Author: Brandon Donnelly

• Should we be banning cashless businesses?

  Three years ago I wrote about how I was one step closer to not only going cashless — I had pretty much already done that — but also going walletless. (That’s one of the things about writing a daily blog — there’s a public record.) I still carry a wallet in most cases, but I couldn’t tell you the last time I paid for something using cash here in Toronto. It was probably at a Vietnamese restaurant.

  I did, however, notice on my trip last month that Germany and Austria are still quite reliant on cash. Many places only accepted cash and many places wouldn’t accept credit cards under a certain minimum spend. Fewer opportunities to just tap as well. I had forgotten how annoying it was to carry around lots of coins. You really need a change purse.

  Still, a paradigm shift has taken place. And because of this shift, there’s a growing movement in cities toward banning cash-free businesses. Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, New York City, and Washington, DC are all working on policy. The concern is that not accepting cash discriminates against lower-income patrons.

  According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FIDC), approximately 8.4 million US households (6.5% of all households) were “unbanked” in 2017. This means that no one in the household had either a checking or savings account.

  An additional 24.2 million US households (additional 18.7% of all households) are estimated to be “underbanked”, meaning they have at least one account at an insured institution, but they also rely on outside financial products — such as payday loans.

  

  When surveyed, somewhere around half tend to cite “not having enough money” as one of the reasons for being “unbanked.” But the good news is that the percentage of people without a bank account seems to be declining (see above chart).

  This is important because we all know where things are headed. And banning cashless businesses isn’t going to stop that march. There are deeper issues that need to be addressed. Here is an excerpt from a recent CityLab article on the topic:

  “I certainly don’t think [this bill] is the right long-term solution,” said Rogoff. “The future does not lie in this direction. The future lies in giving people free debit cards and financial inclusion.” He cited the case of India. The country launched a program to decrease the number of unbanked and saw the percentage decrease from 47 percent of adults in 2014 to 20 percent unbanked in 2017 according to the World Bank Global Findex Report. “If India can manage to give people free debit cards, so can the U.S.” Rogoff said.

  Kenneth Rogoff is a professor of public policy at Harvard University, the former chief economist of the IMF, and author of The Curse of Cash. If you’re interested in this topic, his book may be a good one to check out.

  2019.03.10

• Home and Away: DesignAgency and Bestor Architecture

  This past week I attended the “Home and Away” Lecture series at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. Matt Davis (of DesignAgency here in Toronto) was the home. And Barbara Bestor (of Bestor Architecture in Los Angeles) was the away.

  Both have completed some spectacular work. DesignAgency has really carved out a name for itself in the hospitality space with projects like the Broadview Hotel (Toronto) and the Generator hostel chain (global). And Bestor has completed a number of high profile corporate offices (Snapchat, Beats by Dre, Nasty Gal), as well as a home for Mike D (Beastie Boys) and some infill residential projects.

  The project I’d like to talk about today is her residential project known as Blackbirds. It is a cluster of 18 homes in Echo Park, Los Angeles, which are built into the site’s hilly topography and centered around a shared parking/open space.

  

  A few things are immediately interesting about this project. For one, I have been told that parking in Los Angeles is typically required to be covered. Here they managed not to do that and it allowed the center of the complex to become a more flexible communal space. The residents sometimes use it for dinners.

  Secondly, the overall masterplanning of the site was done in a way that makes it feel like an organic collection of 18 homes, as opposed to a linear stacking of row homes. Apparently, Bestor managed to still get the same number of homes on the site and it greatly improved their marketability.

  

  Lastly, I like how she plays with scale. Below is a section through three of the homes. But if you look at the roofline, you can see how it would appear as two homes from the street. These sorts of design techniques can be useful in striking the right balance between maximum density and a contextual design response.

  

  For more events by the Daniels Faculty, click here.

  Images: Bestor Architecture

  2019.03.09

• Cumulative electric vehicle sales around the world

  When I was shopping for a new car last year I gave serious thought to buying an electric vehicle. In fact, it is what I initially set out to do. But I couldn’t find a model that I liked and I didn’t feel like the charging infrastructure was in place for me to go on snowboarding trips to places like Quebec or Vermont. So I went with an ICE vehicle. But we all know it is only a matter of time before we hit that tipping point, which is why 100% of the parking spots at our Junction House project will be ready for an electric vehicle charging station.

  According to a recent briefing from the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), there were 3.1 million electric passenger vehicles in use around the world at the end of 2017. Almost all of them (98%) were located in China, Europe, Japan, and the United States, and nearly half of them (44%) were located in just 25 cities. Shanghai leads the world (or at least it did at the end of 2017) with 162,000 cumulative sales since 2011. This represents 5% of all global electric vehicle sales during this time period.

  The footnote to this is that most of Shanghai’s electric vehicles are actually plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, whereas in the case of Beijing — which is second only to Shanghai in terms of cumulative sales — it is virtually all battery electric vehicles. Digging even deeper, if you look at the share of electric vehicles sales in each city, it becomes clear that, on a per capita basis, the real leader is actually Norway. Between 40-50% of all cars sold in Oslo and Bergen were electric in 2017.

  Here is a chart from the ICCT:

  

  What is clear from these leading cities is that there are supportive policies and incentives in place to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles. The chicken-and-egg dilemma, which is what I ran into, is that you really need the installed charging capacity. The ICCT estimates that the top 25 electric vehicle markets have about 24x the available charging per capita compared to other cities. That certainly helps.

  2019.03.08

• 13 thoughts on outlier success

  

  This recent post by Sam Altman (of Y Combinator) on how to achieve outlier success was just passed around our office. And it’s so fucking good that I decided to regurgitate it here on the blog by listing all 13 of his thoughts along with some of his most salient points. All of the words below are his (not mine), but most of his words are missing. I wanted to make a more condensed version so that you could easily print out this post and affix it to your desk. I am about to do that. Thanks for a great post, Sam.

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  1. Compound yourself

  I think the biggest competitive advantage in business—either for a company or for an individual’s career—is long-term thinking with a broad view of how different systems in the world are going to come together. One of the notable aspects of compound growth is that the furthest out years are the most important. In a world where almost no one takes a truly long-term view, the market richly rewards those who do.

  2. Have almost too much self-belief

  Self-belief is immensely powerful. The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion. Cultivate this early. As you get more data points that your judgment is good and you can consistently deliver results, trust yourself more. If you don’t believe in yourself, it’s hard to let yourself have contrarian ideas about the future. But this is where most value gets created.

  3. Learn to think independently
  

  Entrepreneurship is very difficult to teach because original thinking is very difficult to teach. School is not set up to teach this—in fact, it generally rewards the opposite. So you have to cultivate it on your own.
  

  4. Get good at “sales”

  All great careers, to some degree, become sales jobs. You have to evangelize your plans to customers, prospective employees, the press, investors, etc. This requires an inspiring vision, strong communication skills, some degree of charisma, and evidence of execution ability.

  Getting good at communication—particularly written communication—is an investment worth making. My best advice for communicating clearly is to first make sure your thinking is clear and then use plain, concise language.
  

  5. Make it easy to take risks
  

  It’s often easier to take risks early in your career; you don’t have much to lose, and you potentially have a lot to gain. Once you’ve gotten yourself to a point where you have your basic obligations covered you should try to make it easy to take risks. Look for small bets you can make where you lose 1x if you’re wrong but make 100x if it works. Then make a bigger bet in that direction.
  

  6. Focus

  Once you have figured out what to do, be unstoppable about getting your small handful of priorities accomplished quickly. I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful.
  

  7. Work hard

  I think people who pretend you can be super successful professionally without working most of the time (for some period of your life) are doing a disservice. In fact, work stamina seems to be one of the biggest predictors of long-term success.
  

  8. Be bold

  If you are making progress on an important problem, you will have a constant tailwind of people wanting to help you. Let yourself grow more ambitious, and don’t be afraid to work on what you really want to work on.
  

  9. Be willful

  People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever reaching anywhere near their potential.
  

  10. Be hard to compete with

  Most people do whatever most people they hang out with do. This mimetic behavior is usually a mistake—if you’re doing the same thing everyone else is doing, you will not be hard to compete with.
  

  11. Build a network

  Great work requires teams. Developing a network of talented people to work with—sometimes closely, sometimes loosely—is an essential part of a great career. The size of the network of really talented people you know often becomes the limiter for what you can accomplish.

  12. You get rich by owning things

  The biggest economic misunderstanding of my childhood was that people got rich from high salaries. Though there are some exceptions—entertainers for example —almost no one in the history of the Forbes list has gotten there with a salary.

  You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value.
  

  13. Be internally driven
  

  The most successful people I know are primarily internally driven; they do what they do to impress themselves and because they feel compelled to make something happen in the world. After you’ve made enough money to buy whatever you want and gotten enough social status that it stops being fun to get more, this is the only force I know of that will continue to drive you to higher levels of performance.

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  Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash
  

  
  

  2019.03.07

• InfraScapes by Paolo Pettigiani

  I just discovered the work of Italian photographer, Paolo Pettigiani. He specializes in something called infrared photography, which is photography that captures the wavelengths of light that generally aren’t visible to us humans.

  Paolo shoots with a full spectrum Nikon D750. What this means is that the camera’s sensor is sensitive to, well, the full spectrum of light: UV, visible, and infrared. Using this photography technique, he has coined something he calls “InfraScapes.”

  Here are a few of his photos from Dubai (source):

  

  

  

  The reason these photos look the way that they do is because anything with chlorophyll — such as grass and trees — really reflects infrared light. The result is a generally muted landscape with pops of pink. Perhaps this could be used as a technique to visually evaluate the greenness of our cities.

  All photos by Paolo Pettigiani

  2019.03.06

• 2019 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate: Arata Isozaki

  This week it was announced that Japanese architect Arata Isozaki has received the 2019 Pritzker Architecture Prize. The prize is generally viewed as architecture’s highest honor. (You also get $100,000.)

  He’s the 46th laureate and 8th Japanese architect to receive the honor. (As a side note, the only Canadian on the list is Canadian-born American architect Frank Gehry.)

  Here’s an excerpt from the announcement:

  Not only did he extend efforts to physically reconstruct his native hometown [after World War II] with buildings including Ōita Medical Hall (1959-60) and Annex (1970-1972 Ōita, Japan), and the Ōita Prefectural Library (1962-1966 Ōita, Japan, renamed Ōita Art Plaza in 1996), but also redefined mutual exchange between eastern and western societies, allowing Japanese vision to inform European and American design, particularly in the 1980s.

  His first international commission outside of Japan was the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which was completed in 1986. He was also one of the first Japanese architects to start working in the West at this time.

  For the full media release, click here.

  2019.03.06

• The holy grail of street paving

  Last weekend I went by Sidewalk Toronto’s “experimental workspace” at 307 Lake Shore Blvd East. It is open to the public every Sunday from 11am to 5pm if you’d like to drop in.

  This week they had their #BuildingRaincoat on display, which is an adjustable awning system designed to protect public sidewalks, mitigate the impacts of adverse weather, and improve outdoor comfort.

  Also installed were a number of the paving systems that they are currently piloting. They’re working with over 20 different vendors to try and create the “holy grail” of street paving.

  They define that as a system capable of the following four key features: modularity, heating, lighting, and permeability. Here’s an example of what one of them looked like (it was snowing at the time and, yes, Doc Martens):

  

  With modularity, the goal is to make it possible for a single person to be able to pull up and replace one of the hexagonal slabs. This would dramatically change how we repair and patch our roads. Supposedly, they’re also more resistant to cracks, which means fewer potholes.

  The key benefit of a heated paving system is an obvious one. When needed, their test system automatically heats the slabs to 2-4 degrees celsius in order to melt any snow and/or ice. That’s as warm as you need apparently.

  They have two heating systems running at 307. The first is hydronic (fluid in pipes just below the pavement) and the second is conductive heating (thin conductive film in or under the pavement).

  I’m sure many of you will be questioning the environmental and carbon impact of a heated public realm. And that is certainly a good question. But the status quo in this city involves about 131,000 tons of road salts per year. That’s a problem.

  The lighting feature is pretty neat because there are a variety of different use cases beyond just demarcating space. One example that Sidewalk gives is that it could be used in a bike lane to tell you how fast you need to ride in order to hit all green lights.

  Finally, permeability matters because it minimizes runoff and allows water to be absorbed in situ. The tradeoff is that it makes the slabs structurally weaker. So that is still being worked on.

  I am thrilled to see this sort of urban innovation taking place right here in the city. If you haven’t already, I recommend checking out 307.

  2019.03.04

• The new American condo

  Every year since 1984, the National Association of Home Builders (in the United States) has commissioned a home with the goal of showcasing new trends and technologies in the industry. At the same time, it also serves as a kind of dream home. This is what one should aspire to achieve. The initiative is called the New American Home (TNAH).

  The first home was built in Houston by Village Builders. The architect was Booth/Hansen & Associates and the home was about 1,500 square feet. It cost $80,000. Last year the home was in Montverde, Florida and was about 10,690 square feet (6,676 square feet of air-conditioned space). Not surprisingly, these homes have grown over the decades.

  According to a recent New York Times opinion piece by Allison Arieff — called, The New ‘Dream Home’ Should be a Condo — the square footage of this New American Home has been steadily rising:

  

  This is, of course, reflective of what has been happening in the market as a whole. According to Arieff, the average size of a new U.S. home today is about 1,000 square feet larger than it was in 1973. The average space per human has increased from 507 to about 971 square feet. As our wealth has grown we have naturally become more consumptive.

  

  But as Arieff asks in her article:

  What if the next New American Home was a condo? And what if there was a new American dream, not of auto-dependent suburbia, but walkable urbanism?

  She then contrasts last year’s 10,000 square foot “Tuscan style” New American Home against this 6 unit urban infill condo project in Los Angeles, where the average home is about 1,800 square feet and the building in its entirety is around 11,000 square feet.

  Which one would you prefer?

  Charts: New York Times

  2019.03.03

• [Video] Yearning for turning

  It is a beautiful snow day in Toronto today and so I thought we would switch gears a little.

  If you don’t care about snowboarding (or skiing), you may want to ignore today’s post and check back tomorrow. But if you do care, then you are going to absolutely love this video by KORUA Shapes. There’s something so magical about pairing the right song with the right video. If you can’t see it below, click here.

  I’ve been following KORUA for a number of years now. They make unique snowboard shapes with virtually zero graphics or ornamentation. The tops are white and the bottoms are red. Clean and simple. It’s all about the geometry of the boards and their performance. Their mission: “Simply for the sake of beauty and joy.”

  I think I’m going to try one out next season.

  2019.03.02

• Open letter to Amazon

  Today the Partnership for New York City took out a full-page ad in the New York Times with an open letter to Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos, asking him to reconsider the decision to pull out of NYC. The letter was signed by a long list of prominent leaders in the city. Here is a copy (a PDF version can also be found, here):

  

  2019.03.01