I woke up this morning to this view:
I then went for a swim. The water tends to be on the cooler side in the Georgian Bay, but with the weather we’ve been having it’s pretty perfect right now.
At this point I’m thinking about a beer and some reading. I have Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty sitting in my car. It’s next in the queue.
I am telling you all of this simply to be transparent.
Recently I had someone caution me that I should be careful about being too public and too open. I won’t get into specifics, but I was told that sometimes it’s better to just fly under the radar.
I recognize that there have to be limits to transparency, but as a rule of thumb I subscribe to the opposite approach. When possible and when appropriate, I would rather be more, rather than less, transparent.
This blog is who I am. It’s indicative of how I think. And it discloses what I’m doing. So I don’t see a lot of downside. What you read is what you get. You’ll know if we should be friends and/or do business together.
After I wrote about what I’m doing next I had a bunch of emails come in from various people telling me what they’re doing and, in some cases, suggesting that we work together. Some people had development sites that they thought I should take a look at. And some people immediately asked if I was hiring.
I am grateful for each of those emails. But I also know that they’re an outcome of openness and transparency.
This morning, I am looking at the following chart of average home prices in the Greater Toronto Area:
It’s from this Globe and Mail article.
These are staggering numbers. The average price of a detached home in the suburbs (905 area code) increased 21% year-over-year. In the city (416 area code), the increase was 19.6% YOY. These numbers are almost unbelievable.
The article focuses on low supply (decrease in listings) and high demand. And that is certainly a big part of what’s going on here in this city, as well as in many others.
But of course, the backdrop to all of this is our low / zero / negative interest rate environment.
Larry Summers has a great post on his blog (which I discovered this morning via
I just stumbled upon an interesting Architectural Review article from last year called: Architecture is now a tool of capital, complicit in a purpose antithetical to its social mission. The author is Reinier de Graaf, who is an architect and partner at the firm OMA.
The focus of the article is on inequality; capitalism vs. socialism; Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (which is now on my reading list); and on how Modernism lost its social mission and got repurposed as a tool that just serves capitalist interests. It went from an ideology to simply an architectural style.
Here is an excerpt:
“Once discovered as a form of capital, there is no choice for buildings but to operate according to the logic of capital. In that sense there may ultimately be no such thing as Modern or Postmodern architecture, but simply architecture before and after its annexation by capital.”
Given that I am initially trained as an architect, but that I work as a real estate developer, this article hits home for me. But unlike the author, I am not as fussed by this intertwining of capital and architecture. In fact, I have always believed that the more architecture can understand its economic milieu, the more likely it can affect positive change.
Of course, there’s the question of whether that economic milieu is even the right one in the first place. I’ll echo this blog post (on the limits of capitalism), by saying that I consider myself a capitalist, but not an absolute capitalist. Capitalism isn’t perfect.
I like Reinier’s description of income vs. wealth (borrowed from Piketty):
He identifies two basic economic categories: income and wealth. He then proceeds to define social (in)equality as a function of the relation between the two over time, concluding that as soon as the return on wealth exceeds the return on labour, social inequality inevitably increases. Those who acquire wealth through work fall ever further behind those who accumulate wealth simply by owning it.
What are your thoughts?
I woke up this morning to this view:
I then went for a swim. The water tends to be on the cooler side in the Georgian Bay, but with the weather we’ve been having it’s pretty perfect right now.
At this point I’m thinking about a beer and some reading. I have Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty sitting in my car. It’s next in the queue.
I am telling you all of this simply to be transparent.
Recently I had someone caution me that I should be careful about being too public and too open. I won’t get into specifics, but I was told that sometimes it’s better to just fly under the radar.
I recognize that there have to be limits to transparency, but as a rule of thumb I subscribe to the opposite approach. When possible and when appropriate, I would rather be more, rather than less, transparent.
This blog is who I am. It’s indicative of how I think. And it discloses what I’m doing. So I don’t see a lot of downside. What you read is what you get. You’ll know if we should be friends and/or do business together.
After I wrote about what I’m doing next I had a bunch of emails come in from various people telling me what they’re doing and, in some cases, suggesting that we work together. Some people had development sites that they thought I should take a look at. And some people immediately asked if I was hiring.
I am grateful for each of those emails. But I also know that they’re an outcome of openness and transparency.
This morning, I am looking at the following chart of average home prices in the Greater Toronto Area:
It’s from this Globe and Mail article.
These are staggering numbers. The average price of a detached home in the suburbs (905 area code) increased 21% year-over-year. In the city (416 area code), the increase was 19.6% YOY. These numbers are almost unbelievable.
The article focuses on low supply (decrease in listings) and high demand. And that is certainly a big part of what’s going on here in this city, as well as in many others.
But of course, the backdrop to all of this is our low / zero / negative interest rate environment.
Larry Summers has a great post on his blog (which I discovered this morning via
I just stumbled upon an interesting Architectural Review article from last year called: Architecture is now a tool of capital, complicit in a purpose antithetical to its social mission. The author is Reinier de Graaf, who is an architect and partner at the firm OMA.
The focus of the article is on inequality; capitalism vs. socialism; Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (which is now on my reading list); and on how Modernism lost its social mission and got repurposed as a tool that just serves capitalist interests. It went from an ideology to simply an architectural style.
Here is an excerpt:
“Once discovered as a form of capital, there is no choice for buildings but to operate according to the logic of capital. In that sense there may ultimately be no such thing as Modern or Postmodern architecture, but simply architecture before and after its annexation by capital.”
Given that I am initially trained as an architect, but that I work as a real estate developer, this article hits home for me. But unlike the author, I am not as fussed by this intertwining of capital and architecture. In fact, I have always believed that the more architecture can understand its economic milieu, the more likely it can affect positive change.
Of course, there’s the question of whether that economic milieu is even the right one in the first place. I’ll echo this blog post (on the limits of capitalism), by saying that I consider myself a capitalist, but not an absolute capitalist. Capitalism isn’t perfect.
I like Reinier’s description of income vs. wealth (borrowed from Piketty):
He identifies two basic economic categories: income and wealth. He then proceeds to define social (in)equality as a function of the relation between the two over time, concluding that as soon as the return on wealth exceeds the return on labour, social inequality inevitably increases. Those who acquire wealth through work fall ever further behind those who accumulate wealth simply by owning it.
What are your thoughts?
There are always people threatening that interests rates just have to go up. But Larry, as well as others, continue to argue that natural real interest rates are likely to remain close to zero going forward.
Fred mentions Albert Wenger on his blog this morning and I have written about him before as well, here. In his book World After Capital, Albert argues that capital is no longer the scarce resource of our time. Instead, it has become attention.
If you believe all of this to be true, then perhaps the numbers at the top of this post aren’t so unbelievable after all.
There are always people threatening that interests rates just have to go up. But Larry, as well as others, continue to argue that natural real interest rates are likely to remain close to zero going forward.
Fred mentions Albert Wenger on his blog this morning and I have written about him before as well, here. In his book World After Capital, Albert argues that capital is no longer the scarce resource of our time. Instead, it has become attention.
If you believe all of this to be true, then perhaps the numbers at the top of this post aren’t so unbelievable after all.
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