Canada’s first purpose-built smart community caters to home-based entrepreneurs

Remember the days when your dad used to eat breakfast, grab his lunch box and head down to the factory or office to toil away from nine ’til five? A lot has changed since then. In today’s global economy, business priorities are rapidly shifting away from rigid work schedules and hive-like offices to focus more on individual productivity and output. Flexi-schedules, virtual offices and telecommuting are now the bywords of the modern working professional. More importantly, they’re considered critical enablers in building a knowledge economy in which innovation, creativity and professional excellence are the drivers of economic growth and prosperity.

That approach is taking physical form in the new sohowest smart community currently rising from the ground in Kanata, Ont. The first major housing development in Canada to deliver fibre to the door, sohowest’s smart community approach is backed by a range of hardware, service and support packages from the likes of Rogers, Best Buy, Geek Squad, RBC and Control 4 home-automation systems.

With 450 homes already built and another 750 on the way, participants and observers of sohowest are bullish about its potential to rewrite the rules for how we live and work.

sohowest deconstructed

sohowest offers buyers virtually unlimited network capacity, lightning-fast transmission speeds and a range of technical add-ons available at time of purchase. But as important, aggressive zoning regulations encourage home-based businesses. These regulations, for example, permit owners with a home-office or business to place a sign on their property and access an additional parking space for an employee, options ruled out by traditional residential by-laws.

According to Brian Karam, an Ottawa-based barrister and solicitor and the visionary behind sohowest, this type of creative zoning is not easy to come by, “as everyone thinks they’re going to end up with a barbershop next door.”

Karam said these concerns were not an issue in sohowest, given the undeveloped or greenfield nature of the property. “In a greenfield, everyone buys into that home-based business concept and everyone is on the same wavelength.”

sohowest also partnered with RBC to deliver a new hybrid financing package that combines a line of credit with a conventional mortgage. This allows buyers to have up to 40 per cent of their mortgage classified as small business financing, which, in turn, opens up access to lines of credit, which can grow as you pay down the mortgage. “So as your principle goes down your line of credit goes up,” he said.

And with fibre to every door, Karam said every sohowest home is “future proofed,” regardless of what new technologies may emerge.

Karam also developed a business model that can bring this infrastructure to homes at no additional cost to the consumer. The fibre build was funded by Rogers, while other enhancements were paid for by the developers through bulk-buying and creative internal financing. “It’s a simple and basic business concept of aggregating supply and demand and basically doing away with those middlemen who are looking at this as a profit centre.”

With sohowest houses selling briskly, Karam and his partners are looking for other smart community opportunities across Canada. But he’s not stopping there. It’s his goal “for all housing in Canada, and ultimately all commercial and industrial space, whether existing or new, to be as smart as it is economical.”

It’s the economy of the sohowest offerings that stand out for Mark Mccallum, who works in Best Buy’s Commercial Sales division. “You can already get this type of infrastructure for a two- or three-million dollar home, but this is the first time homebuyers in the $300,000 to $500,000 range have had access to this type of infrastructure.”

Other builders, Mccallum said, just aren’t ready to capitalize on the concept. “They’re still into simple home sales: build it, buy it and you tell me what I need in terms of countertops and drapes.”

The model owner

International consultant and former air traffic controller David Rome recently bought a home in sohowest. As an expert in air traffic “flow control,” Rome is typical of today’s modern worker. He spends up to 100 days on the road annually, and needs to connect almost every day with clients and colleagues in far-flung corners of the world.

In addition to punishing three-week business trips to Amsterdam, Hong Kong or Johannesburg, “I might be on a teleconference at nine at night with Australia and then with Seoul at eight in the morning.”

To make his life easier (and more comfortable), Rome owns five TVs, several computers, three smartphones, an iPad and all the other technical accoutrements of the modern suburban household. He said the virtually unlimited capacity of the fibre in his home gives him the ability to download, transfer and share very large files through his remote FTP connection–something that simply was not possible with old-fashioned e-mail transfers.

When he and his wife (who also works on the road) are out of town for an extended period, “we can just lock up the house and I can get back on my home machine using cloud technology. Anywhere I am in the world, I’m close to home.”

Although Rome is taking maximum advantage of the bells and whistles built into his home, he’s not so sure about the other denizens of sohowest. “We’ve had a number of neighbours in and very few of them seem to have taken advantage of what is available in their house.”

Building a knowledge economy

Stepping back from the individual experience, the larger issue is that Canada continues to attract investment and skilled workers, said John Reid, president and CEO of the Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance.

“If you don’t build the communities that allow for transparent, ultra-fast access to data, you start to
fall behind as a nation.” Reid said the potential of smart communities to contribute to economic growth is significant, as they have the ability to “rebrand Canada as an attractive place to do business.”

How might that actually play out? Karam points to the example of Mitel, which was founded in a Kanata, Ont., garage by entrepreneurs Michael Cowpland and Terry Matthews. Like Mitel, Karam anticipates that a proportion of the businesses incubated in sohowest will eventually grow into medium, or even larger, ventures.

To illustrate his point, Karam said that “at least 60 per cent of the Canadian population is, in one way or another, working from their homes.” This is particularly true in the Ottawa region, where a large number of government agencies, notably Canada Revenue Agency and the Department of National Defence, are being very aggressive in offering their employees more flexible work hours and options.

A recent study conducted for WORKshift Canada in partnership with Calgary Economic Development discovered that almost 14 million Canadians still commute to work every day, and up to 44 per cent of those commuters have telework-compatible jobs. If they worked at home just two days a week, the study estimates Canadian employers would reap more than $10,000 a year per employee through increased productivity, reduced real-estate costs, and lower absenteeism and employee turnover.

For John Eger, a professor in the School of Journalism and Media Studies at San Diego State University, and a noted thinker on smart communities, the choice could not be more stark. “We’ve lost a lot of manufacturing and service jobs in the United States in the past few years… Those jobs are gone and they’re never coming back.”

So where will new jobs and employment come from? “From being innovative and creative, from being global in your outlook and more entrepreneurial.”

Eger points to a decade-old Department of Labour study that stated the average high school graduate would have 20 jobs in their lifetime, 15 of which have not been invented yet.

“So they’ll be using technology that’s not been invented yet and solving problems that aren’t problems yet.”

Creating the workplace, technological and social foundation for those jobs is vital, even if we don’t know what they might look like. He said, however, that elegant technical infrastructure and liberal zoning bylaws won’t create jobs and new businesses on their own. World-leading smart communities, he said, “will also need arts and culture, clean air and open spaces, so we can attract the knowledge workers to those places.” 


Features and packages in sohowest

Features 

• Design-friendly home theatre with in-wall wiring and flexible controls 
• Multi-room music 
• Smart lighting 
• Security integration 
• Energy management package

Packages 

• Future-proof fibre optic connection 
• One free year of service from Rogers 
• 2 HD set-top boxes (one PVR) with VIP Ultimate TV Channel lineup 
• Rogers Home Phone, with 200 minutes of long distance 
• Rogers Hi-Speed Extreme plus Internet 
• Complete wired and wireless home network from Rogers 
• Secure wireless access with setup assistance by Geek Squad 
• 1 to 2 TV, phone and data jacks per room 
• Cat-6 structured wiring and Cisco/Linksys hardware 
• Free one-hour visit from the Geek Squad 
• Security setup for your wired and wireless networks 
• Home-theatre or home-office consultation