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.
The Quebec City-Windsor corridor is the most densely populated region in Canada. The last time I checked Wikipedia, it was reported to house about 18 million people, or about half of Canada’s entire population.
So it is not surprising that there have been numerous high-speed rail studies for this corridor over the decades, as well as studies for other important links in Alberta (Edmonton-Calgary) and other parts of the country.
And yet, Canada remains the only G7 country without any high-speed rail. Though to be fair, the US doesn’t have all that much either; certainly with respect to the size of its population.
However, there is some good news. In March of this year, the Government of Canada announced a Request for Expression of Interest related to high frequency rail service between Quebec City and Toronto. More information, over here.
But from what I have read, it’ll be a faster upgraded service (~200 km/h), but not true high-speed rail (~250-300 km/h). I took the TGV from Marseille to Paris last summer, and this is how fast we were going:
If we’re going to do this, let’s be the absolute best in the world and not settle for mediocrity.
Even if you never experienced it yourself, we have all heard the lore of 1970s New York City. It was a raw, dangerous, and unpolished city that was simultaneously teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and providing fertile ground for artists and many other forms of expression (some suspect and some not).
Jane Jacobs is famous for saying that “new ideas often require old buildings.” And the New York of this era was exactly that kind of city. Artist Donald Judd (a favorite of mine) bought his five-storey cast-iron building in Soho (on Spring Street) around this time (1968). He paid just under $70,000.
So it is perhaps easy to romanticize this more accessible (and equitable?) version of New York. But there were many other things going on the city at this time beyond minimalist art in Soho loft buildings.
This photo essay by Joseph Rodriguez does a great job at telling some of those other stories in a decidedly humanistic way. Joseph was a New York cab driver from 1977 to 1985. And his final years, he had taken up photography and had started documenting the people and the city through his windows.
His incredible photos are also available in this book called, TAXI: Journey Through My Windows 1977-1987.
Toronto is number one. Los Angeles is number two. And New York sits just behind Winnipeg and Calgary. Huh?
The reason this is likely surprising to you is that when most people think of urban density they think of the urban core. And you are correct in thinking that the urban core of New York City is denser than the urban core of Winnipeg.
The difference here is that we are talking about “urban area” (or “population centre” in Canada). This is the continuously built up area around each major city. Think of it as the lit up area that you might see on a nighttime aerial photo.
Urban areas don’t care about municipal or other jurisdictional boundaries. And they don’t factor rural areas. Urban areas are a measure of continuous urbanization.
So even if you have the densest downtown on the planet, if you have a sprawling low-density urban area surrounding it, you can still end up with a relatively low overall population density. And this is precisely what is happening here with New York.
This is also why there’s only so much that you can glean from a blended average like this. Because you can have very different urban forms and very different mobility splits (think New York City vs. Winnipeg), and still end up with somewhat comparable averages.
At the time of writing this post, affordability was number one, followed by design and beauty, and then sustainability.
Some of you were right to point out that these options are not always mutually exclusive. Affordability and sustainability, for instance, can be mutually reinforcing.
Building in walkable and transit-rich neighborhoods where parking is not needed is both good for overall affordability (parking is usually a loss leader) and better for the environment.
But in other cases, sustainability costs more. Triple-glazed windows might perform better than conventional double-glazed, but they’re also more expensive.
Now, as a general rule, I believe in working hard to find the mutually reinforcing opportunities. How can we check all of the boxes and not have to compromise?
But sometimes there’s no other option. So it is interesting to see how people answer the above question. Not surprisingly, affordability is top of mind.
The New Consumer has just published its 2022 mid-year update. Some of you might remember that I wrote about their inaugural consumer trends report at the end of last year.
It’s interesting, but not surprising, to see a lot of things returning to their means. Spending on home furnishings, for example, is coming down, whereas luggage and bag sales are up. Home fitness has also come way down as people return to gyms. It’s time to leave home.
At the same time, it has become a lot more expensive to leave home, assuming you need to drive. Motor fuel increased 49% year-over-year as of May 2022. It’s the CPI category with the biggest change. But even with this, transit ridership has yet to fully rebound. NYC is sitting at around 60%.
To download a free copy of the full presentation, click here.
A super-entrepreneur, according to the common definition, is a rich person who has amassed a net worth of at least US$1 billion dollars by either starting a company or taking a small company and growing it into a big one. A super-entrepreneur is, by definition, not someone who inherited their wealth. Though I’m not sure what the cut off is. If you inherited $1 million and then started a massive company, does that still make you a super-entrepreneur? What about if you inherited $100 million?
In any event, here is a chart from New Geography showing super-entrepreneurs by region:
The USA is in the lead in this chart at about 3.1 super-entrepreneurs per one million inhabitants. But the highest rate in the world, at least according to this data set, actually belongs to Singapore at 4.7 per million. Europe, as a whole, doesn’t look all that great here. But again, if you get more specific, some European countries are actually doing quite well. Sweden, for instance, is sitting at around 2 per million, which is higher than Canada’s figure.
Why this data is potentially interesting is that it tells you a bit about these countries. It tells you whether they have strong property rights, whether it’s easy to conduct business, and whether it’s supportive of new ideas, among, of course, many other things. There also appears to be a clear link between the presence of super-entrepreneurs and unemployment. Turns out that the more people you have starting wildly successful businesses, the lower unemployment tends to be.
For the full New Geography article, click here. In addition to what I just wrote about, it talks about Europe’s “entrepreneurial paradox” and issues of gender equality.
I’m not sure what the exact dates are for this dataset, but it seems to again suggest that this migration was already a trend before the pandemic happened.
Either way, Miami is red hot and the continues to lead the US in residential rental rate growth. But all of this growth is now apparently starting to catch up to the city. Here is just one example from the same article (though developers here in Toronto would gladly take this sort of timeline):
Right before the pandemic, when he moved to Miami, he said it took no more than four months from when he submitted development plans to when he got city approval. Now, with the number of projects swamping Miami Beach’s staff and resources, that same process takes nearly a year, Mr. Curnin said.
This frenetic run-up is also causing some in the city, including Barry Sternlicht of Starwood Capital Group, to pause:
“Everyone and their cousins are looking to build a building here,” he said. “I’m getting nervous.”
Miami has historically always been a boom and bust kind of market. I don’t know if this is one of those times, but there’s clearly no denying the allure of palm trees, warm winter weather, and no state income tax.
This is a lovely little infill rental project in Tokyo by ETHNOS (architect) for Real Partners (developer):
The building is 4 storeys plus a rooftop terrace. From the plans, it looks like there are 8 units, all of which are two-storey suites.
The A and B suites are accessible from the ground floor. For the A suites, you enter at grade, and then go down into the first basement level. And for the B suites, you enter at grade and then go up to your second level. One of the entrances (suite B-3) is via an exterior walkway.
The middle of the ground floor is the lobby entrance and there’s a single elevator that services the second and third floors (it then drops off for the fourth floor). On the second level is a co-working space, and so the upper C suites (these sound fancy) are all accessible from the third floor.
The fourth floor and fifth floor terraces are all accessible from within the C suites, which means that the only real common area corridors in this building are on the third level. And it looks like they wanted this particular corridor to have a view to the street, because they could have easily reduced it even further to increase the building’s overall efficiency.
What is also interesting to look at this building’s dimensions. Based on the above section, the floor-to-floor heights are 2500mm, which is low compared to the 2950/3000mm that is typically used here in Toronto for new reinforced concrete builds.
In terms of the overall building, it is only about 10m deep and it is less than 10m tall if you exclude the stair popups on the rooftop terraces. For context here, our Junction House lot is about 30m deep and the build is about 30m tall, so actually a similar kind of box proportion.
But let’s scan more of Toronto.
If you move away from designated “Avenues” (which is where Junction House sits) and look at some of our other major streets (which is something the City of Toronto is in fact doing), you can sometimes/oftentimes find even deeper lots.
Below is a random area that I quickly panned too on Dufferin Street — these single-family house lots are around 36m deep:
Now obviously Toronto is not Tokyo and Tokyo is not Toronto. But my point with all of this was to demonstrate just how much space we actually have within our existing boundaries, should we ever feel the need to increase our overall housing supply.
At the beginning of this year, Globizen announced a new collection of city t-shirts. They have been very popular and we only have a few left from our original batch (which included some of the greatest places in the world: Toronto, Paris, and Park City). But we recently added a new city: Kyiv. This is obviously a really important one, and 100% of the proceeds from the sale of this shirt are going be used to support Ukraine. The plan is to allocate 50% to the Toronto Ukrainian Foundation, which has been helping displaced Ukrainians settle in Canada, and the balance to Ukraine directly (via cryptocurrencies).
A blog reader responded to yesterday’s post about rent controls (and inclusionary zoning) with an excellent point: If you’re against rent controls, then you must also be against artificially low property taxes for homeowners. And I would agree with this.
One of the points I was trying to make yesterday was that if you’re in a situation where your revenue is capped but your operating expenses are free to grow based on the market, then you are likely heading down an unsustainable financial path.
This is true if the revenue is in the form of rent and this is true if the revenue is in the form of property taxes. A good example of this is California’s Proposition 13, which is the principal thing that keeps property taxes artificially low over on that coast.
Similar to what I argued yesterday with rent controls, it too creates a misallocation of housing. If you’re sitting on historic and artificially low property taxes, then you are now highly incentivized to stay put where you are. Why would you move only to have your taxes mark to market?
So this line of thinking cuts both ways, whether we’re talking about renters or homeowners.
