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.
Last week was the official broker launch for One Delisle. In normal times, we would have packed the house and done a fun in-person event involving food, and probably some negronis. Instead, Lucas, Riz, and I did a livestream from the sales gallery at Yonge & St. Clair.
That video is now available online (embedded above and here). You’ll have to get past our hair (Lucas and I are both in desperate need of a cut), but otherwise it’s pretty cool. Shoutout to Veronica for pulling everything together and making it awesome.
If you’d like to schedule an appointment at the sales gallery, send a note to sales@onedelisle.com. Please also feel free to contact me directly (or copy me on the email to the sales team). If you’re interested, I would encourage you to act quickly as demand has been incredibly strong.
When I was in my early 20s, I spent a summer living and working in Taipei and Hong Kong. It was a wonderful experience. I’ll never forget my apartment in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay. It was a small single room with a small bed and an even smaller bathroom. The bed didn’t fit me — at all — and my legs would hang over the bottom of it. I couldn’t stop hitting my shins on the bottom of the frame at night. The bathroom didn’t have a dedicated shower, just a hose coming out of the wall. So everything would get wet. It also took me 15 minutes the first morning I showered to figure out how to make the water hot. Eventually I got it.
Despite all this, I remember being enchanted with Hong Kong. Here was this tiny little place with very little developable land that had managed to become, through trade, finance, real estate and other things, one of the wealthiest places in the world. Capitalism! I could also feel the connection to Toronto. Hong Kong has one of the largest Canadian expat communities in the world. In fact, I ran into one of my high school math teachers in a bar in LKF. That was wild. He had moved there with his wife to teach. I suppose because of all of this, I have tended to follow the region a bit more closely.
Last July, the British government promised a path to citizenship for the 3 million or so Hong Kong residents who hold or are eligible for a British National Overseas passport. This passport, as I understand it, was given to citizens at the time of the 1997 handover. Though I don’t know how utility was actually derived from it over the years. Before last year’s announcement, this document didn’t include the right to stay in the UK. However, now it does. And the UK government expects that some 300,000 Hong Kong residents are going to take advantage of this in the first five years of the program. And indeed, according to the Financial Times, 2020 was the first year since SARS back in 2003 that the region lost people — it had a net outflow of about 39,800 people.
What will this mean for Hong Kong? Well, Bank of America estimated earlier this year that capital outflows from Hong Kong could reach £25 billion in the first year of the program. But maybe this is being too conservative. Here in Canada, capital outflows from Hong Kong hit a record last year at C$43.6 billion. But this too could be an underestimation, as it doesn’t include transfers below C$10,000 and probably a bunch of other transfer methods. How much money is actually flowing outward?
This weekend the Financial Times published the above survey results showing sentiment around leaving Hong Kong. Surveys are, of course, a funny thing. Saying you might probably potentially do something is a lot different than actually doing something. But for what it’s worth, about a quarter of pro-democracy supporters (which is maybe half of the population?) responded by saying that, yes, they would be prepared to leave. If you include those who responded no, but that they would reconsider and leave if things got worse, the number increases to about 70%.
I don’t know how meaningful all of this becomes for Hong Kong. Time will tell. But it has me thinking about my tiny bed and tiny shower in Causeway Bay.
“Very little remarkable comes out of bureaucracies for a simple reason. The members of the bureaucracy seek to be beyond reproach. Reproach is their nightmare, their enemy, the thing to avoid at all costs. And the remarkable feels like a risk.” —Seth Godin
I went into the office yesterday to sign some documents (they had to be originals) that I have been working on finalizing for the last 6-7 months. I’m not going to share what the documents were or who was involved, but I will say that it took the entire 6-7 months to get two lines added to the agreement. No other changes. Just the addition of two lines — okay, it was more like a line and a half. On the one hand, I am horrified that such simple things can take so long in the hands of bureaucracy. On the other hand, this is not an outlying situation.
I say this not to bitch, but to instead make a case for the remarkable. As I was signing the documents yesterday, I couldn’t help but think of the writing of Seth Godin and quotes like the one at the top of this post (which is from a post called “Bureaucracy = death”). Because one of the professional goals that I have set for myself is to always strive to create things that are remarkable. I want people to look at whatever the thing might be and think to themselves, “yeah, this is extraordinary.”
But here’s the thing about remarkability. It lives on the edges. It’s by definition not ordinary. It is extra-ordinary. And so there’s risk. Maybe it won’t work. But you know, that’s okay. It also thrives on novelty. You have to be the first and you have to be the best. Because when it does work, it’ll very quickly become the ordinary. But this too is okay because it’s how the world moves forward. Remarkability is not a one time event, it is something that is continuous.
That we have organizations with cultures and processes that systematically eschew the remarkable makes me sad.
This is a chart from Abundant Housing LA (a YIMBY group), via City Observatory, showing the relationship between median household income and single-family zoning across the 88 cities that make up L.A. County. On average, about 80% of the land in the County is zoned for single-family housing. This is also true for Los Angeles, which is not surprisingly its biggest city. What is pretty clear from this chart is that the richest areas tend to have a higher percentage of single-family homes. If you read Anthony Dedousis’ post, you’ll also see that the housing tends to be more expensive (makes sense) and that the homeownership rates are higher in these single-family areas. One obvious takeaway is that it shows you how clearly we are dividing our cities. Zoning is regulation. And here we are seeing some of the socioeconomic implications. But I’m curious if this relationship would be as strong in other cities around the world and at different scales (i.e. neighborhood levels). When it’s made available (not all cities have this much space), how universal is this pull toward single-family housing?
This is a really nice kitchen extension. In response to an “oppressively” low ceiling height, the architects — DGN Studio — lowered the existing ground floor by about 500mm. At the same time, they created a kind of “concrete tray” that fills the width of the Victorian home’s property and extends outward to create a sunken patio space off said kitchen. From the outside, this drop makes the house feel as if it’s sitting on a concrete plinth — hence the name. (A good photo of this can be found here.) It’s a simple move, but a good one. Sometimes you just have to play with the section. If you can’t see the above video, click here.
I don’t think I’m supposed to take any action or feel particularly alarmed after reading about this global mapping of urban subway microorganisms, but it is kind of neat nonetheless. A team of researchers recently spent over 3 years collecting “metagenomic samples” from the transit systems of 60 cities around the world. Everywhere from Stockholm’s handrails to Shanghai’s subway poles.
The process involved nearly 5,000 samples and the result is this research paper, providing a full atlas of the microbial strains that live throughout our subway systems. Supposedly, none of the findings are anything that we should be worried about though. So carry on riding the subway.
But it is interesting (and very geeky) to note that the researchers discovered something that they are calling a “core urban microbiome.” What this means is that they identified 31 different species of bacteria that show up in pretty much all of the cities that they surveyed — some 97% of their samples.
At the same time, each city, because of things like climate and geography, also has its own microbial profile. In fact, these profiles are so distinctive that the geneticist who lead the study is quoted in the New York Times saying that if you gave him a shoe that was a worn in a particular subway system, he could sequence it and tell you the city with 88% accuracy.
“The city has to be for everybody, not just for the very few.” –Paulo Mendes da Rocha
Brazilian architect, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, died this past weekend. He was 92. Though he hadn’t really completed many buildings outside of his home country, his work and his contributions to São Paulo are widely celebrated. Some of his accolades include the Mies van der Rohe Prize for Latin American Architecture (2000), the Pritzker Prize (2006), the Venice Biennale Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement (2016), and the Royal Institute of British Architect’s Royal Gold Medal for Architecture (2017). I’ve always had a soft spot for Brazilian modernism. They were early adopters of European modernism and ultimately made it their own. I don’t think Mendes da Rocha would necessarily appreciate this classification, but as I’ve mentioned here before, modernism, and more particularly brutalism, took on very different qualities in Latin America. Exposed concrete just seems to hit differently in a tropical setting. Here and here are some examples of his more famous projects.
I learned this morning that + POOL (pictured above) recently received an official” confirmation to proceed with due diligence.” This is after more than a decade of planning, fundraising, negotiations, prototyping and, I’m sure, a bunch of other stuff. City building takes a long time. I’m not exactly sure where this milestone sits in the full spectrum of idea to realization, but it certainly sounds like meaningful progress.
The idea behind + POOL is pretty simple: People like to swim in water. But the East River is dirty and not the best place to swim (supposedly it’s been this way — unswimmable — since the 1930s). So why not create a dedicated swimming pool in the river and why not make it so that it filters the dirty East River water at the same time. Pretty clever. (The plus sign format is so that it can be split up into four separate uses.)
New York City is in the midst of creating some incredibly unique public spaces. The other big news is that Little Island opened up this past weekend within the larger Hudson River Park. Also more than a decade in the making, the free 2.4 acre public park, which was designed by Thomas Heatherwick, is the result of a $260 million donation from Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg.
Start with an idea. Put some money around it. And then fight like hell for many years. That’s how these remarkable urban spaces are getting created. This is also pretty much how real estate development works.
I was reading up on vaccine passports this morning. What is clear is that countries are scrambling to figure this out right now, though I understand Israel is already up and running, as is South Korea, which has a system built on top of the blockchain. (This feels like a great use case for the technology.)
What is also clear (see above charts) is that many countries are highly motivated to figure this out sooner rather than later. The geographies that are weighted toward tourism dollars don’t want to miss out on yet another summer travel season. And given how dominant Europe is in terms of international arrivals, I suspect that they might end up leading the way in terms of rolling out some form of internationally accepted passport system. I would imagine that true universality is going to be a challenge though.
Domestic travel in the US has already bounced back in a significant way. Looking at TSA screenings for the first half of this month (May 2021), travel right now is at about 70% of 2019 volumes. This is in comparison to just under 10% last year (May 2020). Once international travel gets streamlined in the second half of this year, I’m sure the same thing will happen on that front.
One of my predictions at the beginning of this year was that we would see an explosion in global travel, probably in the second half of the year. I stand by that view. Many/most of us have spent the last year in various forms of lockdown and many/most of us have spent the last year with almost no work-life balance (a symptom of WFH).
According to some recent data from home website Zillow, the company saw traffic skyrocket in 2020 from 1.5 billion visits to 9.6 billion visits (compared to the year prior). This is people looking at homes, and, in many cases, looking at homes that are more expensive than what they currently own. Real estate websites, you could argue, became a form of escapism last year, which is something that travel is normally pretty good at.
People are restless and ready to unplug. I reckon that’s going to happen in a meaningful way later this year.
Well here is a clever idea by Berlin designer Tobias Trübenbacher. It is a wind-powered streetlight — one that also detects when people are nearby and emits an insect-friendly light spectrum. Lots of cities already rely (partially) on solar powered lights and signage. But that doesn’t always work if the street doesn’t get a lot of direct sunlight or if you happen to be in a darker city. So perhaps wind is the answer. I could imagine this working very well here in Toronto in the middle of the winter at the intersection of Bay and King. And if you remember my post from earlier in the week about a roadmap to net zero energy, it is pretty clear that both solar and wind electricity are going to need to become far more prominent in our cities.
If you can’t see the embedded video above, click here.
