Like everybody understands that.
Like I think a lot of people understand how, yeah, the carbon
footprint of beef is very high because cows take a long time to
grow and they fart a lot. You know, that's what was
related with that. But you know, we know this and
like, so you know, you're vegan.I'm.
I really don't eat beef anymore.And.

(26:11):
And so when you bring that to the built environment, I think
the other real analogy is, you know, 15 years ago, farm to
table was just starting to happen.
I mean, you've got, you know, just drove over to Bayview and
back thinking about Cumbrae farms.
Aren't they first opened, you know, beginning the farm to
table, really wondering where your food comes from.

(26:32):
You know, the stories that your food are telling about your
region and your, your local agriculture like that, that
movement and food. How do we do that in buildings,
right? Because we used to have
incredibly regional diets for our buildings.
Like you're again, I'm looking at your original house like
those bricks are not coming fromfar at all.

(26:54):
Those are just coming over. They probably made the.
Brickwork exactly they're they're a kilometer to away.
The wood was not coming far at all like everything about these
exactly so this is your your original house was very much a
kind of made Ontario made in Canada pallet of materials
right. It did not travel across the
world. And now what we're building with

(27:15):
that aluminum, statistically 54%of the aluminum in your window
would be coming from Guinea in West Africa or Australia 23
percent or Russia or Brazil, right?
It might be smelted in Quebec, but the, the base or is is
coming from other parts of the world.
So it's traveled the distance toget here.
And if we thought about our buildings again through this

(27:37):
lens, a provenance and where things come from, we'd see it
really differently. And so I think that's a critical
lens and that's a lesson I learned in Rwanda because in
Rwanda that 18% import tax on everything, great policy if
you're developing nation in Central Africa, not so good a
policy of the United States. And because of that, it's a,

(27:59):
it's a relatively, you know, it's a developing nation, not
all that wealthy at all, landlocked, small landlocked
country, abundance of, of labour, lots of people there,
but not a lot, not a lot of domestic like what we would
typically consider like a wealthof mineral resources or for
construction. And so when moving there in the

(28:22):
first like job that I was working on, you know, is drawing
these big rectangles for the windows and doors for this
hospital. And our cost estimator, Bruce is
like, Kelly, we can't, we can't afford what you're drawing.
I'm like, well, what do you mean, Bruce?
He's like, well, you're the glass that you're drawing.
Like it it's so big it needs to be tempered like, OK, He's like,

(28:44):
well, all the tempered glass is going to come from like Dubai or
India. There's no, no one does tempered
glass in East Africa. I'm like, oh, OK.
And he's like, and then the frames, they're going to be
aluminum that's also going to beimported.
The nearest fabrication facilities in Nairobi, which is
two countries over, everything that then is coming into the
country has 18% import tax on top of that.

(29:06):
And then the road to the hospital, like you've driven on
it before, it's super bumpy. So if anything breaks along the
way, like that's going to hold up construction for months.
I was like, wow, I never thoughtabout any of this because I'd
been practicing in Canada and I just always just like draw a
rectangle and call the supplier.And there was there it is,
right? I didn't really have to think
about all these things before. And it was like revelatory for

(29:29):
me. Like, oh, shit, like, yeah, you
have to really think about wherestuff comes from all of a sudden
and who's going to make it and how's it going to come together.
And that that lesson, like really it kind of there's a full
circle coming back to the mining.
I'm like, oh, yeah, OK, now I like, I get it.
Like this part of the world is where a lot of the ore come
from. But then it it goes somewhere

(29:51):
else to be processed and it goessomewhere else to become a
window frame. And then that like then maybe
that comes back here. And when you begin to see that
like, and how to practice something.
So ultimately what we did was draw smaller rectangles, use
float glass, bring all the glassto sight, used domestically
recycled steel to get around theimport tax on this steel, and

(30:14):
every door and window was weldedin the room that had hung.
So you you you brought all your fabrication on site to get
around these. Issues right, which also has
the. Local economy and all the jobs,
the employment that come with it.
Yeah, so and that was all driven, that constraint is all
economical, right? It was driven by the the
economics of that project. And there's also the the other

(30:37):
flip there was that in Rwanda, Labour was the inexpensive part
and materials were expensive, which is the inverse here.
And that's, I mean, that's actually a kind of false
statement too, because it's, youknow, it's the materials are
never really expensive. They're, they're just cheap.
You're paying for cheaper laboursomewhere else, right?

(30:58):
But in Rwanda, because the labour was so abundant, every
decision we made was about how to maximize labour.
So things that we would probablylike, oh, we can't afford to do
round earth here. We'd be like, well, we're going
to do round earth, right? Of course we can.
Or, you know, 1 anecdote was instead of hiring the excavator

(31:19):
for a day, we could hire 200 people with shovels.
Well, what are you going to do? You're going to hire 200 people
with shovels, right? To dig the same amount of
transfer foundation. Yeah, there, there you go.
Yeah, I mean, this is like. They they took shovels, they
grabbed them down to make them like knives really, to cut

(31:40):
through the clay. Cool.
And and literally in one week. Where were they from?
The crew we work with on my hands and a couple other is all
they're all from the Ukraine. Amazing.
Yeah. And so we actually we did the
analysis of cost to bring in themaniacs or just have the guys do
it. And the the time difference was

(32:01):
literally a couple days difference based on how quickly
moved dirt. So to your to your.
Point there you go. Yeah, I mean that was on most
all the project we were doing there.
The challenge I would give our our team as like every projects
in an enormous amount of money to put into a community.
And you know, in any community, if you're downtown Toronto or

(32:22):
downtown Kadali, the millions ofdollars in construction are
opportunities for architects andbuilders to divert that money
into into the into businesses and pockets and people, right.
Like that's the opportunity. And so the more we think for
this kind of farm to table version of this, then we're

(32:43):
taking that money and we're funneling it into local
businesses, local pockets, like that's the opportunity.
And, um, as always, basically mykey message to the design team
would be like, alright, we got 60 million on this job.
How many people can we get this money into in the country?
Right? And we're always, really, we

(33:04):
were always tracking that part of it.
Like what was the financial impact of the projects?
Because in part because we are anonprofit that, that, that we
have to do these annual reports and like, Hey, you're donating
money to us. And here's how that money is
being spent. And, and then that led to
environmental impacts too. That's kind of how we got into
the other part of it. But you know, both of these

(33:24):
things connect like the the carbon footprint and the human
handprint are one and the same, right, Because your mini X
decision are the three Ukrainiangentleman with the shovels for
those for those days, like I canguarantee you which one was
probably lower carbon and and long term more economically, you
know, impactful. And also led to three guys being

(33:46):
able to work together in a way that they generally would not be
able to work together if they'remaniacs, right?
Like there you go. They're, they're talking to each
other and having a good time andtaking their breaks together.
And there's the camaraderie thatalso has developed in that.
So in many ways also helping thebusiness because those guys
become closer. Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, it's, it's, it's an interesting way to be able to

(34:08):
look at the perspective of what this I, I say this because, you
know, when we work at Waldens insingle family residential and so
there's these types of opportunities with a lot of the
work that we look to, to contract a different scale,
obviously. But looking and analyzing what,
what what we're putting into these projects.

(34:31):
You had me. You have my mind spinning right
now. O in the small residential space
we're for the last year almost now, we've been working with
Janna Levitt and Levitt Goodman on the CMHC's housing catalog,
which was announced last spring.And the details are by hopefully
by the time this podcast is out,they'll be it'll be out in the

(34:52):
wild here this fall. And so we've been supporting the
design teams across the country on performing energy modeling
analysis, doing whole life carbon analysis.
That's basically doing your energy model and your impact of
the building materials combined and seen how missions play out
over 60 years of a house. And then in addition to that,

(35:14):
we're providing A guidance around climate risk, resiliency
and adaptation. What you can be doing as a
homeowner or a builder at the scale of the house and the
property to look at long term climate risks like wildfire,
drought, flooding, you know, parts of the country that that
experience these events. So what can you be doing at your
in your property, in your house and your interior to to address

(35:37):
those risks? But then the last thing that we,
what we added to it was a material guidance document to
basically say, all right, now you're coming to build this
house, here are all the insulation choices you can make
and here's the cost and the carbon footprint of all of those
materials. So we, you know, basically every
part of a small house, we now will have guidance that you can

(36:00):
immediately see the relative cost of going between one type
of insulation, another one type of siding, one type of roofing
to get all the materials on the menu again and have their carbon
footprint right next to their cost.
So if that I'm super excited about that.
And as a as a kind of follow up to that, we've just wrapped up

(36:21):
doing a vulnerability assessmentfor CMHC of tariffs on those
materials. So yeah, what?
A different scales of tariff. Costs, well, whether or not
there are tariffs, but just basically the question was all
right, in the, in a world of, you know, having tariffs on, on
goods coming from the United States specifically, what would

(36:44):
that mean for, for this scale of, of construction and supply
chain? And so we went down through all
of those materials, all the potential suppliers of those
materials and manufacturing locations and to identify across
the, you know, all, basically all the things that we put on to
build our housing out of in Canada at the scale, how much of

(37:07):
that's coming from the US and where the vulnerabilities like
where the critical vulnerabilities are one of the
main ones is glasses of key concern right now, like there's
not a domestic glass production right now is it's pretty much
nonexistent. So we've been importing.
We used to make glass in Toronto, we don't anymore.
We used to make in Canada, we don't really anymore.

(37:29):
And most of it's been coming from the United States and now
we're the glaciers I know are starting now to pivot to be to
be buying glass more from Asia and Europe because of what's
been happening. So when you begin to understand
that part of it too, it's like, you know, it's this decision
about where we're shopping and what material you're buying.
Ultimately, if you want to buy, you know, if you want to made in

(37:50):
Canada house, I've got good news.
A lot of the lowest carbon materials are are coming from
coming from Canada. I will ask you a question about
the glass specifically. Why is it that you think that
the majority manufacturers that used to exist don't exist
anymore? I had this conversation on
Sunday with Jeff Audorf, Ferguson, New Dorp Glass and St.

(38:11):
Catherines. Yeah, they were shut down.
I think like there was a big Pilkington had a factory in
Toronto and Ford bought it at one point, but I think it would
just post NAFTA. This is one of the things that
they got shut down is in Scarborough, I believe not far
from here. So that was one of them.
There's another one in Owen Sound that he mentioned.
So, you know, not a few decades ago we had this in the promise.

(38:34):
And then I think just, you know,the way things have gone where
the consolidation of Pilkington,buying it and then deciding to
shut that down and and centralizing manufacturing
elsewhere. So the doors and windows on my
cottage are from loin good, amazing, amazing windows out of
Steinback, Manitoba that I was proudly sourcing the Manitoba

(38:56):
Patriot that I am. And you know, a decade ago when
I, I went back and to do a life cycle assessment of the cottage
that I designed for my in laws, the law and windows are in
there. And I asked John, I'm like, hey,
John, can you tell me what the carbon footprint on the windows?
He's like, I've never been askedthat question before.
Kelly. I'm like, OK, well, can you tell
me where like where everything comes from?

(39:18):
And so you went to supply team when he came back with like a
list of all the components and their origin.
And I was like amazing. Like, oh, OK, so you're, you're
the large tempered glass was like basically floated in
Missouri, tempered and Collingwood and then put in the
frame in Steinbach. So that's like Missouri to
Ontario to Steinback back past Collingwood, Halliburton where

(39:41):
college is, right. So that's basically driven
across the continent once. And then the wood was coming
from Oregon or BC, the other glasses coming from Fargo.
The, the handles, the hardware is coming from Germany, the the
spacers and the gas is coming from Asia and like Ukraine and
like you can just imagine like something as simple as this door

(40:02):
and window. This is coming from all over the
world, right? Like it's this is coming from.
I guarantee you this thing come from 3 to 4 continents.
It's a full passport. Yeah.
It's just so we live in this kind of globalized supply chain
right now. And and then you're thinking in
the context we're in right now, post COVID and everything that's

(40:23):
happening right now politically,how we ensure that again or what
decisions you can make to help onshore a lot more of that that
manufacturing, you know, that's maybe a good idea, you know, at
the end of the day. Earlier in the conversation,
Kelly and I talked about metals like steel being at the very top

(40:45):
of carbon food pyramid. Essential, but heavy in terms of
carbon. It's a reminder that the way we
use steel and the suppliers we choose makes a huge difference.
We've been working with Henry Roberts Steel for years.
They've built their reputation on durability, precision and
service. And with steel, that matters

(41:07):
because if you get it right the first time, you're not ripping
things out, reordering or wasting materials.
Fewer mistakes, fewer replacements, and ultimately
less carbon over the lifespan ofa building.
On the projects we take on, thatreliability is non negotiable.
When this spec calls for steel, you want to know it's coming

(41:30):
from a supplier who stands behind the product and helps you
deliver with confidence. And that's what Henry Rothberg
steals all about. And we love working with them at
Walden Homes. e-mail me [e-mail]
and I'll introduce you to Brett,their General manager, and get

(41:50):
you started on a path forward working with a great company.
But for now, again, back to Kelly.
How many people are on your team?
Work team 5. And is everybody feeling the
same role, or there's the other roles?
Yeah, a little bit. We all do a piece of the same
thing. So I, I co-founded the the firm

(42:11):
with Juliette Cook, who's in Montreal now, since she was a
student. She was a student of mine.
My two other business partners, Ryan and Rashmi, are both former
students of mine as well. And we have our first employee,
Laquita, who was a student of theirs.
So kind of, you know, this is how how, how we're growing so
far. We've had a couple other interns
over the years, but yeah, so my business partners are all my

(42:34):
students and I'm based in Londonand they're based in Toronto and
Hamilton and Montreal. And the work we're doing is a
kind of split of teaching architects how to do this, how
to get it into their design process and not just be some
compliance afterthought. And then working with municipal
and federal governmental departments on how to procure in

(42:58):
this way. Also guidance with a guidance
document with the federal government around how to write
this into RFPs and what questions to be asking your
design teams. Now the federal government
training, government strategy, they're requiring life cycle
assessments. So we're helping departments
benchmarks. So we're just starting to work
with Global Affairs Canada who build and operate our embassies

(43:19):
abroad to understand what's the footprint of the embassies
they've been building so that they could improve upon that in
the future. And so that's the and portfolio
level work. So working with larger
institutions, we've been workingwith the University of Toronto
the last couple years looking atthe the campuses owned buildings
both operationally and and construction, you know, so how

(43:43):
can that inform future construction on site?
And um, yeah, so we're kind of mix of everything of building
capacity, providing guidance. One of the exciting projects
we're doing right now is we're starting to work with civil
engineers Parsons and landscape architects O2 on the design of
the new streets and avenues of Downs View and beginning to

(44:04):
think about how to how to think about roads and the right of
ways. And you know, the, the kind of
municipally owned spaces throughthis lens of like how are we
designing those spaces and, and how are we thinking about them
in terms of long-term running costs, long term climate
concerns? What kind of random question to
ask, but as you're describing, those roads I'm thinking about

(44:26):
are clearly winters here. Hmm, and and the disappearance
of them. Yeah, well, last winter was a it
was interesting toward the end. Yeah.
Well, I mean, I do, but I was thinking more so about like
they're the clearing, snow clearing and then salting and
sanding. And so when you look at a
project like what you're describing is, is that does that

(44:47):
become a part of the analysis? Absolutely.
So that the the maintenance of our infrastructure, I think like
on, on infrastructure right now in the kind of broad terms, we
have way too much of it. Canadian municipalities are
facing enormous deficits that we've inherited through the era

(45:08):
of expansion of the 60s and 70's, the 80s largely and the
amount of Rd. We paved the amount of water
infrastructure we built a lot ofit 60 years later has come let's
it's up for renewal and cities across Canada are struggling to
to maintain their roads and, and, and the sheer volume of

(45:28):
them. So what, what we're kind of
conversation we're trying to have is how much road do we
really need right now? How much bike lane do we need?
I'm an avid cyclist you know, what's the right amount of that?
How are we looking at planting of the trees along the roads do
should we be thinking about themdifferently in the future?

(45:49):
You know, we still have winters they're getting warmer and
shorter. Our summers are getting longer
and hotter. How are we thinking more about
shade and heat in the future andless just on cold?
Because how much of our planninghas been around ideas of being a
winter city? But the reality right now, it's
not how it's not hard to have a conversation around heat in in

(46:10):
Toronto in August right now, where it's been over 30 for the
last three weeks. Yeah, exactly.
So the need for shade is, you know, is critical right now.
What what species we're planting, right.
Right now, if you go through thecity, a lot of the trees that we
have on our streets are they're nearing the end of their life as

(46:30):
well, right. A lot of the street trees.
When we when to but to this point, you know, we have we have
the maples out front and the whole streets littered with them
and they are all falling apart because they're you give a
windstorm, then they come. Because they're I'm I'm pretty

(46:52):
sure that those trees were planted more or less the same
time these houses were. Built.
And there you go. So you know, trees have life
cycles too. And we're, we see a whole bunch
of trees nearer at the end of their life and how we replant or
how we plant new trees, what species we're planting, how

(47:13):
those species are going to be ready for a hotter, drier,
wetter future. Other parts of the world like
Germany and California are already planting trees, you
know, from Italy or from Mexico because they know they'll be
heat resistant and the weather that we're going to have in
20-30 years. And we need to be doing the same
thing. And we need to be planting more

(47:33):
of them because we need more shade.
We need more of upper transpiration.
And like, how do we begin? We need to begin having these
discussions. But back to the infrastructure
piece. And like snow and salt and waste
and the things that make the city work, all of those have not
just a carbon footprint, but they then have again, an

(47:55):
analogous maintenance cost, right?
Because the more we pave, the more we have to resurface and
clear and on and on and on and on.
And so I think this like right sizing our infrastructure and
thinking about, you know, modeling it for a future in
terms of climate and in terms oftransportation.

(48:15):
You know, we need to really start imagining what things will
be like in 20 to 30 years on designing for that as opposed to
designing for thing how things have been for the last 30 years.
How do how are how are practicescoming to you to be able to draw
upon your knowledge? Yeah.
So we we act as a kind of collaborative consultant.

(48:38):
I'm an architect. I come from a design background
and I think my main message to to the folks we're working with
are people we might work with inthe future as we're here to help
you be a better designer and make better choices.
And the work we're doing isn't about a kind of compliance box
ticking exercise at the end of the project.

(48:58):
We want to be involved throughout it and and help set
some goals up early, do some like getting options on the
table and helping design teams, you know yeah, produce better
buildings, produce lower cost, lower carbon building.
So that's the work we've been doing is supporting teams on
projects and also building capacity, doing training.

(49:19):
So even KPMB, we, we did a training for their office,
teaching them how to do LCA, howto think about materials.
That training we developed though through them and a couple
other firms. We since have the National
Research Council funded us last year to go across the country to
do in person one day workshops for architects and engineers and

(49:39):
planners. So we did 10 Canadian cities and
trained over 1500 people on how to do this.
And I think again, we need everybody doing this.
We need builders understanding this, we need designers,
policymakers, planners understanding this so we can
really be moving things collectively.
A few people doing this is not sufficient.
We all need to be doing this. So I think that's really our

(50:02):
focus is around capacity building and then supporting
people and executing it. So you got to say that it's just
because if you if you if you eat, you're this far into the
episode right now, probably found this conversation as
interesting, as engaging as I have, which is the same as what
I found the first time I spoke to you.
Kelly, I would highly recommend that you reach out to Kelly.
I know that sometimes we're under the impression that

(50:25):
budgets can be tight on projectsand we're always trying to
figure out like, how can we maximize our dollars?
But bringing on the right consultant, you know, it's nice
to be able to bring on consultants that are going to do
really nice things for a house. But sometimes you can get those
nice things when there's also some thought that goes into how
the envelope is going to work and perform.

(50:45):
So I would again highly recommend you reach out to
Kelly's Small little plug. Thank you.
Yeah. Because it's it's really, really
fascinating work. And I think that anyone that
truly cares about the impact of design and, and how it, how it
can make you feel and how you appreciate it knowing that

(51:08):
you're in it, especially if you were inside of a building.
That you. You.
See as a low efficiency, high efficiency, but low carbon
footprint building, Yeah, there's, there's, there's an
inherent good value. And I think that like there
there's other things on top of it like health, you know, human
health, material health. The reality is we, you know, we

(51:31):
are what we eat, we are with, weare what we live in.
So much of our, our health is determined by materials that
surround us and that we breathe and we touch all the time.
And so this too is a kind of piece in this, the healthy
materials, my business partner, Juliette, there's a course at
Parsons in New York around healthy materials.

(51:52):
Again, it's another lens to lookthrough it.
But like I, I particularly have a, you know, I'm not alone in
this, but how do we get plasticsout of our built environment?
Because they're everywhere. They're, you know, they're
probably in the floor, They're definitely on the paint, they're
on your light switch, they're inthe doors.
They're like, they are all around us plastics and you know,

(52:14):
they're known carcinogens. Um, we, we have been inundated
by the plastic. The plastics industry has like
is everywhere in construction and it wasn't 60 years ago,
right? Like that.
Again, your neighboring, your original house didn't have any
plastic in it. I hazard a guess, right?
And this is like how do we get plastics out of our building is
a key concern from a client perspective, but from a human

(52:36):
health perspective as well. Doesn't fuel also like?
The fuels that we use, yeah, I mean, that's trying to.
Get everything into is it? Well, that's absolutely Patrick
for the petroleum is like a big source of the carbon footprint
of the of the material, right. So I mean, this is another
reason why sourcing Canadians a good idea because if you're a

(52:57):
manufacturer in Ontario or Quebec or Manitoba or British
Columbia, you know, historicallywe've invested in nuclear power
and hydroelectric power. And so, you know, the
electricity right now humming inthe background recording our
session, it's got a really low carbon footprint relative to if
we were recording this podcast in Texas, it would be a lot

(53:18):
higher carbon footprint because you know, that part of the
United States, you know, it's got some wind and solar, but
it's still largely coal-fired and gas fired.
And so that's the same with other what's the world like?
Much of Chinese production is still coal-fired, right, Though
the rapidly scaling up the renewables.
There's a lot of the parts of the world, specifically United

(53:39):
United States compared to Canada's power in Canada is way
greener, less carbon intensive. And so if you're making
anything, if you have a factory,for instance, and it's an
Ontario, it's going to produce lower carbon goods simply
through the you're doing your processing on our power.
So, you know, it's kind of like if I ever run for Prime Minister

(54:01):
or anybody listening like this is bringing Ontario jobs,
bringing Quebec jobs. If we encourage low carbon
construction and low carbon procurement in an it's going to
funnel to two Canadian manufacturing and suppliers who
are sitting on our low carbon grids.
It's it's good for us if we establish trade relationships

(54:24):
with Europe, The countries in Europe like France, like Denmark
that that require low carbon construction and they're looking
and Belgium, like much the EU now is going to have LC as a
requirement. So these countries are going to
be looking for suppliers with low carbon materials.
Guess what? That could be Canada, right?
We could be exporting a ton, seetwo to the EU and to parts of

(54:47):
Europe again, simply because we have a big advantage here.
We have the advantage of, you know, historically investing in
hydro and nuclear and we have the advantage of a lot of form,
a lot of farms, a lot of fields,places.
We could, you know, we can grow material here.
Ontario, I mean the province of Ontario is bigger than what?
I don't know how many countries in the world.
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, and yet our

(55:10):
forestry sector, you know, has waned in in years.
So that's, I think these are theopportunities we have right now.
How to connect, how to connect the kind of political reality
are in and the need to create housing and marry our need for
housing. How we change our immigration
laws to be pushed towards tradesand manufacturing in the future.

(55:32):
To begin to like, you know, build the buildings of the
supply chain that can house ourselves and and house other
parts of the world. Well, so we've covered.
I mean, we have covered a lot. Find my mind exploding right
now. Sorry.
That's OK. It's a good thing.
It's this is kind of what I was anticipating.
You touched on something before because I wanna, I wanna go into

(55:53):
the personal side of things now.It's something before saying
you're an avid cyclist. Yeah.
So what does that look like for you?
Well, I wish I'd worked from home, so I'd like to cycle a lot
more. I live in London.
It's pretty, pretty flat. I don't have those don't have
the ravine system you have that we covered earlier.
But what? Yeah.
But you know, when I do, I do rent an office space from a from

(56:15):
a firm and shortage. So I do get to back into work
every once in a while. So I've got a Brompton and I've
got a single speed images of both or you can take your
Brompton on the tube if you can't make it home in time.
So, um, yeah, I mean ride my bike a lot and in the city.
I think one of the massive benefits of living in London

(56:35):
right now is and having 2 littlekids is how non car dependent
our life is. It's like I probably what I what
I like most about it. I don't drive anywhere, you
know, we, we walk, we bike, we take the, we take the train
everywhere we go of the tube. The tube where the Overground.
Yeah. So, yeah, that part of the life

(56:55):
I think like there's the benefits of of density that that
come, the benefits that come with density are something I
really appreciate. And I can imagine, you know,
that I, I pay a lot of attentionto Toronto's municipal politics
and I'd love to talk about bike lanes if you're up for it.

(57:16):
But you know, again, where we'regoing in the future, we need, we
need to decarbonize. And so we can't, like EVs are
part of the solution, but they're not the solution because
Evie's have very high upfront carbon, right?
They're heavier and they requirebatteries that come from, again,
mines and parts of the world that people are not thinking

(57:38):
about. What happens to those when the
cars are end of life? Exactly.
String to a film with a battery.In it, yes.
So it's it's. That's not the root problem.
The root problem is like we don't have other transportation
options necessarily or we shouldbe cycling more or we should be
using a lot more ebikes and we should be building our
infrastructure to enable and empower that right, not fight

(58:00):
against it. Absolutely.
And then the second piece, I think the fundamental challenge
we have right now in Canada and North America is density, right?
Like if, if we, we have, we needto build, you name the name of
the number of houses, if it's 3.5 million, where and how we
build that housing is critical to get right, right.

(58:21):
We need to have a politics and acultural desire for density.
That is like the key challenge right now.
How do we create the politics infavor of density?
How do we get over Nimbyism? Because we need, I mean, look,
let's look at the future here. The world's going to heat a hot
up. People are going to continue to

(58:41):
migrate and, and Canada is goingto be one of the places that
people are going to migrate to. And Ontario and Toronto
specifically is, you know, this is, this is where, where a lot
of that livable area is going tobe.
And so, you know, the city is going to double or triple in our
lifetime. That's that's safe to say.
And how do we do that like in a kind of managed way and not a

(59:03):
haphazard way, I think is like akey challenge.
How do we design for that? How do we, how do we design for
a city three times the size we are?
That's like a great opportunity,right?
And what's in the way right now though, is I think we've got,
we've got our mentality that is very much the single family
house Canadian dream, which has been the dream, right?
I think I grew up in a house like yours, most of Canada.

(59:27):
This is what we aspired to and that needs to change.
Like think like we can't, we can't live like this anymore.
We can't have that as the, as the dream for young people.
We need to live in apartments and courtyards and and the the
we need to live like, you know, frankly, like I do in Europe.
And the density with that density enables is investment in

(59:50):
public transportation. You 2 could have an Overground,
you know, you 2 could have a subway.
Well, you will have a subway pretty soon, but more of it,
right? Maybe, yeah, maybe in 15 years.
But you know, the net, the the kind of abundance of
transportation options I enjoy in London, you know, we need
that in Toronto. And the way to create that is

(01:00:11):
through a politics that that's in favor of that investment.
And see how that that investmentin transportation is tied to a
more uniform, uniformly distributed form of of.
Density. I think you said you said
something before that I actuallyfound it really interesting.
And that was that, you know, as the summers here continue to

(01:00:34):
extend and the heat continues toexpand and you need more shade.
It's funny because the majority of people that are vehemently
against density are complaining that they're going to lose their
son, right? You know, and in neighborhoods,
when, when you think about the reality of it, it's like when
you go outside now it is the sunso hot all you want is straight.

(01:00:55):
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's it's it's one of
the tools that Nimbys like to use.
Yeah. Shadow and shades, our friend.
Shade and shadow are are are going to be our friend.
You still have your sunlight. Good news.
The sun travels across the sky over the course of the day.
So you 2 can have sunlight and shade.
We can have it both. And you have something

(01:01:16):
affordable that like the future generation is going to be able
to live in. Absolutely.
You eventually don't want to live in your single family home
because you have a staircase that you can't get up anymore
and you haven't converted it into a have a bedroom on the
main floor. You're gonna have to go into
that rental apartment or condo. Absolutely and.
You better hope they have enough.
Yeah, I mean, this is the the types of housing right now the

(01:01:38):
the options are, you know, it's either spiky city, it's like
it's either a tower at the corner of Young and Eglington or
whatever the nearest tower was that we saw.
It's either the tower or it's a small or it's a single family
home. Like that's that's what Toronto
is right now. That's what Vancouver is.
That's what I mean Winnipeg thatcould aspire to have some

(01:01:58):
towers. We had a couple, but it's, you
know, everything is low rise or tall.
And that whole missing middle component, that 468 story built
form that constitutes most of, you know, most of the rest of
the world, frankly, you know, Asia, Europe, North Africa,

(01:02:19):
Middle Eastern, like historically that's kind of the
scale of construction that that you had because it's good
uniform density, four to six stories, right?
I've got to add to this, and that is to say that given what
we're talking about in Missing Middle and what the majority of
the world sees by the time this is now out, you could go to our

(01:02:40):
YouTube channel and you can watch our first roundtable
series that was about missing Middle.
And the missing middle applies not just to Toronto.
This applies to pretty much all of North America and every major
city throughout North America. Absolutely.
I would highly recommend going and watching that because you're
going to learn a lot. It's directly in line with what
Kelly's been saying. Now I want to actually have

(01:03:02):
Kelly on the panels or he wasn'tin town.
Yeah, it's it's basically it's ascale of housing because if your
street just imagine there was four story just imagine that you
reduce your setback at the front.
You don't need the front setback.
Imagine you get rid I mean your house is semi detached.
Imagine if you didn't have to have a side yard so you could be

(01:03:24):
fully attached. Friends of mine just came out
with impossible Toronto looking at courtyard blocks so you can
have a building at the front andthe building we're in back here
could also be 4 stories, right? You could have a four story
garden suite. Why not?
And the entire space we're looking out into could be shared
up to our space, could be semi semi private to the ground
floors, etc etc. You could house 8-4.

(01:03:47):
You could house 7 more families on your site.
Yes comfortably, very comfortably.
And that scale of construction could all be wood framed.
It could be you guys could buildit and no problem.
Would be very low cost and couldadd overnight.
You could have 7 times more families on your street.
OK, and maybe that sounds scary,but what does that mean?

(01:04:08):
Is like, OK, well, now that sometimes more people who want
to have a shop at the corner anda coffee like the, that the end
of your street, you can imagine you actually might have a shop
And we, we wouldn't, you know, need to drive to Bayview to get
a lot of that stuff. And that is what my life looks
like in London, right? I have.
I've got all these things on my corner.

(01:04:28):
Looks like in a lot of places. Exactly.
I feel like as Canadians we go for vacations in these places
were like, oh it was great. We walked everywhere like the
the best food in our little neighborhood, You know, you name
it, that's Italy, Spain, wherever, England, wherever
people went. And then oh, well, now we're
back in Canada. That was nice.

(01:04:49):
Maybe next year, you know, like we can have nice things too.
Earlier, Kelly made the point that some of the best design
lessons come from nature and that working with natural
systems is often the smartest way forward.
And stuck with me because it's not just true for buildings or
streets, it's true even in the spaces we create for rest and

(01:05:10):
enjoyment. One of the companies that come
across a Quantum pools has takenthat idea seriously.
There are pools are designed with bio design principles using
natural filtration, lighter chemical footprints and forms
that sit in the landscape instead of fight against it.
It's a reminder that the same values we've been talking about,

(01:05:31):
durability, respect for resources, harmony with place,
can show up anywhere, even in something as simple as a pool.
To learn more about a quanta, e-mail me.
It's Jonathan. Jonathan at waldenhomes.ca and
I'll introduce you to Yuri and you can find out more for
yourself because I found it fascinating the first time I

(01:05:54):
heard about it. But now let's get to the final
stretch with Kelly. It was, it was also interesting.
I guess in some capacity is not taught.
But anyhow, I'll leave, I'll leave all the time.
People value time here in a different way, some capacity.
I could be wrong about that, butI think so.
I feel like people here, they feel the constant need to press

(01:06:15):
and rush. Yes.
They don't leave the time to be able to go for the walk to the
store because they have the immediacy of the vehicle to be
able to go and get there. Interesting.
And I am 100% a victim of that. It's listening to Derek
Thompson's podcast yesterday. He had us, like, psychologist
not talking about there's like aterm for this exact thing in

(01:06:36):
North America and how much more stressed out we are.
The whole episode was about, yeah, generally like where North
America, the United States is right now psychologically.
And I think like our politics and our our well-being is really
undermined by, yeah, the amount of time we spend on cars as

(01:06:57):
opposed to walking and interacting in more human ways.
Like I behave horribly when I'm in a car compared to if I was
just walking right, it wouldn't be yelling and honking at the
person in front of me. I'd be like, oh, I'm sorry, Hey,
you know, excuse me. But in the car, it's like, you
know, you get angry to kind of what this does to us in
aggregation usually. Oh, no, I'm going to go from my

(01:07:20):
house, get into my car, go to another air conditioned space,
get back to my car as opposed to, yeah, I just kind of go walk
around the block and get something right.
It's again, this. We could, we could have
something different. We we could if we wanted that
other thing, if we could imaginewanting that, we could easily
have it. It's so within reach and just so

(01:07:41):
you know, I have this conversation with my parents and
my in laws who, you know, very similar settings.
So like, just imagine if you, you know, you're aging, just
imagine if you'd walk around your block and you had stuff to
go to as opposed to just this kind of boring 80s subdivision
that we're in. You know, that you're just
walking in the old, the same loop every day.

(01:08:02):
There's nothing along that loop except for maybe somebody's in
their front yard watering their,you know, their grass that you
may not know. But if you had a neighborhood
with amenities on it, you know, and all the other things that
you'd want to get to, we could have that and which.
Is part of what I'm excited about because as we were driving
earlier, just before we started this recording, we were seeing
that. But you know, building going up

(01:08:23):
on on Bayview and there's another now there's a beautiful
retirement residence that's going up on layered around the
corner from where I live. And you're starting to see the
infiltration of the non high rise, the 8 story, 10 story.
Building the mid rise. Yeah, mid rise that is, that is
fulfilling the needs and you know, we just have another one

(01:08:45):
that's, I don't know, it's probably like 20 stories at the
corner over here. But the way that it sets back
then steps back from the roads, the road, it looks the same as
everything else and then carriesbackwards toward the other
commercial area. Why I say this is because now
one of the local coffee shops that was in a really rundown old

(01:09:07):
building. Moving into it.
Moved in and set up at the base and there so busy.
Yeah, because the community wants it.
And they? Just knowing that they want.
It and they got a bunch of new customers as well.
Right. And that I think seeing that
happening on on Bayview, on the major streets and avenues,

(01:09:28):
that's like a first step. And then not limiting it to
there, but bringing it everywhere.
I would love to see four storiesas of right across the entire
city, right? Like eliminating all side
setbacks, reducing your front setback.
You know, this is the type of like zoning reform that we need.

(01:09:50):
So you're, you're probably listening to this right now,
Jason. Yeah, exactly.
Below. Jason.
Hello. Hello, Mayor Chow.
You don't want unlock housing. Get rid of your setbacks.
Yeah, increase your coverage do force, I mean the fact that the
whole Multiplex, the six Plex thing only being a nine of what
26 wards or what have you? I mean, it's short sighted for

(01:10:13):
sure. It's it's exactly the kind of
nimbus politics I'm talking about.
Like there's not a politics in the majority of the city of
Toronto that supports density, evidently, right, or you would
have as of right, six plexes everywhere.
But six plexes are not enough. They are a kind of like stepping
stone to it like that. I'm talking about your.

(01:10:35):
Your. The house we just described is a
8 to 12 flex, right? That's the kind of density we
need to see. Yeah, I mean, look, Jack, Janet
did it. Yeah, as an example.
Exactly. Start Kelly on that then thank
you so much for coming. I'm so happy that we were able
to set this up on the trip that you had into here.

(01:10:56):
We're going to find a way. We're going to be back on talk
more about this. There's this whole other
roundtable series than I'm goingto be working on building out
and I want to have you on there.For anyone that has made it all
this way through, I highly recommend going to Kelly's
website. I'll have that in liner notes
for the show. So when you're listening to this
on Spotify, if you listen to this on Apple YouTube, wherever

(01:11:17):
you're going to consume it, check the liner notes to see his
his website there and in addition to that will show some
of the some of the work that he's been affiliated with
through our Instagram account. You can look for it online on
Instagram. It's a blue handle with some
white writings behind the build.Kelly, greatly appreciate you
taking the time for. This amazing, I think I mean,
yeah, thanks for invitation and much appreciated and and look

(01:11:41):
forward to hearing from anybody.We're we're here to work with
people. So please do reach out.