Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.
Foster + Partners has just completed its first residential high-rise in London. It’s a 50 storey building with 299 apartments, called Principal Tower. The tower forms part of a broader mixed-use project — that now houses Amazon UK — called Principal Place. The developers were Concord London and Brookfield Properties.
Here’s a short 11 minute video from Dezeen talking about the project:
Below are the US counties with the highest per-capita income (as of 2018), according to this recent Bloomberg article:
Teton, WY is home to the Jackson Hole valley (which has some of the best skiing in the world). And Pitkin, CO is home to Aspen. Turns out, rich people like ski towns.
Interestingly enough, 2018 saw per capita income grow in the greatest number of US counties since 1981. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, it was 97% of all counties:
For the full Bloomberg article, click here.
Charts: Bloomberg
New rental housing measures were approved by Vancouver City Council this week. I haven’t gone through the policies in the detail (you can do that here), but they aim to increase rental housing supply by doing things such as “pre-zoning” for 6-storeys on main streets and by allowing rental apartments to be built on some side streets (up to 150m away from arterial roads).
Here’s an excerpt from the staff report:
Enabling new rental housing in all neighbourhoods would support an increase in supply and choice. The incentive programs have concentrated secured market rental development in selected neighbourhoods and along arterial streets. This has been effective at creating larger multi-unit projects, but has created an inequitable environment, where renters have limited housing choice. Expanding program coverage into low density areas, areas zoned for single detached housing and non-arterial locations to allow for a greater mix of structure types and densities (e.g. townhouses, small apartment buildings) are important considerations moving forward.
It is yet another data point for what I wrote about here — the loosening of single-family zoning. Turns out, it can be difficult to meet the demand for new housing when you set aside a large part — or most — of your land for low-rise single-family homes. And there seems to be growing acknowledgement of that on the part of cities.
Photo by Aditya Chinchure on Unsplash
There’s a narrative out there that all developers are uncreative and greedy, and if only they would start being more creative and generous, we could solve the housing affordability problem that is plaguing many (if not all) global cities. In other words, the solution to increasing the supply of low and middle incoming housing is simply a psychological reframing on the part of developers.
The problem with this mental model is that it ignores reality. Development happens on the margin. The market is competitive. It’s difficult to find developable sites. And it’s a challenge to make projects work. More often than not, you have to say no as a developer. No I can’t buy this land. No I can’t build housing here. And no the market will not support new office space here. Sorry, but no. (See cost-plus pricing.)
Development needs to give back. On the blog we usually call this city building. And that’s because it implies a greater sense of civic responsibility. Developers aren’t just building one-off buildings, they’re building a city. I believe wholeheartedly in this. But the belief that projects can be saddled with an endless array of government fees and civic contributions is a problematic one. There are limits — because markets have limits.
If only city building were that easy.
I thoroughly enjoy the way that Paul Graham reasons through arguments. There’s something hyper rational about it. And even if you happen to disagree with his position(s), you still end up appreciating the way he has taken you through his logic. I guess that’s what you get when you combine a computer scientist with someone who clearly likes to write.
His latest essay is about how to do great work. Conventional wisdom, he explains, has it that you really need two things: ability and determination. That’s how you win. And that’s how you create new things. But Paul makes the case for a third ingredient — one that is arguably even more telling than the first two. Here’s an excerpt:
If I had to put the recipe for genius into one sentence, that might be it: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters.
Aren’t I forgetting about the other two ingredients? Less than you might think. An obsessive interest in a topic is both a proxy for ability and a substitute for determination. Unless you have sufficient mathematical aptitude, you won’t find series interesting. And when you’re obsessively interested in something, you don’t need as much determination: you don’t need to push yourself as hard when curiosity is pulling you.
He refers to this as his “Bus Ticket Theory of Genius,” because bus ticket collectors are an example, in his view, of a group with a “disinterested obsession.” They’re not collecting bus tickets for any particular reason, other than because of interest. And when you have this kind of obsession with things that (ultimately) matter, it can lead to important discoveries.
Think Darwin and his obsession with natural history.
But the other reason this topic resonates with me is because it makes the case for passion projects, side hustles, creative pursuits, and all other irresponsible things that seem to get harder to fit in the older we all get. I am believer in this. There’s tremendous value in indulging in the things that stoke our curiosity, even if they might seem to silly to others.
And so I will leave you all with this final thought/excerpt:
It might be at least as useful to ask yourself: if you could take a year off to work on something that probably wouldn’t be important but would be really interesting, what would it be?
Alex Bozikovic’s review of the book Canadian Modern Architecture: 1967 to the Present raises something potentially troubling. Here’s what I’m talking about:
It is by turns an exhilarating and depressing narrative: Canada, in this book, appears as a country that announced itself on the world stage in the 1960s and 1970s with incredible ambition but, since then, has retreated toward the mean.
It is potentially troubling not only because I believe in the value of good design, but because I believe that architecture embodies the ethos and cultural context in which it was created.
And so if you believe that our architectural ambitions have retreated toward mediocrity, you might also surmise that our overall level of ambition has retreated toward the same.
That should be viewed as a serious problem.
Tesla’s new Cybertruck was the talk of the town last week. Its design is polarizing and both windows broke during the unveiling (Elon’s reaction was amazing). At first I couldn’t tell if this wasn’t some sort of spoof on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator. Everything seemed to fit, including the design of the car, the chosen brand typography, and Elon’s outfit.
But within the first 24 hours and with no paid advertising, Tesla received 146,000 pre-orders for the truck (though, all it takes is a USD 150 fully refundable deposit to secure a place in line). So while a lot of you may consider this to be one the ugliest vehicles around, there are others who think this entire move is genius.
The design was jarring when I first saw it. It looked like a comical representation of what we thought vehicles in the future were going to look like. But I have to admit that the design is growing on me. And I agree that for Tesla to win any sort of marketshare in the pick-up category, it needed to do something radical. Brand loyalty to Ford’s F-Series pick up truck is simply too strong.
Marques Brownlee has a good video explaining this take (and why he ordered a Tesla Cybertruck):
But if successful, I also wonder to what extent the Tesla Cybertruck will eat into the sales of existing pick-up truck models versus capture new buyers that historically wouldn’t have bought this kind of vehicle. In other words, we are seeing tech people and successful YouTubers, like Marques, pre-order this truck. But I bet that very few of them currently drive an F-150.
Image: Tesla
The Wall Street Journal estimates that, from now until about 2037, roughly 21 million homes in the United States will be vacated by seniors. To put this number into perspective, it’s about 25% of the US for-sale housing stock and more than double the amount of new homes that were sold during the 1998 to 2008 housing boom. That number was about 10 million (see below).
This is part of the normal cycle of housing, but in this particular instance, there’s concern that the new generation won’t be there to backfill these homes, or least not in the same way. For one, there are more boomers than there are Gen Xers. So right away there’s a potential gap. But on top of this, the next in line don’t appear to necessarily have the same preferences in housing type and location.
As someone who would fall into the 65.9 million birth bucket highlighted in deep mustard (had I been born in the US), I can tell you that I am far less interested in many of the housing products (real estate speak) / typologies (architect speak) popularized by the generation ahead of me. Whether my opinion is representative is, of course, debatable.
Anecdotally, I can also say that I know many boomers who have started making real estate decisions based on the assumption that demand for certain types of housing will be tepid going forward. This is not to say that some of these communities won’t be able to reposition themselves if it comes to that. But there is uncertainty.
Images: WSJ
Here is an excerpt from a Guardian article that was published last year (by Tim Burrows) about Grimsby, England:
In Grimsby’s 1930s heyday, fishermen used to head to Freeman Street as soon as they were off the trawler, straight to the Lincoln or the Corporation Arms to spend their bountiful earnings. A century previously, Grimsby had been a fairly sleepy fishing village, but by the 1890s it was on the way to becoming the biggest fishing port in the world. In the mid 20th-century, trawlers were bringing in 500 tonnes of fish a day.
Today, Grimsby still has a thriving indoor market (paid for by the EU and the Enrolled Freemen of Grimsby, an organisation that dates back to the 13th century), but the further north towards the docks you walk, the emptier and more dilapidated things get. A local businessman says sex workers wait around at night for lorries to take them to the deserted docks. “It’s a legacy of the old fishing days.”
There is scant legacy to be found elsewhere. After a long decline, the fishing industry died in the mid 1980s, its owners selling their trawlers to companies in Aberdeen or Japan. Unlike Hull across the river, currently basking in its year as Capital of Culture, Grimsby is the Humber city that never was.
More than 70% of people in Grimsby, England voted to leave the European Union in the 2016 “Brexit” referendum. It was one of the highest shares in the country. But with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, that outcome is not all that surprising.
Supposedly, at its peak, there were eight onshore jobs for every one at sea in Grimsby. And like all thriving cities, there were economies of agglomeration, which resulted in things like the largest ice factory in the world. The fishing fleets needed crushed ice — and lots of it.
The Grimsby story is, of course, not a unique one. You just have to replace fishing with some other industry. Many cities have managed to diversify their economies either out of necessity or because they saw the writing on the wall. But for others it has been a real struggle.
It’s one of those things that is perhaps simple, but far from easy.
