Brandon Donnelly
Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly.
Brandon Donnelly
Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly.
A new YIMBY activist group is starting to gain meaningful traction in San Francisco. They were recently featured in the New York Times and they have managed to secure the financial backing of people like Jeremy Stoppelman – co-founder and CEO of Yelp.
(All excerpts in this post were taken from the NY Times.)
The group is called SF BARF, which stands for SF Bay Area Renters’ Federation. The group, however, supports new development of all kinds. So I think the name is more driven by the fact that the founder, Sonja Trauss, wanted the acronym to be BARF. It speaks to their shit disturbing approach:
“Her group consists of a 500-person mailing list and a few dozen hard-core members — most of them young professionals who work in the technology industry — who speak out at government meetings and protest against the protesters who fight new development. While only two years old, Ms. Trauss’s Renters’ Federation has blazed onto the political scene with youth and bombast and by employing guerrilla tactics that others are too polite to try. In January, for instance, she hired a lawyer to go around suing suburbs for not building enough.”
The impetus for all of this, of course, is San Francisco’s lack of affordability and severe housing shortage. Housing supply is decades behind the city’s population and job growth.
Most people are directing the blame at the tech community for bidding up housing. But there’s clearly growing recognition that housing supply matters.
As a real estate developer, my industry obviously benefits from fewer barriers to building. So let’s get that out there:
“Ms. Trauss’s cause, more or less, is to make life easier for real estate developers by rolling back zoning regulations and environmental rules. Her opponents are a generally older group of progressives who worry that an influx of corporate techies is turning a city that nurtured the Beat Generation into a gilded resort for the rich.”
But let’s also be clear that I don’t believe we should be developing roughshod over our cities. New development should respond to what’s already there and give back.
At the same time, housing supply matters a great deal. A big part of the reason that cities like San Francisco, New York and Vancouver are so expensive is that they’re naturally supply-constrained markets. Geographically, they are either peninsulas or islands.
When you overlay tight land use restrictions, fierce community opposition and/or foreign investment on top of this geography, it should come as no surprise to anyone that demand is outstripping supply.
New supply won’t solve every problem, but I do agree that it is an important part of the solution.
We talk a lot about economic inequality these days. We worry, among other things, that our successful cities are becoming playgrounds for the rich and that housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable for the middle class.
Without negating the importance of things such as attainable housing, I’d like to offer up two, potentially new, perspectives on economic inequality.
The first is an essay by venture capitalist Paul Graham. In it, he rationally unpacks, as he always does, the phenomenon of economic inequality. One of his key points is the distinction between rent seeking degenerate economic inequality and the economic inequality caused by rapid value creation (i.e. Two Stanford students decide to create a new search engine called Google).
“If the rich people in a society got that way by taking wealth from the poor, then you have the degenerate case of economic inequality where the cause of poverty is the same as the cause of wealth. But instances of inequality don’t have to be instances of the degenerate case. If one woodworker makes 5 chairs and another makes none, the second woodworker will have less money, but not because anyone took anything from him.”
Of course, Paul Graham is thinking about this from the perspective of a venture capitalist that funds startups and helps entrepreneurs get rich. But what about the impacts to people who live in a city where the rich are far richer than the poor?
That brings me to the second perspective.
A recent study, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association and written about in the New York Times, has discovered a surprising relationship between income and life expectancy across the United States from 2001 to 2014.
What they found was that cities with high economic inequality – such as New York and San Francisco – actually have lower inequality when it comes to life expectancy.
I’ve written about co-living spaces before – here and probably elsewhere on this blog.
Well this morning, WeWork (the co-working startup currently valued at a cool $16 billion) unveiled its inaugural co-living space on New York’s Wall Street. It’s called WeLive and Vanity Fair describes it as “Soho House meets Airbnb meets a tricked-out Restoration Hardware storeroom, but for the Slack Set.”
Got it?
Ultimately, this location at 110 Wall Street will have 600 fully furnished WeLive apartments, but they’re coming online in tranches. This first release includes 200 units. Here’s a bit of information on pricing from Fast Company:
“There are 200 units available—ranging from $1,375 per person in shared apartments to $2,000 for an individual studio—all with the option of either a month-by-month or yearly lease (a $125 monthly fee covers amenities). The apartments are about 450 square feet on average, with the largest units topping out at 1,000 square feet (one-bedroom apartments in the area, by comparison, range in prices from about $2,850 for 451 square feet to $3,500 for 700 square feet). Each apartment comes fully furnished, minimally decorated, and set up with cable and Internet at move-in.”
But this is not just about price. The WeLive concept is about creating a strong sense of community within the building. Every floor, for instance, has some sort of common area to foster interaction – a space for yoga classes, a laundry room with a big pool table, and so on.
I am interested in seeing how this concept pans out because I’ve had discussions before with people in the industry about how condos/apartments might be programmed to feel a bit more like hotels. Years ago, I even spoke to a major European company about trying to pioneer a model like this.
Because there’s something very social about being in a hotel – something that I really like. You can walk down to the lobby bar by yourself and you never know who you might meet. That’s not really the case in many multi-family buildings.
Now, part of that might have to do with the fact that people tend to be more open when they travel. But maybe WeLive can help create that kind of social interaction within the apartment building. I think that would be a positive thing.
A new YIMBY activist group is starting to gain meaningful traction in San Francisco. They were recently featured in the New York Times and they have managed to secure the financial backing of people like Jeremy Stoppelman – co-founder and CEO of Yelp.
(All excerpts in this post were taken from the NY Times.)
The group is called SF BARF, which stands for SF Bay Area Renters’ Federation. The group, however, supports new development of all kinds. So I think the name is more driven by the fact that the founder, Sonja Trauss, wanted the acronym to be BARF. It speaks to their shit disturbing approach:
“Her group consists of a 500-person mailing list and a few dozen hard-core members — most of them young professionals who work in the technology industry — who speak out at government meetings and protest against the protesters who fight new development. While only two years old, Ms. Trauss’s Renters’ Federation has blazed onto the political scene with youth and bombast and by employing guerrilla tactics that others are too polite to try. In January, for instance, she hired a lawyer to go around suing suburbs for not building enough.”
The impetus for all of this, of course, is San Francisco’s lack of affordability and severe housing shortage. Housing supply is decades behind the city’s population and job growth.
Most people are directing the blame at the tech community for bidding up housing. But there’s clearly growing recognition that housing supply matters.
As a real estate developer, my industry obviously benefits from fewer barriers to building. So let’s get that out there:
“Ms. Trauss’s cause, more or less, is to make life easier for real estate developers by rolling back zoning regulations and environmental rules. Her opponents are a generally older group of progressives who worry that an influx of corporate techies is turning a city that nurtured the Beat Generation into a gilded resort for the rich.”
But let’s also be clear that I don’t believe we should be developing roughshod over our cities. New development should respond to what’s already there and give back.
At the same time, housing supply matters a great deal. A big part of the reason that cities like San Francisco, New York and Vancouver are so expensive is that they’re naturally supply-constrained markets. Geographically, they are either peninsulas or islands.
When you overlay tight land use restrictions, fierce community opposition and/or foreign investment on top of this geography, it should come as no surprise to anyone that demand is outstripping supply.
New supply won’t solve every problem, but I do agree that it is an important part of the solution.
We talk a lot about economic inequality these days. We worry, among other things, that our successful cities are becoming playgrounds for the rich and that housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable for the middle class.
Without negating the importance of things such as attainable housing, I’d like to offer up two, potentially new, perspectives on economic inequality.
The first is an essay by venture capitalist Paul Graham. In it, he rationally unpacks, as he always does, the phenomenon of economic inequality. One of his key points is the distinction between rent seeking degenerate economic inequality and the economic inequality caused by rapid value creation (i.e. Two Stanford students decide to create a new search engine called Google).
“If the rich people in a society got that way by taking wealth from the poor, then you have the degenerate case of economic inequality where the cause of poverty is the same as the cause of wealth. But instances of inequality don’t have to be instances of the degenerate case. If one woodworker makes 5 chairs and another makes none, the second woodworker will have less money, but not because anyone took anything from him.”
Of course, Paul Graham is thinking about this from the perspective of a venture capitalist that funds startups and helps entrepreneurs get rich. But what about the impacts to people who live in a city where the rich are far richer than the poor?
That brings me to the second perspective.
A recent study, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association and written about in the New York Times, has discovered a surprising relationship between income and life expectancy across the United States from 2001 to 2014.
What they found was that cities with high economic inequality – such as New York and San Francisco – actually have lower inequality when it comes to life expectancy.
I’ve written about co-living spaces before – here and probably elsewhere on this blog.
Well this morning, WeWork (the co-working startup currently valued at a cool $16 billion) unveiled its inaugural co-living space on New York’s Wall Street. It’s called WeLive and Vanity Fair describes it as “Soho House meets Airbnb meets a tricked-out Restoration Hardware storeroom, but for the Slack Set.”
Got it?
Ultimately, this location at 110 Wall Street will have 600 fully furnished WeLive apartments, but they’re coming online in tranches. This first release includes 200 units. Here’s a bit of information on pricing from Fast Company:
“There are 200 units available—ranging from $1,375 per person in shared apartments to $2,000 for an individual studio—all with the option of either a month-by-month or yearly lease (a $125 monthly fee covers amenities). The apartments are about 450 square feet on average, with the largest units topping out at 1,000 square feet (one-bedroom apartments in the area, by comparison, range in prices from about $2,850 for 451 square feet to $3,500 for 700 square feet). Each apartment comes fully furnished, minimally decorated, and set up with cable and Internet at move-in.”
But this is not just about price. The WeLive concept is about creating a strong sense of community within the building. Every floor, for instance, has some sort of common area to foster interaction – a space for yoga classes, a laundry room with a big pool table, and so on.
I am interested in seeing how this concept pans out because I’ve had discussions before with people in the industry about how condos/apartments might be programmed to feel a bit more like hotels. Years ago, I even spoke to a major European company about trying to pioneer a model like this.
Because there’s something very social about being in a hotel – something that I really like. You can walk down to the lobby bar by yourself and you never know who you might meet. That’s not really the case in many multi-family buildings.
Now, part of that might have to do with the fact that people tend to be more open when they travel. But maybe WeLive can help create that kind of social interaction within the apartment building. I think that would be a positive thing.
Here is a chart from the New York Times:
And here is a chart from healthinequality.org:
If you’re rich, it doesn’t matter where you live. The life expectancy of a rich person in New York is roughly the same as a rich person in Detroit. (Though, as to be expected, women generally live longer than men.)
However, as income levels fall, so does life expectancy. But it falls more in a city like Detroit than it does in New York. In fact, rich cities such as New York and San Francisco are almost model cities in this regard. Why is that?
The biggest predictor appears to be health behaviors, such as smoking and obesity:
“The research seems to suggest that living in proximity to the preferences — and tax base — of wealthy neighbors may help improve well-being. New York is not just a city of rich and poor, but also one of walkable sidewalks, a trans-fat ban and one of the most aggressive anti-tobacco agendas of any place in the United States.”
So there you have it. Two, potentially new, ways to think about economic inequality.
Here is a chart from the New York Times:
And here is a chart from healthinequality.org:
If you’re rich, it doesn’t matter where you live. The life expectancy of a rich person in New York is roughly the same as a rich person in Detroit. (Though, as to be expected, women generally live longer than men.)
However, as income levels fall, so does life expectancy. But it falls more in a city like Detroit than it does in New York. In fact, rich cities such as New York and San Francisco are almost model cities in this regard. Why is that?
The biggest predictor appears to be health behaviors, such as smoking and obesity:
“The research seems to suggest that living in proximity to the preferences — and tax base — of wealthy neighbors may help improve well-being. New York is not just a city of rich and poor, but also one of walkable sidewalks, a trans-fat ban and one of the most aggressive anti-tobacco agendas of any place in the United States.”
So there you have it. Two, potentially new, ways to think about economic inequality.
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