A draft version of the new London Plan was released today for public consultation. It is “the spatial development strategy for Greater London”. And you can download all 524 pages of it, here. A final copy of the Plan is expected to be published by fall 2019. Here… Read More
Stockholm has a congestion charge that is used to reduce traffic volumes in the center of the city. Toronto does not. We looked at it, actually fairly recently, but then we lost our nerve. Stockholm’s congestion charge was first implemented on a trial basis starting… Read More
In the comments of my recent post about Manhattan real estate prices during the Great Depression, a regular reader of this blog shared this terrific blog post (and corresponding research paper by Piet Eichholtz) about house prices along the Herengracht canal in Amsterdam from 1628 to… Read More
Below is an interesting podcast with venture capitalist Bill Gurley talking about how technology might transform and improve health care. Based on their discussion, the US spends about 17-18% of GDP on health care. In most Western European countries and in Canada, it’s about half… Read More
I was searching around trying to find data on long-term real estate prices and I came across a paper by Tom Nicholas and Anna Scherbina called, Real Estate Prices During the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression. Here are some stats about Manhattan real estate… Read More
Who better to talk about on Black Friday than Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Supposedly he’s now worth $100 billion. I just finished watching this short 60 Minutes clip about Amazon from 1999. If you can’t see it below, click here. Amazon was founded in 1994, so… Read More
There’s certainly lots of buzz these days around the Blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Some of it is negative. Here is a recent New York Times article talking about how celebrity-endorsed “initial coin offerings” have created a new gold rush. Most of these ICOs are scams. But some… Read More
I was recently with some New Yorkers and we got on to the topic of their subway system. I made a comment about how extensive their network is and how their express trains work so well for traveling further distances. They responded by basically saying: “Yeah, it’s… Read More
Steve Aoki was in Toronto today for a collaboration with Saks Fifth Avenue – namely the launch of his fall/winter Dim Mak Collection. The after party was at Junction House (the pre-development version). Here is a photo: I actually wasn’t there (because I’m fighting off some… Read More
If you’ve ever wondered how Facebook figures out all of the people you may know, here is some reading material. The short answer is that Facebook doesn’t just know the things you’ve told it about yourself, it also knows what other people have told it… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 