Bill Gairdner of Gairloch Developments sent me this message the other morning:
He is talking about Junction House and he is, of course, right. It is a very cool feeling to create homes for people.
It’s not easy building buildings. People get upset at you. They tell you that you’re ruining their community. And broadly speaking, it can feel like every imaginable obstacle has been placed in front of you to make things more difficult.
But at the end of the day, once the dust settles, there will be places to live where places did not exist before. And then people will move into these places and transform them into homes.
They’ll make them their own, create new memories, and, in the case of the people that Bill was referring to, they’ll raise a family.
I’m not trying to make this sound more grandiose than it deserves to be. But I am being honest when I say that I know the team feels both a sense of honor and a great sense of responsibility because of the work we do.
You want people to be happy and you want the city to be a better place. So it’s hard not to feel a little emotional when you see people moving into a place that you’ve worked tirelessly on for several years.
Yeah, it is a cool feeling, Bill.
BRANDON DONNELLY 
Did you see the interview with Mitch Cohen in the ROB on Saturday? Similar sentiment. The money is an outcome, not the objective!
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Since the largest part of my practice was just that.. creating homes of all sorts I have to echo the feeling. Yes I too endured all the uniformed claims that I was going to ruin neighbourhood after neighbourhood and so forth and so on. A lot of what we built was termed affordable (some of it done with Mitch Cohen who is referenced above) and that was even more satisfying. I even recall once having to defend a rental project at the OMB where the prosecuting lawyer tried to get me to admit high-rises were no places for families. I told him he had to define family first and that not every family consisted of two adults 2.5 kids and a pet and a balloon. They also consist of single parents, aging couples, one aging parent and a caregiver offspring, recent arrival, and on and on so yes they were suitable for families of all combinations in any number of situations especially if both adults had full time jobs and preferred to spend their at-home time with their kids instead of mowing the lawn. I think I have left behind about 10,000 places for everyone to live so yes that is satisfying
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