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.

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Author: Brandon Donnelly

  • Rethinking the lobby

    Junction House was mentioned in the National Post this week as part of an article talking about how residential lobbies are being reconsidered. The article is by Lisa Van de Ven.

    Transit City in Vaughan is providing direct access to an adjacent Buca restaurant. 55C in Yorkville is providing refrigerated storage space for perishable deliveries. And Junction House is incorporating a co-working space on the ground floor overlooking Dundas St W. We wanted it to have real utility (a place to work and hang out), but also serve to foster a sense of community within the building.

    I have long been a fan of hotel lobby bars. They’re a place for social interaction, as well as a place for chance encounters. One of the best in the city is perhaps the Lobby Lounge (or “urban living room“) at the Shangri-La.

    Of course, part of their success is aided by the fact that hotels are, by their very nature, transient places. And that transience can often encourage people to be more open. That makes the spaces more social. You also have the benefit of an operator (i.e. a bar/restaurant), which is what Transit City is leveraging with Buca.

    Residential lobbies aren’t quite the same, but there are lessons to be learned. Oben Flats has been programming the lobbies in its rental buildings for years and they are doing a great job. And with the growing interest in co-living arrangements and small space living, I am sure we’ll be seeing more, not less, lobby rethinking.

  • The Yonge line

    On September 8, 1949, Toronto held a groundbreaking ceremony at the intersection of Yonge & Wellington to celebrate the start of construction for its very first subway line. (Formerly known as the Yonge line, now called line 1.)

    The scene looked like this:

    Some of the buildings in these pictures still remain, but many do not. The first picture is looking north. And the second one is looking south toward the lake. You can see the rail corridor in the background.

    There’s something very urban about these images. The storefronts look active and the streets are full, though no one appears to be live tweeting the event and this clearly pre-dates Toronto’s transformation into the most diverse city in the world.

    But my favorite bit of these photos is the people hanging out on the exit stair, watching the march toward modernity. It’s an image that no longer correlates to Toronto.

    Images: Toronto Archives

  • Death of the standalone camera

    I took the above photo on my Fujifilm X-T3 at the Museum of Contemporary Art here in Toronto. Obviously, it is a cast of David Bowie’s head. I’ve been using Fujifilm’s X cameras for exactly 3 years now and have already gone through 2 different models. I love them. But Om Malik’s recent post on why the future belongs to computational photography is, in my opinion, entirely accurate.

    For most people, taking photos on a standalone camera and dropping them into Lightroom is not only far too much work, but also unnecessary. Here is a chart from Om’s post showing total worldwide digital camera unit sales (in millions). Sales have fallen off a cliff from about 10 years ago and now look to be on the verge of dying.

    What is obvious is that we are all now just taking photos on our phones. Thanks to better chips, sensors, and software, the future of photography looks, again, destined to be computational. Apple is set to announce its new iPhone 11 (or whatever it will be called) this week and already the rumors point to a dramatically improved camera.

    This change in hardware has also changed our relationship to the photograph. We now take photos for the purpose of real-time sharing, which is another point that Om makes. When I post photos of things that have happened in the past — as I often do — people are commonly confused: “Where are you? When are you back in Toronto? Wait, is this a #latergram?”

    This has made photographic memories feel ephemeral. Once the moment has passed, we forget about them. They get drowned out in new real-time images and shares. As a society we are taking more photos than ever before. Not surprisingly, this lowers the gravitas of each individual one.

  • Prime residential pricing in 10 global cities

    The below graphs are taken from a recent (June 2019) report by Knight Frank on “prime” residential pricing across the world. They define “prime” as generally being the top 5% of each market by value. What these graphs show are the spread between the average price of a prime property and the top price achieved in that market.

    The most expensive market is Hong Kong. The average price of a prime property in 2018 was USD 4,251 per square foot (or USD 45,760 per square meter) and the top price achieved was in 2016 at USD 28,154 per square foot (or USD 303,051 per square meter).

    Using the 2018 average, a 350 square foot studio apartment would run nearly USD 1.5 million (or almost CAD 2 million), assuming there are “prime” studios available in the market. Remember, we are talking about the top end of the market.

    If you’d like to download a copy of the full report, you can do that over here.

  • Snøhetta completes energy positive building in Norway

    Snøhetta has just completed an office building in Trondheim that produces more than double the amount of electricity that it consumes. If you recall my recent post on Norway’s new coastal highway, you may remember that Trondheim is the northern terminus of highway E39. I mention this because of access to sun. Latitude 63.43.

    The office building is about 18,000 square meters and it is wrapped with about 3,000 square meters of solar panels. The roof is angled at 19 degrees in order to maximize sun harvesting, and any excess electricity is fed back into the city’s grid / neighboring facilities. Large batteries also help to help carry the building through the winter months (again, latitude 63.43).

    Here are a few photos of the roof (via Dezeen):

    I wish I had more of the details so that I could see how the numbers pencil. Hard costs, utility costs, office rents, government incentives/disincentives, embodied energy in the batteries, and so on. Because this looks like an extraordinary accomplishment for a city that is remarkably north.

    Images: Dezeen

  • The good in change

    This deserves a blog post. Below is a great tweet by Jason Thorne. Jason leads the department of planning and economic development at the City of Hamilton, where, full disclosure, we have a development project.

    https://twitter.com/JasonThorne_RPP/status/1169749295299538944?s=20

    I have said this many times before on the blog, but the challenge with most “community engagement” is that cities typically hear from the people who disagree. Those voices are then taken as representative.

    My gut tells me that we need to make it easier for people to agree. We need to reduce the barriers. Some will take the time to write a thoughtful letter. But most won’t.

  • Standard elements in non-standard ways

    A few people have now sent me this TED talk by architect Débora Mesa Molina. But I watched it for the first time today. I guess my personal brand is pretty closely associated with architecture and design.

    In it, she talks about her firm’s approach to using overlooked and/or standard building materials in unconventional ways. For example, here, she used stacked precast beams to assemble a house in Madrid (c.2008). The entire structure came together in only 7 days.

    My first reaction is that I like the idea and approach — which is really quite interesting — more than the final designs. I am also curious if there were any cost savings as a result of using “standard” materials. What are your thoughts?

  • Every major hurricane in the North Atlantic and Eastern North Pacific

    I came across this map while reading up on Hurricane Dorian:

    It is a map showing the tracks of every known hurricane in the North Atlantic (1851-2013) and in the Eastern North Pacific (1949-2013). Major hurricanes (category 3 or higher) are shown in yellow and tropical cyclones (intensity less than category 3) are shown in red.

    The map is from the National Hurricane Center. Some of their other maps include the points of origin for tropical cyclones (here is August 21-31 from 1851-2015) and the total number of hurricane strikes by U.S. county (here is Florida from 1900-2010).

    What has happened is a catastrophe. UBS is already estimating the insured damages in the Bahamas to be between $500 million and $1 billion. But as is usually the case, the total economic losses will likely exceed the insured losses.

  • Norway’s $47 billion coastal highway

    The E39 highway in Norway runs along the west coast of the country and connects Kristiansand in the south to Trondheim in the north. There’s also a ferry connection to Denmark that forms part of the route. The entire highway (excluding the ferry south to Denmark) is about 1,100 km. But it takes about 21 hours to drive it because Norway’s dramatic fjords (see above photo) mean that there are seven ferry crossings along E39. The Norwegian government wants to transform the route into a ferry-free highway, which would dramatically reduce travel times. But this presents a number of extremely difficult engineering challenges — some of which haven’t been solved yet. You can learn about a number of them in the below video from The B1M. If you can’t see it below, click here. It’s a fascinating video.

    Photo by Christiann Koepke on Unsplash

  • The new decentralized workforce

    A few weeks ago the WSJ published an article about Toronto’s growing tech talent pool, arguing that its base now rivals the top US cities, but that it may not be an entirely good thing for the city’s ecosystem. I wrote about it here.

    This morning venture capitalist Fred Wilson published a post on his blog talking about the necessity of scaling tech companies in lower cost locations. It’s a good follow-up to the above article/post.

    Here’s an excerpt from Fred:

    Last week I heard some shocking numbers about salary levels for certain kinds of engineers in the bay area. I checked them out with a few of our bay area portfolio companies and they were more or less corroborated.

    The tight technical labor markets in the bay area, NYC, and a number of other regions in the US are making it hard to scale software businesses without burning massive amounts of cash.

    He goes on to argue that (startup) companies now need to think about scaling in other/remote locations sooner than they ever have before — basically as soon as the company hits about 50 engineers (or 100-200 employees).

    Many companies are now working with a distributed workforce. Supposedly 2/3 of the global workforce now spends at least one day of the week working remotely. I almost never work from home, but I do get how this is possible.

    So what is happening is that engineering talent is spilling over into secondary markets out of necessity. There’s an economic imperative to colonize. But I would imagine that, at least initially, most of the economic benefits accrue to the colonizer.

    Photo by NASA on Unsplash