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.
We have spoken a lot about pedestrian fatalities over the years (here, here, and here are a few posts), and, if there is a general rule of thumb, it is that pedestrians are safer in dense urban environments where there are a lot of other people walking around.
But another important factor might be average vehicle size. Here is a recent study by Justin Tyndall that combined US pedestrian crash data with car sizes to come up with the effect of front-end vehicle height on pedestrian death probability. This is an important metric because larger/higher front-ends are more likely to fatally hit someone in their chest and/or head.
What was ultimately found was that a 10 cm increase in front-end height — which is really not a lot — causes a 22% increase in pedestrian fatality risk! Meaning that something as simple as reducing front-end heights could reduce pedestrian fatalities. By his estimation, a 1.25 m height cap would reduce US pedestrian deaths by about 509 people each year.
This is pretty interesting, especially considering that average car sizes seem to keep going up.
Downhill skier Jean Vuarnet, whose name is today found on cool sunglasses, had just become an Olympic Champion at Squaw Valley in California. He returned to his home in Morzine, France (located in Haute-Savoie) and was asked to help build a new resort on the empty plateau above the town.
So he, and whoever else, raised some money, got the necessary approvals, and managed to successfully get the first lifts operational. But the resort quickly ran into financial difficulties and, apparently, bankruptcy became a possibility.
The turning point came when he met Paris-based developer Robert Brémond. He had the capital and the experience, and so Vuarnet eventually ceded the project to him in 1962. In 1964, Robert then asked his son, Gérard, who was only 27 at the time, to lead the project. Supposedly he said to him, “the mountains are for the younger generation.”
Gérard then went out and hired a young architect named Jacques Labro. He was also in his 20s at the time; 26 to be exact. The mandate he gave Labro was clear: design the ideal recreational resort. At the same time, he was asked to build upon Vuarnet’s original vision for Avoriaz. The result was an audacious masterplan designed around three guiding principles.
First, it was to be a completely car-free resort, which was/is a big deal and an accomplishment that remains true today. To access Avoriaz by car you either need to park below in Morzine and take a gondola up, or park at the entrance to the resort.
Two, it was to be an ideal place for skiing (snowboarding didn’t exist just yet). This meant that the entire resort had to be sloped correctly so that everything would be ski in and ski out.
Finally, it was to have decidedly modern architecture that fit sensitively within the landscape. They didn’t want it to look like some ideal Swiss mountain village. What they wanted was bold, different, and highly sustainable. The result is some of the most unique mountain architecture to be found anywhere.
For a preview of the village’s architecture, check out these photos by Alastair Philip Wiper. They were part of an exhibition called “Avoriaz: The Enchanting Village.” Along with this story, they will probably make you want to visit the place. That’s certainly the case for me.
In this case, this, is a conversion of an old TV and radio repair shop into a new 4,800 square foot gallery and workspace (there also looks to be a single residential suite based on the photos). These are the kinds of projects that can really make and/or transform an area. However, they are often few and far between.
In Toronto’s red hot market, it wasn’t easy finding a building large enough to do all of these things; that Mr. Low-Beer had been out of the city for two decades only added to the shock: “I wasn’t fully cognizant of the fact that every square inch was going to be priced out as a condo; I thought you could get an old garage or some place on a highway that was undesirable.”
Having cheap and undesirable spaces in a city can be a huge benefit, because they lower the barriers to entry and allow for new ideas. And at the end of the day, it is new ideas that usually make cities so exciting. Jane Jacobs was on to someting here.
But over the last real estate cycle, this has been a challenge because of how frenetic the market has been. It has been a challenge for people wanting to convert TV repair shops into new creative spaces, and it has even been a challenge for new/smaller developers wanting to, yes, build things like condos.
However, all of this started changing about a year and a half ago. And I would argue that right now is the best time in the last 15 years to be a new entrant. Two years ago, it was hard to buy development sites, and it was mostly impossible to negotiate favorable deal terms (such as structure).
This current reset has changed that. And it is creating opportunities for those who can be creative.
This week, a 1913 Beaux-Arts office building at 69 Yonge Street (here in Toronto) was conditionally approved for conversion to residential. The proposal entails preserving the existing 15-storey building, adding 6 storeys on top, and creating a total of 127 new condominium suites (14 studios, 65 one-beds, 27 two-beds, 21 three-beds, and exactly zero parking spaces).
Two, there’s no parking. This isn’t novel for Toronto, but it’s a good reminder that you don’t need parking in urban centers (so stop mandating it). It’s also something that you often have to accept with office conversions. If the parking doesn’t already exist, you’re probably not going to build it.
Finally, this approval demonstrates a reversal in the city’s view on office replacement. Years ago, this sort of project wouldn’t have been feasible, because the developer would have been forced to replace any demolished office space. But obviously that’s no longer the case today. And in my opinion, that’s a good thing.
Tonight was a “housewarming” party for the residents of Junction House. It was hosted in the co-working space that I wrote about, here, which was a lot of fun to see in action.
And in the penthouse, we set up a little gallery displaying historic photos of the Junction — from the 80s — taken by photographer Avard Woolaver.
They’re awesome photos, and eventually they’ll make their way down to the lobby. But for now, it’s a penthouse gallery.
However, the most important component of the evening was that it was an opportunity for residents to meet each other. And that’s why the question of the night quickly became, “so what floor do you live on?”
I sometimes hear people say that there can be a lack of community in multi-family buildings. But I can honestly tell you that I felt the exact opposite of that this evening.
It was nice to meet so many lovely people from the building.
Sometime before the Paris 2024 Olympics this summer, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is expected to announce who will host the 2030 and 2034 Winter Games. Right now, the two frontrunners are thought to be the French Alps and Salt Lake City/Park City — I think respectively.
Obviously these are two fantastic winter locations. But one of the things that the local committees need to do before they can secure the games is show the IOC that they have enough hotel rooms on hand. More specifically, they need 24,000 rooms reserved for 33 nights. This covers 17 nights during the games, 14 nights before, and 2 nights after.
Most of these rooms, about 10,000 or so, will go to journalists.
I didn’t fully appreciate — or I just didn’t think about it — that this was something that needed to be done 6-10 years out. Because right now there is a human running around try to lock up these rooms in advance of the decision this summer.
According to the Salt Lake Tribune, they’re already at 85% of the requisite 24,000 rooms. Though some of these rooms have yet to be built and some of them reach into neighboring Wyoming, which apparently isn’t an atypical distance when it comes to meeting this accommodation requirement.
For obvious reasons, I’m rooting for Utah here. I really want them to get the Winter Games.
Last year in the Greater Toronto Area, condominium construction starts fell to a 9-year low of 15,891 homes. And this year, condominium construction starts are forecasted to fall to a 15-year low of 11,500 homes (though new sales are expected to rebound). Both of these figures are from Urbanation’s Q4-2023 market data.
One possible explanation for this drop in construction starts could be that developers are somehow colluding to keep supply low and prices high. Another one could be that more developers are right now independently speculating that prices will be higher in the future, and so they think it’s better to just wait. But both of these explanations would be wrong.
The correct answer is that more developers are unable to start construction because the market isn’t there. In the case of Toronto’s condominium market, this means that the pre-sales aren’t there. This might seem obvious, but there seems to always be a contingent of people who believe that developers can choose to build whenever they want.
It is for this same reason that some people think that zoning approvals should have an expiry date. Call it a use-it-or-lose-it approach. But as I think we can see in the above numbers, developers don’t control the market. And so I would never want to be in a position where I need to start construction by a certain date, or else.
That’s not entirely within my control. In fact, sometimes it’s completely out of my control.
Remember Wuhan? Well, it turns out that it is emerging as an important hub for driverless vehicles. Right now it is home to the largest fleet in the world:
In Wuhan, 500 robotaxis, mostly run by Baidu, China’s rival to Google, recorded more than 730,000 ride-hailing trips last year. That compares with combined orders of more than 700,000 last year in Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles, according to Waymo, the self-driving car developer of Google’s parent company Alphabet. Waymo told the Financial Times that it had “a couple of hundred cars” in each of the three fully autonomous zones.
One of the things that is allegedly helping Chinese companies is that they have access to more data. The networks of cameras and other infrastructure that make Chinese cities the most surveilled in the world are, coincidentally, also good for training machine learning models.
This has some industry experts speculating that China could reach an autonomous vehicle “tipping point” sometime around 2027. Meaning, the technologies will be significantly safer than human drivers (at least 10x) and ready for mass adoption.
I don’t know if this is the right timeline. There have been many forecasts made over the years. But I do know that competition is good for progress and that having a rival can be an important motivator. And right now, this is yet another example of the US vs. China.
About five years ago, a project in downtown Los Angeles, called Oceanwide Plaza, halted construction. I don’t know exactly what happened, but the reports suggest corruption, financing problems, and the Chinese developer running out of money.
Under typical circumstances, once you secure your financing and start construction, it should mean that you have enough money to finish the project. That is unless there are significant cost overruns, you experience a cash crunch somewhere else, and/or somebody does something bad.
In fact, on some projects, the peak equity requirement occurs before construction commencement, meaning that once you do secure your construction facility, you should be able to reduce the amount of equity that you have remaining in the project (i.e. you can pull out some cash).
Here it sounds like a combination of things went sideways. And now today, Oceanwide Plaza looks like this:
The towers have been tagged pretty much all the way up. And it kind of looks like each artist commandeered their own suite in the building. Not surprisingly, this has been attracting a lot of attention and debate. The project is also across the street from the Crypto.com Arena and so there are a lot of eyeballs on it.
On the one hand, you have artists being creative and doing something with an abandoned set of buildings — ones that are beset with corruption charges and that people are generally upset about. But on the other hand, you have a busted project, and you have artists trespassing and creating what others see as another symbol for a spiralling downtown.
LA police are reporting that the site is going to be better secured and that all of the graffiti will be removed. But until then, this has got to be one of the tallest expressions of graffiti ever created.
My time in the mountains has come to an end. I’m on a flight back to Toronto and about to start watching old Bond movies (as one should). If you don’t ski or snowboard or do any other winter sports, it’s maybe hard to relate to this, but the mountains are a truly special place. I’m always sad to leave them. In my opinion, there’s no better place to disconnect and recalibrate.
And even though I’ve been mostly disconnected, it has been hard not to miss the hype around the new Apple Vision Pro, which was released into the wild this week. I haven’t tried one yet, but every review that I have read or watched seems to come to the same general conclusion: “Wow, this thing is incredible. It feels like a glimpse into the future of computing.”
If you’re looking for a comprehensive technical overview of the device, you should check out Marques Brownlee’s video, here. But if you’re just looking to get a sense of what it might be like to, you know, wander around New York City wearing one, you should definitely check out Casey Neistat’s video, here.
Now I think there’s no question that there’s a dystopian element to all of this. When Casey is standing around and watching a butterfly eat his donut, he looks pretty strange from the outside. Only he is seeing the butterfly. But then again, we all look pretty weird standing around staring down at our phones all the time. Maybe this will help us become less disconnected. I don’t know.
Either way, it’s hard not to imagine this changing — a lot. I mean, here’s just one small example. Already Zillow has an app for Vision Pro that allows you to tour homes for sale. Assuming it’s as good as everyone says it is, I can’t imagine anyone going to physically tour a home ever again, unless they’re really serious and/or ready to put in an offer.
Of course, there’s also no shortage of people saying that this device is simply too expensive. But I think that misses the point. This is version one. At this point, Apple just needs to be directionally right about what they are calling “spatial computing.” (They don’t want you to call it VR.) Because if they are right, the price will come down and then we’ll all be watching old Bond movies on these devices.
