I started my undergraduate degree as a computer science and physics student. But despite my love of technology (and physics, incidentally), I quickly realized that I didn’t want to end up as a software developer. I was interested in so many other things: art, design,… Read More
There’s a lot of debate within urbanist circles about whether or not supply alone can solve or at least mitigate housing affordability concerns. Richard Florida and others will say that, while beneficial, increasing supply isn’t the be all end all. We need to be building… Read More
This morning BILD and Altus Group released their January 2019 new home sales figures for the Greater Toronto Area. Here are the highlights: 1,362 new homes sold in January 2019 across the GTA. This is up 14% compared to last January. Of these, 942 (~69%)… Read More
Earlier this month it was announced that the on-demand electric scooter and bike startup, Lime, had closed a $310 million series D round. This values the 18-month old company at around $2.4 billion and brings its total raise to $867.1 million. For comparison, Bird —… Read More
The third edition of Savills’ annual Tech Cities report is now out. Savills is a global real estate company headquartered in London and a few years ago they started looking and what makes a successful “tech city.” As always, you should take these rankings with… Read More
At the beginning of this year, the City of New York filed this lawsuit in an attempt to shut down an Airbnb business that has supposedly generated around $20 million in revenue since 2012. It is currently illegal to rent out an apartment in most… Read More
Today we visited BMW Welt (World) and the BMW Museum in Munich. BMW Welt was designed by COOP HIMMELB(L)AU out of Vienna. It is the result of a design competition that the BMW Group held in 2001. Construction of the ~73,000 square meter facility was… Read More
We drove on the Autobahn today. Our Ford remained as smooth as ever. They take their cars seriously here and force regular inspections. But this got me wondering about safety records and why more countries haven’t adopted similar approaches to highway driving. Here is Germany’s… Read More
Last summer Bloomberg ran a visual essay on how America uses its land. In case some of you missed it, I thought I would share it here today. They started by breaking the country down into 6 main land uses. Each square represents about 250,000… Read More
On Monday, Christopher Hume of the Toronto Star responded to the recent backlash against Sidewalk Toronto with a piece called, Anger over Google’s vision for Toronto waterfront is misguided. The below excerpt is what I was trying to diplomatically allude to with my post on… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 