Brandon Donnelly

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.

Subscribe

Month: August 2022

  • Manhattan is still looking at a congestion charge for south of 60th Street

    We talk a lot about congestion charges and road pricing on this blog. Here’s a list of some of those posts. I found 46 that were tagged with “road pricing.”

    I continue to believe that it’s the only way that big cities can effectively solve the problem of traffic congestion. It’s not being caused by the bicycle lanes that were just added to your street. It’s not the new COVID street patios. And it’s not the new apartment that was just built with too many parking spots.

    The problem is mispricing.

    If you want free roads, then you don’t get free-flowing traffic. That’s how this equation works, which is why I have always thought it a good idea to dynamically price roads based on demand, and then to direct those funds toward more efficient forms of mobility — such as transit.

    Despite all this, it’s not a very popular approach in this part of the world. Toronto looked at road pricing back in 2016, but we got nervous and backed away from it. New York City has also been looking at a congestion charge for Manhattan south of 60th Street for at least 4-5 years. But this one appears to still be on the table.

    According to this recent CityLab article, New York’s congestion prices could look something like this (note that this chart includes other pre-existing tolls):

    But with some exceptions (I think this is an interesting approach):

    Primary residents of the Manhattan central business district, which is south of 60th Street, and New York State residents with adjusted gross income of less than $60,000 would be eligible for a state tax credit equal to the amount of the new tolls, paid during the taxable year.

    In total, this current pricing scheme is expected to generate an additional $1 billion in annual revenue for the city’s transportation authority. The MTA also plans to bond against this revenue and raise an additional $15 billion for new transit projects.

    This sounds like a reasonable approach to me.

  • New Taipei Performing Arts Center by OMA

    The new OMA-designed Taipei Performing Arts Center opened up last Sunday and so you’ll now find lots of articles, photos, and drone videos circulating around online. The two partners-in-charge, Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten, were also on this Monocle on Design episode talking about the genesis of the project and how they worked to optimize the various theater spaces.

    My favorite part of the whole story is how they actually won the design competition. The site is located next to Taipei’s renowned Shilin Night Market. And I can attest to this fame because I spent a summer living in Taipei while I was in university. This night market was the thing I was immediately told I needed to visit as soon as I stepped off the plane. And they weren’t wrong. I spent many a nights with those stinky tofu dishes that smell like feet but actually taste pretty good.

    But for whatever reason, the competition brief stipulated that the night market was to be torn down in order to make way for this new performing arts center. And since it was in the brief, almost everyone took it as a non-negotiable given. The only firm that didn’t — out of 140 bidders — was OMA. They questioned why the city couldn’t have both: a new performing arts center and their wildly successful night market.

    So that’s how OMA — at least partially — won the competition. And I’m certain that Taipei is better for it.

  • How Toronto landed its first Michelin Guide

    Back in May, I happen to come across a 1912 copy of Michelin’s Guide to France. It was exceedingly cool to see and I’d love to find a copy for my own library. (For those of you looking for a reminder on how the Michelin Guide works, click here.)

    After returning to Toronto, I then serendipitously learned that our city would be getting its own guidebook this fall, which will be a first for both Toronto and for Canada as a whole. A Michelin-starred restaurant means something to some people, and has generally been proven to drive tourism dollars — so this is perhaps a big deal.

    But there’s a lot of opacity around how these guides work and how a restaurant gets awarded one, two, or three stars. Who are these secretive reviewers? And is it really worth the money that governments need to pay to the French tire company? South Korea allegedly spent US$1.8 million back in 2016 to get its guide.

    Andrew Weir, who is the executive vice president of Toronto’s tourism marketing group, was recently interviewed about all of the behind-the-scene efforts that took place in order to make this upcoming guide happen. If you’d like to have a read, click here.

    In my view, all of this is very much an act of city building.

  • Lobbies as pseudo-public spaces

    This is a good idea (taken from a recent FT article by Edwin Heathcote):

    The hotel lobby is already understood as a kind of public space, the corporate lobby should belong to that same world, a place open to the functions of the city, porous and welcoming. It is no accident that the vast lobbying industry has that name, lobbies are where encounters occur.

    Sometimes we do this. Maybe there’s a coffee shop or some other activations in your lobby. But more often than not, a “good” corporate lobby is about grandeur and security, which means that they do very little to animate the street.

    In the above article, Edwin reminds us that before the invention of the modern office building, the entire city functioned as a kind of dispersed workplace. Places like coffee shops and pubs were, of course, central to this.

    While this is still partially the case today — people continue to like coffee and beer — it is interesting to think about what more we could be asking of our office lobbies. And I do think it is more.

  • Weekend walking tour

    I had a friend — who I know from architecture school — visiting from Detroit for the weekend, so we did a little building tour on Sunday morning.

    This is the elevated (and half-finished) CIBC Square Park that spans over the rail lines leading into Union Station. The benches are beautiful. On the right side of the second photo are also fire pits that are in the process of being setup.

    This is us nerding out (photo credit to Neat B).

    And this is the view looking down Bay Street from the stairs that lead up to the park. We tried to snoop around inside a little but a security guard asked us to leave.

    This is T3 Bayside — a new timber office building going up on the waterfront. Apparently it is the tallest of its kind in North America at the moment. I am also embarrassed to say that I just learned that T3 stands for timber, transit, and technology, and that it is part of a broader office development strategy that Hines is rolling out.

    This is Tridel’s Aquavista. I’m looking forward to the ground floor spaces getting leased up in this area. All of the ingredients seem to be here for a vibrant waterfront community.

    This is the next Aqua-something project. We all assumed that there must be strict umbrella rules in place.

    This is Monde by Moshe Safdie & BDP Quadrangle (architects) and Great Gulf (developer). It kind of reminds me of 56 Leonard Street (New York) from this elevation. I guess I’m not used to seeing it from the south side.

    Finally, this is Sherbourne Common, which is both a park and an important piece of stormwater infrastructure. It treats stormwater before it gets discharged into Lake Ontario and it also helps to reduce poop from flowing into Lake Ontario as a result of combined sewer overflows.

    It’s fun being a tourist in your own city. We should all do it more often. It makes you appreciate what you have.

  • The story of Los Angeles’ last Japanese boarding house

    Rooming houses or boarding houses are a divisive topic. Here in Toronto, they are permitted in the older parts of the city, but illegal everywhere else. Since 2021, we have been talking about changing that in attempt to increase the supply of what is typically the most affordable kind of housing. But there are lots of people who want to “protect the integrity of single-family communities”, and so a decision on this issue has been, as I understand it, punted until sometime next year. At some point, I suspect a decision will be made (though deferring is also a decision).

    While we wait, this recent piece by journalist and photographer Samanta Helou Hernandez tells an interesting story of Los Angeles’ last Japanese boarding house. But as you’ll see from her article, it’s labeled as a boarding house, but it really acted as a kind of community center. Boarding houses in this community have, over the years, served as a place for people to get back on their feet (after returning from internment camps following WWII) and as a place where they could speak their own language and build community.

    Looking back on the history of the area, it’s hard to fathom being comfortable with some of the exclusionary policies that were in place at that time, which effectively blocked immigrants and people of color from moving to certain areas. Then again, I’m sure posterity will look back on some of decisions being made today and wonder what we were thinking.

  • It’s time to build, but not here

    Oof.

    Let’s assume for a second that you penned an article back in April 2020 called, “It’s time to build.” And in this article, you argued, among other things, that we’re not building nearly enough housing and that home prices are skyrocketing as a result.

    Now let’s assume that a new multi-family zoning overlay is being proposed for your own neighborhood in an attempt to increase said housing supply and alleviate some of the concerns around home prices. And in response to this proposal, you pen this:

    One might call this being hypocritical. But I’m not here to name call. I think the real lesson is what Jerusalem Demsas points out in her recent article, “The Billionaire’s Dilemma.”

    What we have is a macro-micro disconnect that policy makers need to be more aware of. At the macro level we know what we should be doing in order to achieve our stated objectives. But if we allow people at the micro level to veto these efforts, they often will, and sometimes using ALL CAPS.

  • A case study in urban resiliency

    One of the most exciting city building projects going on in Toronto right now is the revitalization of the 715-acre Port Lands area (here’s a map if you’d like to get situated). Despite its massive scale, it doesn’t seem to be receiving a lot of attention. And that’s probably because, at this stage, it’s mostly infrastructure work. It’s just a lot of soil being moved around.

    But it’s of course important work. The mouth of the Don River (where it meets Lake Ontario) was never properly engineered for resiliency, and so the entire area is at risk of flooding. That’s why this $1.25 billion effort to re-naturalize its interface is currently underway. The above video does a good job explaining just what that entails.

    At the same time, it is creating a wonderful city building opportunity — new parks for the illegal drinking of craft beers, new wildlife habitat, new meandering rivers for kayaking, and of course new housing and new jobs. But when you look at what’s planned, it’s hard not to feel like we’re missing the mark in terms of density.

    The plan for Villiers Island calls for some 4,900 homes (according to this Globe and Mail article). And the plan for the entire area calls for only about 20,000 homes (according to this recent Bloomberg article). Surely there’s room for at least a few more — especially if we’re hoping to support a new LRT line to the area.

  • How far you can travel in Europe by rail in 5 hours

    Here is a neat tool (created by Benjamin Td) that allows you to quickly see how far you can travel in Europe by rail in 5 hours. The way it works is that you just hover over a train station and then the relevant isochrone will show up. Above is what that looks like for Paris’ Gare de Lyon, which has one of if not the largest catchment areas from what I can tell after playing around with the tool for a few minutes. The data being used to power this map is from Deutsche Bahn. And if there’s a transfer on any of the routes, the tool assumes you can make that happen within 20 minutes, which may or may not be realistic. Regardless, it’s fascinating to see just how connected (or disconnected) some cities are. It’s also a shameful reminder that a North American version wouldn’t be nearly as impressive.

  • AI-generated street transformations

    One of the most effective ways to encourage change in our cities is to run a pilot. I think people find comfort in knowing that if chaos ensues, things can be easily reversed. So that is exactly what Phoenix has been doing with its “cool pavement” pilot program; what Seattle did (or is doing) with electric scooters; and what Toronto is doing with the pedestrianization of Market Street. Let’s try it out and see how things go.

    But there are other options emerging beyond just physical pilots. Better Streets AI, for example, is using artificial intelligence to instantly transform streets and give people an idea of what might be possible. If you haven’t yet seen any of these images, I would encourage you to check out their Twitter account. The rendered images aren’t hyper-realistic, but they are instant and they are all magically generated by a computer.

    As these sorts of tools become more sophisticated and widespread, it isn’t a stretch to imagine them having an impact on the way we think about and plan our cities. And I think that will happen. They also get me excited about the potential of augmented reality (which is something that interests me a lot more than full VR). Being able to quickly and accurately pilot the future is a powerful thing.