The ABCs of Sidewalk Labs
The company owned by Google parent Alphabet Inc. is developing a controversial proposal to build a ‘smart city’ on the eastern waterfront, yet many Torontonians are not aware of the plan or the complex issues it raises. So here’s an A-to-Z primer,
Sidewalk Labs is working on a proposal to bring a large, sensor-driven ‘smart city’ to Toronto’s waterfront — and the world is watching. Yet, Environics Research recently conducted a survey for the Toronto Region Board of Trade that found 50 per cent of Torontonians haven’t heard, or aren’t sure if they’ve heard, about the project. So, using the letters of the alphabet (Alphabet is also the name of the company that owns Google and its sister firm Sidewalk Labs) the Star offers a brief overview of the key names, issues, places and players in this ongoing and controversial story
the parent company of Google and Sidewalk Labs is based in Mountain View, Calif., northwest of San Jose. The company was born after the corporate restructuring of Google in October 2015. Sidewalk Labs, an “urban innovation” firm based in Manhattan, was formed later that year and is working with Waterfront Toronto to build a tech-driven smart city on Toronto’s waterfront. Alphabet is a company worth tens of billions of dollars U.S., revenues driven largely by Google. Aside from Google and Sidewalk, Alphabet includes Google Maps, Chrome, YouTube, mobile operating system Android and other entities. Late last year Sidewalk Labs began negotiating with Illinois to sell the state a tool called Replica that maps out commuting patterns using an individual’s de-identified cellphone location data. Illinois plans to use Replica to build a travel demand model that gives city planners the ability to “run alternative scenarios for where traffic would go if a new bridge or road were constructed.” Sidewalk has offered to bring the tool to Toronto for free.
Sidewalk Labs won a competitive request for proposals (RFP) that Waterfront Toronto, a tri-government corporation dedicated to revitalizing Toronto’s waterfront, issued in March 2017. The RFP calls for an innovation and funding partner to create a “globally significant” community that will highlight advanced technologies, sustainable practices, innovative building materials
and business models and “climate positive” urban development. The RFP was for Quayside, a 12-acre development site near Queens Quay and Parliament St. The RFP says it might be beneficial to advance successful outcomes from the project beyond Quayside, to the eastern waterfront. Waterfront Toronto’s 12-member board of directors will approve or reject the project. (Other levels of government will likely weigh in on final approvals as well). Toronto developer Steve Diamond, the new chair, says the board is in no way obliged to give the green light to Sidewalk’s final plan. The Sidewalk file has been a contentious one for the board — one member, prominent Toronto developer Julie Di Lorenzo, resigned last summer, saying she felt Waterfront Toronto was too closely aligned with Sidewalk Labs and fell short of properly addressing concerns around Sidewalk’s data collection plans. Then in December, Ontario’s Infrastructure Minister Monte McNaughton fired three board members including the chair, after Bonnie Lysyk, Ontario’s auditor general, released a report slamming Waterfront Toronto and its handling of the Sidewalk file. The province recently made four new appointments to the Waterfront Toronto board.
Sidewalk Labs sees itself as a “catalyst” when it comes to its plan to bring a techdriven, mostly residential neighbourhood to Toronto’s eastern waterfront. In a speech last October to Sidewalk’s advisory panel of Canadian executives, academics and urban experts, Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff described the firm’s role as being an “essential catalyst.” On a “beta site” — a 12-acre parcel near Queens Quay E. and Parliament St. and another parcel just south of there that Sidewalk calls “Villiers West” — the company wants to unveil data collecting sensors, autonomous vehicles and more. Doctoroff told the Star that after Quayside his company wants to expand these technologies and innovations across the eastern waterfront to the Port Lands. Doctoroff says Sidewalk intends to build on 10 per cent of land that can be developed in the eastern waterfront, property that will also take in Google’s new Canadian headquarters, and an “innovation hub” Sidewalk wants to create. Governments, private developers and others would build on the remaining lion’s share, Sidewalk says. Quayside alone would provide housing for about 5,000 residents, according to a site plan released in November. It would take about seven years D to build, Sidewalk says.
Sidewalk Labs is proposing to collect and use data with the intention of helping to make everyday life more efficient for its residents, employees drawn to new jobs in the area and visitors who’ll be passing through. Using sensors and other data collection methods, noise levels could be measured, as could air quality, temperature, wind conditions, traffic (pedestrian, cyclist, vehicle), waste disposal habits and more, Sidewalk says. But critics charge all this data collection will eventually lead to massive breaches of personal privacy. Sidewalk has pledged not to control data gathered at the smart city, and is calling for an independent “civic data trust” to store and oversee that data. The trust will serve as a “sheriff” that acts to police the “wild west” of data collection that already exists in the public realm, CEO Dan Doctoroff says. The Toronto Region Board of Trade has suggested that the Toronto Public Library could be in charge of the data. Sidewalk says it will not sell personal information and any such information collected will be deidentified at source, unless express consent is knowingly and explicitly given. Sidewalk has also promised to base its technology on “open standards” that outside parties can build on and connect their services to. Kurtis McBride, who is part of the panel advising Waterfront Toronto on the Sidewalk Labs endeavour and who is CEO and co-founder of Miovision, a Kitchener-based firm specializing in smart city technology, says Waterfront Toronto, city council, the province and federal governments need to pay more attention to the potential “economic value cre- ation” of data and digital infrastructures that will flow from the Quayside project. Meanwhile, critics remain deeply suspicious of Sidewalk’s long term intentions, given the firm’s ties to Google — which has made a lot of money from our personal data.
Sidewalk has the goal of being an “innovation manager for the entirety of the eastern waterfront.” In this role the firm says it would set design and innovation “guidelines for vertical and horizontal development” including a “radical rezoning of the entirety of the area needed to achieve Sidewalk’s economics.” Aside from the obvious goal of making money through increases in land value, investments in infrastructure, and licensing innovations that other jurisdictions could later adopt, Sidewalk Labs’ says its end game in broad terms is not about being a tech company, but rather “an urban place-making company” that uses technology to achieve objectives everyday people share, say CEO Dan Doctoroff. He says those objectives include wanting to live in less expensive homes, having reduced commuting times, a healthier environment, inclusive economic opportunities and a sense of community. “That is why we are doing this,” Doctoroff recently told the Star’s editorial board.
In February, Toronto city council unanimously endorsed a motion by Councillor Joe Cressy calling for the city to develop its own policy framework of rules and regulations to govern the storage and managing of data collected from smart city projects. Cressy wants to see a public consultation process and then a set of “data governance principles” hammered out. “It’s critical that as smart city proposals arrive, that it is cities and not private companies that lead the discussion,” Cressy tweeted after his motion was approved. Cressy says he’d like to see the final policy formalized and in force by year’s end or early next year. Right now the city doesn’t have an overall policy tailored to data collected through smart city technology. We’re behind cities such as Barcelona, where Francesca Bria, the city’s chief technology and digital innovation officer, helped launch the Barcelona Digital City Plan, which prioritizes the digital rights of its citizens.
Governments at all three levels have interacted in some way with the Sidewalk Labs project. In October 2017, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, then-Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne and Toronto Mayor John Tory gathered in Toronto to announce the launch of the Quayside proposal and Sidewalk’s involvement. All three leaders seemed generally positive about the news. Trudeau told the gathering that Waterfront Toronto has found an “extremely promising” partner in Sidewalk Labs, which “will create a test bed for new technologies at Quayside. Technologies that will help us build smarter, greener, more inclusive cities, which we hope to see scaled across Toronto’s eastern waterfront and eventually in other parts of Canada and around the world.” Wynne told the crowd, “Our goal is to build a complete urban community ... a place where innovation of every variety can flourish.” Tory said, “Sidewalk will work to develop solutions to some of our city’s most pressing urban problems, from housing affordability, to mobility and sustainability.” Recently, with news the Star broke that Sidewalk wants to expand its vision beyond Quayside, a senior provincial government official at Queen’s Park told the Star “there is no way on God’s green earth” that Premier Doug Ford would ever sign off on handing away hundreds of acres of “prime waterfront property to a foreign multinational company.” On the record, the province says its four new appointments to the Waterfront Toronto board will ensure any proposal Sidewalk presents passes muster with taxpayers, has strong oversight and privacy protection and puts the public first. These days Tory says he wants Sidewalk’s work conducted in a “healthy, transparent manner” but he is generally reserving judgment until he sees the firm’s final plan. Ottawa has taken a similar stance, adding that any proposal put forward must address privacy concerns and meet regulatory approvals from all levels of government. Sidewalk Labs is vowing to create a “new standard for affordable housing” on the 12-acre Quayside area and beyond. In a press briefing last November, Sidewalk says of the estimated 2,500 new units of housing that will be built on the site, 40 per cent will be below market housing, including 20 per cent affordable housing, which will include 5 per cent “deep affordable” units. The city defines affordable as less than the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s average market rent for the GTA, which currently for a one bedroom is $1,270 a month. Deep affordable generally refers to nonmarket social housing, which accounts for about 8 per cent of the total housing in the city. Another 20 per cent of the units at Quayside would be middle income units, Sidewalk Labs says, including 5 per cent “shared equity purchases” for middle income households who can’t afford the full down payment for a condo. Sidewalk says it is looking to partner with government at all levels, as well as housing non-profits, to “leverage existing programs that are typically used to support af-
fordable housing development” across the city. Sidewalk CEO Dan Doctoroff says the project needs to “scale” beyond Quayside and into the Port Lands to achieve these affordability targets. But University of Toronto professor David Hulchanski, an expert on affordable housing and homelessness, says given that Sidewalk’s proposal calls for development to take place on public land, the firm’s affordable housing targets fall far short, in his view. “I’m just saying on publicly owned land we should do a lot for people unable to afford what the market has to offer. Five per cent (deep affordable) is laughable — it’s not serious,” he said in an interview, pointing to the nearby St. Lawrence neighbourhood, which Hulchanski points out has 50 per cent social housing — a mix of affordable to deep affordable. He added that Sidewalk’s 40 per cent below market housing targets will also be hampered by the fact social housing supply programs from Ottawa and the province aren’t there. Hulchanski also worries that despite these affordable housing targets, the tech neighbourhood Sidewalk envisions will in the end only be a magnet for the well-to-do. “Google, like many firms, (doesn’t) have much interest in people who don’t have much money. They have an interest in having middle and high income people,” Hulchanski adds.
Innovation, everything from self-driving cars, streets that get rid of snow and ice, or roads where pieces needing repair can be removed and replaced rather than dug up are some of the many features Sidewalk Labs is promising. Recently at its head office on Queens Quay E., Sidewalk held an open house to show off prototypes of hexagonal sidewalks that light up to show changes to how a street is being used, in addition to having the ability to melt snow. The open house also featured Sidewalk Labs’ “building raincoat” covers, which can be opened when the weather is warmer or closed to give cover when it’s cold, snowing or raining. Sidewalk also wants to use timber to construct all of the 12 buildings in the neighbourhood. In addition, Sidewalk wants to pilot a thermal grid that would tap into multiple sources of energy for the purposes of circulation and reuse, which, the firm says in its documents, would enable the heating and cooling of its buildings without the use of fossil fuels. Sidewalk also wants to establish an “urban freight transit system” that could utilize robots to make deliveries to homes and businesses in the area or haul solid waste. In its “Project Vision” document, Sidewalk says “pallet-shaped” robots would be able to deliver a wide variety of items through tunnels or “channels,” which would mean fewer trucks on the streets. “Few if any deliveries would arrive on traditional trucks; virtually all arriving deliveries would be routed into a consolidation or distribution centre that would sort packages and then distribute them on the underground robot network,” Sidewalk says.
Sidewalk says its project has the potential to create tens of thousands of jobs. In its site plan, released in November, Sidewalk states that 9,000, direct and indirect jobs will be created in Ontario as a result of building construction at Quayside alone. Much of that will come from a new timber factory Sidewalk wants launched — the company says its final plan, due in the coming weeks, will detail who would launch the factory — to supply wood for the buildings at Quayside. With concrete foundations and timber skeletons, the buildings would together create the largest concentration of timber structures in the world, Sidewalk says. The factory is vital because the reason timber buildings and timber construction has never reached “critical mass” is there’s never been the supply chain — actually producing enough timber to justify a factory, says Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff. “We think it’s possible here,” Doctoroff says referring to Quayside and beyond. When Quayside is completed, the mix of jobs “on site” including office and retail will total 3,900, according to Sidewalk. In phases two and three of the project, Sidewalk hopes to spread its vision out to the Port Lands, where the firm estimates up to 70,000 jobs could exist “on site” upon completion of construction, including at the new Google Canada head office and a new innovation hub. But in an interview last year, Rana Foroohar, a Financial Times writer and author of Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business, said “these firms sell themselves as innovators and job creators, but they create far fewer jobs than even the previous generation of tech firms such as Microsoft or IBM.”
In February, the Star published an exclusive story based on leaked documents from a presentation Sidewalk Labs gave near the end of October or early November to its parent company Alphabet. The documents outline Sidewalk’s interest in spreading out into the Port Lands and paying upfront for big ticket items such as an LRT line and getting paid back through development charges or tax increment financing — money that usually goes to city governments to build things such as roads and transit. Sidewalk Labs’ CEO Dan Doctoroff says the headline for the story, which stated the firm is planning a “massive expansion to its waterfront vision,” left the impression Sidewalk was hiding information the public didn’t know. “That, to be perfectly blunt, was ridiculous,” he told the Star’s editorial board recently. Sidewalk has always been upfront about the notion their project only works if it is “scaled up” beyond Quayside, he said. He went on to add that Waterfront Toronto’s original RFP from 2017 mentions the notion of “scaling” beyond Quayside 20 times, Sidewalk’s response to the RFP mentions it more than 100 times, and city documents and the July 2018 Plan Development Agreement between Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk talk about the concept too. But Doctoroff was asked by the Star to explain why Sidewalk’s Nov. 29 site plan, which came about a month after the presentation to Alphabet, mentions Quayside over a dozen times, yet makes no reference to expanding beyond Quayside into the Port Lands. Doctoroff replied that the concepts in the leaked documents weren’t fully baked at the time. “I don’t like to promise things we don’t have any intention of doing,” he said.
Sidewalk says its Quayside and Villiers West project can’t work without a new
LRT line built near the waterfront. Sidewalk is proposing to finance the line upfront and be paid back later through tax increment financing or development charges that would accrue through increased land values created by the LRT and new infrastructure projects. Financing the construction of a new LRT to serve the Port Lands would allow the line to enter service “years, if not decades sooner” than if the company didn’t intervene, Sidewalk says. Sidewalk doesn’t want to own the LRT and says it would stay in public hands. The city has been planning to build an LRT on the east waterfront for at least a decade, but it is currently unfunded and has less political support than transit projects such as the Relief Line or Scarborough Subway extension. The city has estimated its version could cost more than $1.2 billion. Sidewalk Labs spokesperson Keerthana Rang said “ideally the LRT would be built with public dollars,” but Sidewalk is “developing options for Waterfront Toronto and governments to consider as alternatives if public funding is not available.” According to diagrams Sidewalk has published, the LRT would mostly follow the route envisioned by the city, and would run along Queens Quay, Cherry St., Commissioners St. and an extension of Broadview Ave. Sidewalk also envisions a second phase that would push the LRT further south to Unwin Ave. Sidewalk Labs is busy working on a fi
nal Master Innovation and Develop
ment Plan that will lay out the design and development vision for their Quayside beta site. According to the city of Toronto’s website the MIDP will “make specific proposals in the areas of affordable housing, mobility, buildings, sustainability, public realm, community facilities, digital governance and data applications,” for the project. The MIDP will also contain financial plans for the project, Sidewalk says, adding it hopes to have the document finished sometime this spring. It’s expected to be hundreds of pages long. Once the MIDP document is released, Waterfront Toronto says there will be an evaluation period that includes input from external experts, government partners, and consultations with the general public. After that, Waterfront Toronto’s board will vote to accept or reject its evaluation team’s recommendations. The city of Toronto is also expected to produce a staff report on the MIDP which could go before city council for a vote. The province and Ottawa will also likely weigh in.
Sidewalk Labs’ story is heavily steeped in
New York. The firm is based in Manhattan, and its New Jerseyborn CEO, Dan Doctoroff, 60, is the former deputy mayor for economic development of New York City from 2002 to 2008, most of that time under then mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg. After that, Doctoroff went on to serve as president and CEO of Bloomberg’s company Bloomberg L.P., a media, data, software and financial firm in Manhattan, before leaving to become head of Sidewalk Labs. While deputy mayor, Doctoroff began working on the rebuild of New York after the devastating Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Behind the scenes he helped guide numerous initiatives in the city, including the recently opened Hudson Yards development, a massive $25-billion complex of soaring residential and office towers. As recently reported in the New York Times, tax breaks and funding from the city for Hudson Yards have reached nearly $6 billion, according to public records and analysis from the New School, a re-