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.
It was pure luck, but we couldn’t have timed this last week any better. It started snowing in the mountains around Salt Lake City on Tuesday, and it felt like it didn’t stop until Saturday. On Wednesday morning, which was peak powder, the main resorts were reporting anywhere between 23″ and 30″ of fresh now. It was the stuff of magical dreams.
But snowfall is, of course, highly variable. SLC is having a record year, whereas many resorts in Europe weren’t able to open until mid-January because of a lack of snow. And from a macro perspective, things are generally getting worse. According to this report, for every one degree increase in the world’s average temperature, global snow cover is reduced by about 8%.
What this mean is that, even in low emission scenarios, many of the places that previously hosted the Winter Olympics, may struggle to do so again in the future because of “non-reliable” snow cover. Freestyle ski and snowboard, for example, typically wants a minimum of 1 meter of snowpack as a base, and sometimes more if melting is expected.
Things do not look positive for Vancouver, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and even Chamonix in the below chart. (And as a further blow, the authors of the report also don’t know how to spell Vancouver.) Naturally, this is something that you might want to consider when looking at long-term investments that are dependent on fresh snow.
You can, however, ignore Sochi in the above chart. Because this was never a great place for the Winter Olympics and it’s unclear to me why this place was ever chosen (other than for presumably nefarious reasons). It’s like: “We are one of the largest and coldest countries in the world. We have a lot of snow in Russia. But for fun, let’s choose one of the few places with a sub-tropical climate.”
Excluding Sochi, though, this is an alarming chart.
The current electric vehicle plan in the US is to build a national network of 500,000 chargers and have EVs make up at least 50% of new car sales by 2030. (Here’s where we are today with adoption.) To this end, a big announcement was made today that included lots of public funding, a Made-in-America agenda, and lots of other goodies. But perhaps the two most important points are that (1) Tesla has, for the first time, agreed to open a portion of its charging network to non-Tesla EVs (so that it can gain access to the new $7.5 billion EV charging initiative) and (2) there is a requirement for all of the station connectors to use the “combined charging system” (CCS). I’m not a connector expert but, in my mind, this is both exciting and directionally right. To fully transition to electric vehicles, we need universality.
This is the current state of global electric vehicle adoption:
Last year was the first year that global electric-vehicle sales reached 10% of all car sales — the total was around 7.8 million cars (see above chart)
Fully-electric vehicles accounted for about 5.8% of all car sales in the US, 11% of all car sales in Europe, and about 19% of all car sales in China — China is leading in this department
The US saw 807,180 fully-electric vehicle sales last year — Tesla remains the biggest EV maker in the world
In Germany, electric vehicles accounted for about 25% of all new vehicles produced last year — BMW reported a 5% decline in new-car sales, but saw its EV sales more than 2x
Similar story with Volkswagen: 7% decline in new-car sales; 26% increase in EV sales
This year, some are predicting that China will see EV sales increase to every third car, and that it will reach its tipping point sometime between 2025-2030
It is obvious where all of this is heading. It is simply a question of how fast, and who will be the leaders at the end of the day.
It has been mild and wet in Toronto over the last week, but normally at this time of the year, the entire city looks like as if it was just hit by some sort of apocalyptic chalk storm. Everything is white. And that’s because we rely on rock salt and liquid salt brine to keep our roads and sidewalks free of snow and ice. Each winter, the city uses upwards of 130,000 tones of salt to maintain its service levels.
This is the tool of choice because it is both reasonably effective and cheap. However, the trade-off is that it does horrible things to the environment. It also ruins perfectly good shoes, which should tell you something about what it’s doing to the environment. So it’s a balancing act: Yeah, it’s terrible for the environment, but we want usable roads and sidewalks. People slipping and falling is also a liability problem.
That said, when I was in Montreal over the weekend, I did notice a greater use of gravel:
This causes its own set of problems in the spring when it all needs to be tidied up. But in the interim, it did allow me to wear my neon Nike Air Max 90s without the fear of them disintegrating on my feet. Sometimes there’s also no choice. Road salts only work down to a certain temperature and then they become ineffective. So there are lots of examples of cities using sand and/or gravel to improve traction.
This is not the case in Toronto. We rely on rock salt. And part of the reason for this is that our winter service levels dictate “bare pavement” on highways and arterial roads. Gravel doesn’t get you bare pavement. Salt does. Also, Ontario doesn’t require snow tires, whereas Quebec does. So there is an argument that, because of this, we are all ill-equipped to deal with anything besides bare streets. (Though have you seen our sidewalks and bike lanes?)
I am not a salt management expert. I opted out of that fascinating elective in University. But in my opinion, the goal should be to use as little rock salt as possible. Maybe that means we need to rethink our service levels and our priorities. And maybe that means we need to do things like mandate winter tires.
“It is the biggest transition in the history of our species, with the possible exception of starting to use fire at all in the first place,” says Barnabas Calder, author of the groundbreaking study “Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency.” Fireplaces had to be redesigned for coal, smaller, and more efficient, and could now be distributed throughout the house, warming a sequence of smaller rooms that contained heat more efficiently. Brick, which also requires substantial amounts of energy to produce, became affordable. And glass, too, was accessible to ordinary people. “Coal affects the way you can achieve comfort conditions in a building, and it is a very affordable way of producing a significant amount of warmth, which allows for bigger windows. Even more significant is that it opens up a series of new building materials.”
But as new technologies transformed how we thought about it architecture, they also transformed how we thought about climate. Buildings used to have to be carefully “tuned” to their local environment. You had to think about where the sun was coming in, how you were going to trap it during the winter months, and how you were going to release it during the summer months, among many other things.
Eventually though, this stopped mattering.
We had building systems that could take care of these matters, which then meant that we were free to aspire to build the exact same architecture in Phoenix as in London. But we now know that that this doesn’t make much sense. And this recent architectural tour from the Washington Post, which starts in 16th century England, is a good reminder that the lessons learned many centuries ago are in fact still relevant today.
When it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, we know this:
Households in denser neighborhoods close to city centers tend to be responsible for fewer planet-warming greenhouse gases, on average, than households in the rest of the country. Residents in these areas typically drive less because jobs and stores are nearby and they can more easily walk, bike or take public transit. And they’re more likely to live in smaller homes or apartments that require less energy to heat and cool.
We also know this:
Consider housing. For decades in the United States, the majority of new homes have been built in the suburbs and, increasingly, exurbs, where climate footprints are larger. As a result, for many people today, it is often easier and cheaper to find a home in a high-emissions community than a lower-emissions one.
An important caveat to these points is that if you use consumption-based carbon accounting — that is, you consider all of the goods and services that people tend to consume — then other things like income also play a major factor. Wealthy households, for example, tend to fly more frequently, and that is bad for emissions.
But even with this more accurate accounting, the two biggest contributors to a household’s carbon footprint still tend to be housing and driving. And that’s why when you look at emission maps, like these over here, the urban core still usually performs the best. Density, it turns out, is hard to beat.
On-street electric vehicle charging points are starting to roll out across Toronto. Here is one that I came across this morning in the Junction on Annette Street. The stations are from Flo.
At its core, this is, of course, a great thing. Ubiquitous charging points are a critical component of overall EV adoption. But at the same time, it was a good reminder that (1) above-grade electrical wires are ugly (this is the typical Toronto approach) and that (2) on-street EV charging is a design challenge that is going to need to be solved.
In the above example, the charging stations were mounted to an existing electrical pole and two bright yellow bollards were installed on either side to make sure nobody smashes into said charging stations while they’re parking and/or trying to watch TikTok videos on their phone.
But what happens when nearly everyone has an EV? There are only so many electrical poles, so we will need to move on to standalone stations at some point, and that is obviously already being done. But if we’re going to have charging points practically everywhere, how should they work and what should they look like?
I am sure that lots of very smart people are already thinking about this. But as someone who is not directly involved in this space, it feels like we need to think about these in a similar way to street lights. Because they are going to be just as ubiquitous, if not more so. That means there is a strong cause for making them both functional and beautiful.
In fact, this feels like a real city branding opportunity.
The EU has set an interconnection target of at least 15% by 2030 to encourage EU countries to interconnect their installed electricity production capacity. This means that each country should have in place electricity cables that allow at least 15% of the electricity produced on its territory to be transported across its borders to neighbouring countries.
The main reasons to do this is that it is good for renewables and it is good for overall resilience. The UK, for example, has one of the largest offshore wind markets in the world. But if it’s having a bad wind year, interconnections allow it to import the electricity it may need — perhaps from Norway, which is Europe’s biggest producer of hydropower.
Here is what that looked like in 2021 (via the FT):
Of course, this works really well when there’s enough electricity to go around and everyone is cooperating. The question this winter is whether that changes at all.
There is an ongoing debate about the value of cities hosting the Olympic Games. And that’s because this is usually how it works: You, the host, spend a lot of money (Tokyo 2021 was over $25 billion), it feels really good during the games while the world is watching you on TV, and then everyone leaves and you have a big bill to pay.
As I understand it, this has generally been the case for almost all of the games. One rare exception is Los Angeles in 1984, which supposedly managed to make over $230 million from hosting. In pretty much every other case, the rough value was, at least in theory, things like exposure, ego, and hopefully a bunch of assets that will remain useful to other people once the games are done.
But as I have argued a few times before, perhaps the most important hard-to-quantify benefit is this: Hosting the Olympics creates an immutable city-building deadline. Because, what could be worse than not being ready when your global guests show up?
A perfect example of this is what Paris is now trying to do with the Seine ahead of the 2024 Olympics. The goal is to clean up the Seine so that it’s actually safe enough for the athletes to compete in it. That would obviously be really cool for the games, but it would also be a wonderful legacy for Paris.
Would Paris still be doing this if it weren’t hosting the games? Perhaps. Paris has a habit of doing some obviously good things. But I bet it wouldn’t be moving nearly as quickly.
Between 2016 and 2021, and according to this recent report from Statistics Canada, the population of the Toronto CMA (Census Metropolitan Area) grew by over 274k people:
The population of the Montréal CMA grew by nearly 188k people:
And the population of the Vancouver CMA grew by over 179k people:
These are the three largest CMAs in the country and they, not surprisingly, also have the three largest “downtowns.” As of the spring of 2021, the most populated downtowns were as follows: Toronto (275,931 people), Vancouver (121,932 people), Montréal (109,509), Ottawa (67,169 people), and Edmonton (55,387).
In this exercise, Statistics Canada breaks down each CMA into 5 categories, which are generally based on two things: (1) your typical monocentric city model (downtown in the middle with a declining gradient of surrounding sprawl) and (2) how long it takes to commute — by car during non-rush hours — from downtown to the surrounding areas.
The good news in all of this is that Canada’s downtowns seem to be doing just fine. Broadly speaking, they are growing at a faster rate than their respective CMAs and growing at 2x the rate of the previous census cycle. Halifax’s downtown grew at 26.1% from 2016 to 2021 and Calgary grew at 21%, to give two more examples. So I think you can safely ignore what you may have heard about a pandemic exodus. Those people are now returning from the country after realizing that there aren’t any pretentious coffee shops and expensive butcher shops.
But something else is also going on in Canada’s largest urban centers. The concurrent trend is continued urban sprawl. The biggest downtowns are growing quickly, but so are the distant suburbs (30 minutes or more from downtown). And they are growing at a faster rate than everything in between. This is not entirely surprising, but it is obviously concerning from a climate change perspective and because it suggests that people are being forced to do the old “drive until you qualify” thing.
These two phenomena are the most pronounced in the Toronto CMA. If you scroll back up to the top of this post, you’ll see that downtown absorbed a decent chunk of the population growth (about 14%), particularly considering its small footprint. But then if you look at the distant suburbs (the mustard color), you’ll see that it’s where 72% of new entrants went!
The question I like to ask with all of this is, “are people choosing to move to the distant suburbs because that’s the housing and location that they truly want, or are people choosing it because it’s all they can afford?” There is an argument out there that sprawl is a natural market outcome and that we shouldn’t be forcing people to live in higher-density housing. And I am certainly sympathetic to giving people as much choice as possible.
But how much choice are we really giving people in our biggest cities? We have figured out how to intensify our downtowns through mid- and high-rise development. And evidenced by the growth rates, many people are enjoying this form of housing and the kind of urban lifestyle that comes along with it. But if it happens to not work for you, our current solution is, “either be rich so you can remain close to downtown or go for a drive.”
What is clear from this latest census data is that we haven’t yet figured out the in-between. The missing middle is still missing. And that’s because we have clear mechanisms in place to more or less ensure this is the case: (1) We restrict meaningful growth from taking place in our single-family neighbourhoods and (2) we have made a habit out of shifting some of the incumbent tax burden to new entrants through things like development charges.
Overall, it’s a devilishly clever system where two things happen: “Sorry, you can’t build that kind of housing here. Build it somewhere else. By the way, I’d like to keep my property taxes as low as possible, so not only do I not what you close to me, but I’d also like you to help pay for some things. Cool?” This is the arrangement that we are seeing playing out in these charts. It can be easy to ignore, but it’s there.
