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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Category: New York

  • A “New” New York

    Earlier this year, the Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, and the Governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, assembled a panel of civic leaders and industry experts to try and come up with a plan for a “New” New York.

    Initially, this panel was intended to be entirely focused on reviving the city’s business districts, and in particular those that have been slow to recover from the pandemic. But scope creep happens and it ultimately grew to include two other important goals: make it easier to get around and encourage “inclusive, future-focused growth.”

    The recommendations from this panel were released today and it’s in the form of a report with 40 specific initiatives. In keeping with its original intent, the first recommended initiative is one that you would expect: “Make Midtown and other business districts more live-work-play.” And what that means is the following:

    We will remove barriers that have kept Midtown and other business districts stagnant by making it easier to convert and redevelop outdated office buildings to other uses, including residential, thereby empowering the market to create more vibrant, mixed-use districts. We will also update old-fashioned regulatory codes that have prevented small businesses from locating, expanding, and innovating in those districts, providing zoning flexibility for businesses to thrive. And we will unite our business districts behind a shared goal of vitality by aligning incentives for businesses to help maintain vibrant business districts.

    New York isn’t the first city to be encouraging office-to-residential conversions and it certainly isn’t going to be the last. I think most of you know that I am a firm believer in office-centric cultures and that I’m in mine 5 days a week. But this is a recalibration that is going to need to take place in some submarkets.

    And here is one of the capitals of the world — New York City — telling us that it needs to happen there.

  • New ideas like buildings people don’t want

    There is a very common story that plays out in cities. It starts with an area that has seen disinvestment and is probably a little seedy and/or dangerous . This creates an environment where rents and real estate as a whole are relatively inexpensive. New, cool and creative businesses start to move in (attracted by said inexpensiveness) and the area begins to turn around. Eventually it becomes suitable for institutional-type investors, and this ultimately leads to everything becoming expensive as a result of demand outstripping supply. Gentrification complete.

    The great irony of this story is that you sometimes, or oftentimes, lose the very things that made the area cool and interesting in the first place. Here is an example from Miami:

    The result has been a property speculation boom that, when combined with the city’s relatively low wages, put many businesses and residents on the street. Asking rents for industrial space, for instance, went up by 53 percent in the last year alone. Nobody can afford to buy, let alone rent, adequate space for a music venue because so much land has been snapped up by outside investors with a predilection for grand, “world-class urban” designs. 

    And for some areas, it is arguably the result of a careful and deliberate plan that was put in place nearly two decades ago:

    Teele’s commissioner district in the early 2000s included both Park West and the historically Black neighborhood of Overtown. At the turn of the millennium the area was blighted and crime-ridden thanks to years of racist, regressive policy decisions from segregation to redlining. His plan was simple but incredibly effective. He spearheaded a campaign to revitalize the area by granting a limited number of 24-hour liquor licenses to clubs like Space. Dozens of venues rose up on and around 11th Street, including vast, multi-room clubs like Metropolis, live venues like Studio A and Grand Central, and more intimate spots like Vagabond. Sporadic police raids also gave the area a druggy, dangerous reputation, inadvertently raising its allure. 

    This reoccurring arc has led some people to conclude that cities and/or areas seem to want to follow a kind of binary outcome: they’re either dying or they’re too successful. Why can’t we just have urban homeostasis? I don’t think this is necessarily always the case. Cities go through cycles just like any other market. I also know that it’s complicated. But I do feel strongly that we need to be mindful that part of what makes cities such wonderful places is that they are factories for new ideas and creativity.

    I can’t remember when or exactly how he said it, but YouTuber Casey Neistat once described New York City as an incredible island (Manhattan?) where misfits from all over the world come to do whatever the hell they want. And that part of the reason for this is that nobody cares what you do, because everyone is just so damn busy. You could certainly argue that New York isn’t what it used to be. But the lesson here remains the same: Cities are at their best when they allow humans to create, build, experiment, and express themselves.

    And oftentimes a great place for that is in a space that nobody else wants.

  • New York City proposes a bounty for reporting bike-lane blockers

    The general rule when it comes to bike lanes is that, if you build them without some sort of grade-separation, at some point a car is going to park in them. But here are two possible solutions to this problem. The first is that you could build some sort of grade-separation that can’t be driven over. And the second is as follows:

    Now a New York City Council member is pushing a bill that would give civilians the power to report bike lane scofflaws, as well as vehicles that block entrances or exits of school buildings, sidewalks and crosswalks. New Yorkers who submit evidence of a parking violation can earn 25% of a proposed $175 ticket. The Department of Transportation would review the evidence to determine whether an infraction has occurred, according to the bill’s text.

    What this essentially does is decentralize rule enforcement by paying people to be rats. Off hand, I can’t think of any other cities that have done something like this and so I don’t know how effective it might actually be. But being a rat sounds like it could be a good paying job.

    Let’s assume that somebody decided to treat this as their full-time job and work 8 hours a day, Monday to Friday. And then let’s assume that they were able to rat out one person per hour. Here’s how much money they could make in a year:

    • $175 x 25% = $43.75 per illegal incident
    • $43.75 x 8 incidents per day = $350 per day
    • $350 per day x 5 days a week = $1,750 per week
    • $1,750 per week x 52 weeks = $91,000 per year

    Now, if the goal of this rat-people-out program is to ultimately change behaviors, then it might make sense to assume that your revenues would decline over time as more people start following the rules. Either way, something tells me that more than a few people would be happy to take on this job.

  • Community living rooms in New York City

    This is a great collection of third places or “community living rooms” in New York City. Simply speaking, a third place is any space where people hang out that isn’t their home and isn’t their place of work. Hence the third moniker. The most typical example is arguably the humble coffee shop. But what is clear from this thread list, is that a third place can take on many different permutations — everything from a bathhouse to an art library with the world’s largest collection of artist’s sketchbooks. What is also clear is that these are the kinds of spaces that really define a city. They create a sense of place, they give us community, and they help us with our sense of self — because they allow us to think things like, “I am the kind of person who hangs out and enjoys independent bookstores in the East Village.”

  • Super-prime home sales in New York and London

    Here’s what I can tell you this morning: Real estate development is a bit more fun when you don’t have to constantly worry about supply-chain issues, access to labor, high inflation, and regularly increasing interest rates. That said, if you just want to buy a super-prime property in one of the world’s preeminent global cities, things seem to be just fine:

    According to FT, both New York and London have continued to see a rise in super-prime sales this year and both have seen more of these sales in the first 8 months of 2022 compared to all of 2019 (before the pandemic). Note: These charts are showing home sales greater than US$10 million and greater than £5 million, respectively.

    On top of this, many or most of these buyers are, apparently, still able to access financing at LTVs of 100% (i.e. no money down). For what it’s worth, there is a London mortgage broker quoted in the article saying that he has arranged more 100% mortgages this year than in his entire 20-year career. Turns out that the best way to ensure access to debt is to not need it in the first place.

    Charts: FT

  • 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.

  • Paris vs. New York bike lanes

    It’s one thing to have bike lanes. And it’s another thing to have really generous bike lanes. The above video by Streetfilms does a good job of comparing Paris to New York City, and showing just how far Paris has come in terms of cycling infrastructure. Some of you might remember that in the fall of last year, Paris announced plans to become a “100% cycling city.” This was a follow-on to their plan vélo 2015-2020, which saw a doubling of the city’s bike lanes. The current plan, which covers 2021-2026, includes 130 km of new bike lanes and 52 km of pandemic lanes that have been (or will be) made permanent. But again, it’s one thing to have a lot of bike lanes. And it’s another thing to have a lot of wide bike lanes that look like the ones in this video.

  • 1970s New York, through the lens of a taxi driver

    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.

    Photo: Joseph Rodriguez

  • New York City is back

    So here’s the headline: More people are moving to Manhattan than before the pandemic. This is true. But an even more accurate description might be that New York City was losing people before the pandemic and it is still losing people. But things have rebounded since the lows of the pandemic and it is now losing less people. Here are two charts from Bloomberg:

    This is generally good news since the increased exodus (to places like Miami) led some to believe that one of the most important global cities in the world was now dying. I never thought that was the case. But there’s no arguing against the fact that the fastest growing cities in the US are the ones with more affordable housing and fewer constraints on new development.

  • New York City releases climate resilience plan

    New York City is projecting that Lower Manhattan is likely to see more frequent flooding by as early as the 2040s. This could move to monthly flooding by the 2050s and daily by the 2080s. These time horizons may seem like a ways away, but I’m personally going to try my damnedest to see the 2080s.

    In light of these projections, New York City released a new Financial District and Seaport Climate Resilience Master Plan at the end of last year. The plan is projected to cost somewhere between $5 to $7 billion and entails building out a new multilevel waterfront that extends the current shoreline into the East River by up to 200 feet.

    Here are a couple of renderings:

    The upper level will be elevated by about 15-18 feet (designed to protect against storms like Sandy) and the lowest level will be a continuous waterfront esplanade (designed to connect humans to the water). Overall, the plan encompasses about one mile of waterfront, running from The Battery to the Brooklyn Bridge.

    City building take times. In the case of this plan, it is building for the next century.

    For a copy of the full press release, click here.

    Images: NYC Economic Development Corporation