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 Graham Donnelly

  • France clamps down on “dark stores”

    One way to shop for things is to make a list of all the things you want and/or need, and then go to a location that sells as many of those things as possible. As I understand, this is more or less what people do when they go to a place like Costco.

    Another way to shop is to just order things piecemeal, and have them delivered to you when you want them and in the least amount of time possible. And it turns out that this latter option is pretty popular.

    It is popular because it involves (1) not going anywhere and (2) not having to make a list and think proactively about the things you may want and/or need in the future. But it does mean that we need specific infrastructure to support this method of consumption. Generally speaking you need urban spaces close to where people live and work, and you need people to transport the goods.

    I mention all of this because it has translated into two areas of concern within our cities: (1) we now have “dark spaces” that are embedded into urban areas but don’t have any public-facing components and (2) we now have throngs of delivery vehicles starting to annoy local communities.

    In fact, France has already responded with a new federal policy that is expected to reclassify “dark stores and “ghost kitchens” as warehouses. This is intended to give local municipalities the power to shutter these sorts of spaces. Part of the thinking is that we all did just fine before delivery apps, so why not just go back to doing what we were doing?

    My own view is that this shift in consumption is here to stay. And so we would be better served by figuring out how to respond in a way that is both sensitive to communities and that maintains the vibrancy of our urban environments. We also managed without things like refrigerated food and mobile phones, but I’m pretty happy to have these tools available to me.

  • Influencers in the wild

    Okay, so this is creepy, but perhaps not all that shocking:

    What artist Dries Depoorter has done is the following:

    • He recorded videos from open cameras located in cities around the world (the one in the embedded tweet above is from Temple Bar in Dublin)
    • He scraped all Instagram photos tagged with the same general location
    • And then he used AI software to help compare the Instagram photos against behind-the-scenes footage of the photos actually being taken

    I don’t have a problem with people posing and making numerous attempts to capture the right photo. You should see me before every meal and when I go to the gym. I think the creepy part is that many, or perhaps most, probably don’t realize just how ubiquitous video surveillance is within our cities. But the reality is that there are cameras everywhere.

    I guess I’ll never be able to run for Prime Minister.

  • Redfin experiment shows how home buyers react to flood-risk data

    This is a fascinating little experiment:

    From Oct. 12, 2020 to Jan. 3, 2021, Redfin ran an experiment on 17.5 million of its users across the US. As prospective homebuyers entered the site, Redfin assigned them randomly to either a group that was shown flood-risk information on each property or a group that was not.

    The flood-risk scores came from First Street Foundation, a climate and technology nonprofit that works to make climate hazards more transparent to the public. In June 2020, First Street published the first public maps that revealed flood risk for every home and property in the contiguous US. 

    First Street scores properties on a scale of 1 to 10 based on the likelihood that they will flood in the next 30 years (which is assumed to be a typical mortgage term). A score of 1 means the property has “minimal” risk and a score between 9-10 is considered “extreme” risk.

    So what happens once you start showing people flood-risk information? They, not surprisingly, start systematically looking for safer properties. After one week of users being exposed to this new information, prospective buyers who were previously looking at “extreme” homes started looking at homes that were about 7% safer.

    After 9 weeks, these same “extreme” home buyers were looking at properties that were about 25% less risky. And for some buyers, in particular those working with a Redfin agent or partner, their flood-risk tolerance dropped by over 50%. (Embedded in this data might be a sales pitch for working with a knowledgeable Redfin agent or partner).

    Also interesting is the fact that below “severe” flood risk (a score between 7-8), there was very little change in behavior. “Major” flood risk, it would seem, isn’t all that concerning to most buyers. It needs to be “severe”. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that people will in fact make behavioral changes when presented with clear climate-risk data.

  • Coastline villages

    I recently collected two NFTs from aerial photographer Vitor Esteves. I purchased one of Menton, France and one of Las Negras, Spain (pictured above). Both are from his 1/1 Coastline Villages collection on Sloika. I know that NFTs aren’t nearly as popular as they were last year, but that is exactly why now is a great time to be collecting. Talented artists continue to create, but ETH gas fees have come way down (a few dollars versus sometimes over a hundred at the peak) and there is now far less competition out there. It is no different than trying to buy great real estate when the rest of the market is sleeping.

    At some point, I’m going to need to pull the trigger on a good NFT display. I’ve been contemplating a Tokenframe, but I also think that most TVs are going to appropriate this function pretty soon. Some already have.

  • A conversation about families in condominiums

    I spent this morning filming a new short video for Junction House. My friends Adriana and Mateusz live in a beautiful boutique condominium building downtown. They are also raising their young daughter there, and using it as an office and design studio (he’s an architect). This is a story that we are looking to tell in a new campaign that we’ll be launching this fall, and so I very much appreciate them volunteering their time.

    We talk about this a lot on the blog, but there are deep cultural biases in Toronto (and throughout North America) around single-family housing. But that is changing. For a variety of reasons, more and more people are choosing to live in multi-family buildings and to raise families within them. We believe that there are many benefits to this lifestyle choice, and that it is ultimately a positive thing for our cities. So that’s what we were discussing this morning.

    Thank you both for your time, and thank you to Studio Haus for figuring out how to get the lighting right in a corner suite with copious amounts of natural light.

  • Listed.fun (and something else)

    This is a fun little passion project by Airbnb-engineer Andrew Pariser and someone known as Potch. The way it works is that it shows you a picture of a recently sold property, and you have to guess what it sold for. You get a bunch of guesses, and after each one, you are given more information about the property and some feedback on how close you are. To win, you need to get within 1%.

    When I tried it out, my initial guess was way off (too high). Toronto has trained me well. I also wasn’t sure where Evansville, Indiana was, so that bit of information didn’t really help me. But the arrows telling me I was way too high, certainly did. The reality is that it’s pretty hard to guess the value of a home if you don’t know where it is, you can’t see interior photos, and you generally don’t have enough information.

    But what if you were from Evansville, Indiana and what if you did have enough information? I bet that the guestimates would actually be pretty accurate. This idea of crowd-sourcing market information and pulling wisdom from crowds has long interested me, because price discovery is a major pain point for real estate. Sure you can look at comparable sales and current listings, but that is not an exact science. Neither are algorithms.

    But what if there was a way to test the market and get pricing feedback before you actually list? Would you trust it more than Zillow’s algorithm? This is something that I’m working on testing right now through a passion project called Unlyst. Myself and a few others are working on a very simple product that will be released this fall. If you’d like to follow along, sign up here.

  • The disproportionate impact of urban renewal projects on non-white families

    Here is an interesting chart from the New York Times explaining the disproportionate impact that highway and urban renewal projects have had on non-white families in the US. The x-axis is the non-white population share in 1950. And the y-axis is the percentage of displaced families that were non-white. What this means is that the diagonal dotted line through the middle represents a kind of racially balanced displacement.

    However, as you can tell from the graph, displacement from 1950 to 1966 was not balanced. In Providence, for example, only 3% of families were non-white in 1950. But these families represented 31% of the ones displaced for renewal projects. In Philadelphia, about 18% of families were non-white, but here they represented 71% of those displaced.

    I don’t think that this will be news to a lot of you. “Urban renewal” is a loaded term in American urbanism. But the article does do a great job of taking you back through time in cities like Houston, Chicago, and New York. The article is also by Adam Paul Susaneck, who is the founder of Segregation by Design. If you’re interested in this topic, I would encourage you to check out his website.

  • A few observations about Salt Lake City

    Utah is beautiful. See here.

    People in SLC are really nice. Strangers greet you on the street. Motorists are also more polite and patient. I had no idea how to respond. I suspect it might have something to do with there being less traffic and, in turn, less frustration. But again, even if you ignore what happens on the road, people are nice.

    You will need a serious utility vehicle to navigate the topography of this region. Venturing into the surrounding canyons requires 4-wheel drive or chains during snowstorms. I was only there for a week and already I have visions of a classic Defender in my mind. Do they come in electric versions?

    The streets are too wide for proper enjoyment as a pedestrian. This is a challenging problem to fix, as I have mentioned before. That said — and this is going to be an unpopular opinion — the city felt void of any sort of real traffic. The distances travelled are great, but the highways actually flow freely. You also never really need to worry about parking.

    Electric scooters are popular in SLC. As is cycling — both for getting around and as a reason to wear tight-fitting bright clothes.

    SLC feels as if it is both under the radar and also rapidly emerging. My new favorite restaurant in SLC is a place called Post Office Place. We walked in without a reservation on a Friday night and they gladly took us. I couldn’t understand why the place wasn’t rammed. I mean, they have Marseille-style panisse on the menu!

    The Granary District is an area to watch. It is a former industrial area to the southwest of downtown. It is already home to breweries, food halls, and creative offices. But it needs some more time to properly fill in. We stayed at the Evo Hotel in Granary (highly recommend). The campus amenities include a rock climbing facility, an indoor skatepark, and plenty of places to work and Zoom.

    Most of the new infill housing appears to be mid-rise in scale and most of it is wood-frame construction on top of concrete.

    By my estimation (and by estimation I mean that I have a spreadsheet for this), the ski and snowboard communities surrounding SLC are some of the most accessible in North America. Land at SLC airport and you’re in the mountains in 20-30 minutes.

    Park City-Canyons is the most well-known ski destination. But if you’re a more aggressive skier — the kind that keeps your gloves together with duct tape and counts the number of ski days per season — you’ll want to head over to the Cottonwood canyons and places like Snowbird and Brighton.

    Snowbird remains one of my all-time favorite ski destinations for two reasons: the mountain itself and the brutalist architecture at the bottom of it. There’s none of that faux alpine crap over here — just exposed and unabashed concrete and wood. And who doesn’t love brutalism, right? (I haven’t been to Brighton yet but one of my local friends told me that it’s a great snowboarders mountain.)

    The Canyons Village at Park City is developing really nicely. As I understand it, it’s only about 30-40% built out at this stage. The Pendry Hotel just recently opened (announcement here) and I can tell you that the restaurants were generally busy every night of the week (summer experience). The project team did a wonderful job creating a place and a new anchor in the village.

    What did I miss in this list?

  • CloudKitchens quietly expands across Latin America

    Despite having somewhere around 4,000 employees and being valued at upwards of $15 billion (2021 figure), CloudKitchens remains an incredibly secretive company. In 2020, it was reported that they had spent over $130 million in the preceding two years on properties in about two dozen cities, and this week the Financial Times reported that they have been quietly building “dark kitchens” across Latin America, alongside a new food and convenience goods business called Pik N’ Pak.

    The way this all supposedly works is that the “dark kitchens” prepare the food for delivery and pick-up takeaway, and any excess space within these buildings is used to store convenience goods like over-the-counter medicines and pet foods. I guess it is literally about picking and packing various items that you can then attach to takeout orders. In both cases, the food and goods are delivered to customers using local app companies such as Uber Eats.

    All of this appears to represent a shift in the supply chain for takeout food and various convenience goods. But what I am really curious about right now is what the real estate footprint of this network looks like within our cities. What is the optimal square footage of a ghost kitchen? What radius do they serve? And how does this ultimately change the landscape of our cities? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but change appears to be underway. Here’s an excerpt from the above FT article:

    “…the growth of dark kitchens across Latin America has caused controversy in certain cities. The proliferation in São Paulo, the largest city in the Americas, sparked objections from residents living nearby, with banners against new facilities appearing in well-heeled neighbourhoods. The town hall has proposed local regulation of dark kitchens and earlier this year placed a temporary ban on the issue of new licences. People have complained about noise, smells, smoke and motorcycle drivers — known colloquially as motoboys — waiting outside to collect orders. One unhappy local said his son had been nicknamed “bacon” and bullied in school because of the odour on his clothes, according to Cris Monteiro, a city councilwoman.”

    Travis Kalanick seems to have a knack for upsetting people and changing the way our cities operate. Although, the same could be said about a lot of other startups.

  • New NFT collection — Utah

    Our week of working remotely in the mountains of Utah has come to an end. Being on mountain time meant early mornings every day. But it also meant being able to enjoy the evenings, including sunsets like the one shown here at the top of Ensign Peak. This was my first time really experiencing the Salt Lake City area in the summer, and I’m grateful for the opportunity. It is a beautiful place, and one that still feels under the radar once you exclude its global draw as a ski and snowboard destination. I also had a great time capturing it on my camera. So I’m excited to share my latest NFT photography collection — Utah. All of the photos were taken on my Fujifilm X-T3 (35mm) and can be viewed and purchased over here on Foundation.