Below is an excerpt from Warren Buffet’s latest annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders (2016). It represents an entire section dedicated to American optimism, which is something you’ll notice in most (all?) of his letters. I’m a big believer in optimism, because I find it has… Read More
I spent Saturday evening at Honest Ed’s for An Honest Farewell. It was a lot of fun. There were many familiar faces. And it felt very Toronto. See above photo. But part of me felt a bit phony pretending to celebrate the end of 68 years… Read More
I have been very vocal on this blog about the importance “nighttime economies” for cities and for its creative industries. So I continue to be encouraged by all of the attention that this topic is getting over the last year or so. Recently, the Creative… Read More
My friends in New York tell me that if you want to sell a luxury residential building, you need a name brand architect. People care about architecture and it’s part of the buying process: “Oh, it’s a Herzog building.” To that end, Toll Brothers City Living… Read More
Earlier today Richard Florida published a piece in CityLab called: Anatomy of a NIMBY. The article cites a recent paper by Paavo Monkkonen (of UCLA) that focuses on the relationship between NIMBYism and housing affordability – a much talked about subject these days. More specifically,… Read More
A new “bicycle house” recently opened up in Malmö, Sweden. It is a 7 storey apartment building that has been designed entirely around the bicycle. It’s called Cykelhuset Ohboy. Bicycle house means: – There’s no parking for cars in the building. Apparently it’s the first building in Sweden… Read More
I just discovered Steve Randy Waldman’s blog called Interfluidity and, more specifically, a post he wrote called: “Home is where the cartel is.” I am now following him. He starts off by saying that housing is a bitch, which is just him saying that urban housing… Read More
There’s lots of talk these days about how technological innovation and globalization are taking our jobs. Of course, these are not unreasonable concerns. The data suggests a hollowing out of the middle class and the threat of automation feels perhaps more real than over with… Read More
In Toronto we have something known as Development Charges. In the US, they are more commonly referred to as Development Impact Fees, which in my view, lends a certain precision to their intent. The idea behind these fees is that they account for some or… Read More
The MIT Senseable City Lab recently developed something called the Green View Index. It is a measure of a city’s tree canopy. Below are the GVIs for Boston (18.2%), Geneva (21.4%), London (12.7%), and New York (13.5%). You may have to zoom in. And here… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 