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: Places

  • Unlocking micro-spaces and micro-businesses

    Asian cities will often have buildings that look something like this:

    In this particular case — Tokyo — the building type is referred to as zakkyo. And apparently, it is something that emerged over time:

    Another is the city’s iconic multistory zakkyo buildings covered in neon signs, like those lining the famous Yasukuni Avenue, which house a spectacular variety of businesses. Zakkyo largely started out as office buildings and transformed over time to house everything from mahjong parlors to karaoke boxes. Almazán and McReynolds point out that these buildings offer a density of destinations rarely found in the West because they offer a vertical—not just a horizontal— dimension to walkability, with elevators that open onto the street and take customers directly up to businesses. Zakkyo are on narrow lots that pull pedestrians along the streets that they line. Unlike larger U.S. office buildings, their small lot sizes also facilitate the easy reuse of zakkyo space for different purposes.

    Okay, so small lot sizes seem to help. But what else is needed? Is there a world where this is possible anywhere in the West? It’s probably hard to imagine. Conventional real estate wisdom would tell you that multi-storey retail buildings don’t work.

    But they work in Tokyo, and probably for two reasons. The first is density. Tokyo is dense and I am told that zakkyo buildings tend to emerge around train stations, where foot traffic is high and people are generally looking for things to do and/or consume.

    The second has to do with rules. Tokyo has an overall policy framework that allows for micro-spaces and micro-businesses. Said oppositely, Tokyo hasn’t erected so many barriers that the only way to open a business is with scale and lots of money.

    Liquor licenses are a perfect example:

    So maybe these are possible in the West, after all. Assuming you have any sort of meaningful pedestrian density, the only real prerequisite might be to just get out of the way of small business.

    And I think this is a powerful way to think about cities. We often think about doing new things to elicit certain outcomes. But what outcomes are we missing out on and not seeing because of the rules that we’ve already put in place?

  • Salt Lake City wants to build a new linear park around downtown

    It is well known that Salt Lake City has some of the biggest blocks and widest streets in the United States. This is typically a challenge if you’re trying to create a walkable urban environment; however, it can also be an opportunity, because it means you have a lot of public space that you can do other things with.

    It is for these reasons that SLC is working on something called the Green Loop:

    And the idea is to turn a ring of downtown streets into a new linear park that looks something like this:

    More specifically, the Green Loop wants to do the following five things (copied verbatim):

    • Develop a robust downtown urban forest
    • Serve as an active transportation corridor for walking and biking
    • Improve water quality through stormwater management
    • Create inviting social spaces that provide a variety of amenities and attractions
    • Create public front yards and gardens within the downtown that support the needs of all users

    In my mind, albeit as a non-Salt Laker, this has the potential to be truly transformational for the city and as impactful as the High Line was for New York. So if you are a local, I would encourage you to complete this short project survey. It’s open until Nov 30.

  • New York City has a lot of construction scaffolding

    More specifically, it has this many:

    This, according to a NYC government website, equals 8,660 active shed permits covering 1,959,444 linear feet. And on average, these construction sheds are erected for 493 days. If you’ve been to New York recently, this will all sound right to you.

    I thought I had read somewhere that this has to do with a property tax benefit. Something about if you keep your hoarding up after construction completion, you can avoid immediate reassessment.

    But according to some sources, the proliferation of sheds is mostly driven by the city’s Facade Inspection & Safety Program, which requires that all buildings taller than 6 floors have their facades closely inspected every 5 five years.

    So presumably, keeping these up for an extended period of time is the less costly and less risky option.

  • Paris on top of Toronto

    There are about 2.1 million people who live in Paris (2023 figure).

    The metro area is, of course, much larger with over 13 million people. But if you look at Paris proper — that being the 20 arrondissements within the Boulevard Périphérique — it’s the 2.1 million number.

    The footprint of this area is 105 km2, and so that means that Paris has an average population density within its administrative boundaries of just over 20,000 people per km2.

    This is about 4.5x more dense than the City of Toronto as a whole. Which is why if you overlay the outline of Paris on top of Toronto, as Gil Meslin has done over here, you get this:

    To be fair, there are pockets of Toronto that are very dense, even by Paris standards. North St. James Town, for example, was estimated at over 44,000 people per km2 back in 2016. But generally speaking, Toronto is not that.

    And Gil’s maps do an excellent job of demonstrating it.

  • The case for bottom-up planning

    Many of you probably didn’t click through on this link in yesterday’s post, but it was a link to a book called Emergent Tokyo — Designing the Spontaneous City. What this book is largely about is the idea that Tokyo — usually considered to be the largest urban region in the world — is more the result of bottom-up actions than top-down actions. In other words, it is a kind of complex and self-organizing system.

    Some of you may be reading this and thinking that the result would be chaos. But the opposite is, in fact, true. Despite being the largest urban agglomeration in the world, Tokyo is consistently viewed as one of the most livable big cities in the world. How is that possible?

    One topic that we’ve been talking about on this blog recently is the planning approach of mandating ground-floor retail in new developments. While certainly good intentioned, this is one example of top-down planning. We are saying, “retail needs to go here because.”

    The problem, as we have talked about, is that the market may not want it. It may not actually be viable or desirable. Of course, it is a delicate situation. Because if you don’t provision for it, then you might block it from ever being possible on sites where it clearly makes sense. (We spoke specifically about this, here.)

    There is also the opposite question of: where are we not allowing retail?

    Maybe there are places where retail activity would be viable today, except it’s currently not permitted. One concrete example of this is Toronto’s laneways. Right now, we only allow residential (throughout our “Neighbourhoods”). But there many people, including myself and planner Blair Scorgie, who have been arguing that they should be mixed-use:

    Would office and retail uses actually work in Toronto’s residential laneways? I frankly don’t know. Because they’re not allowed today, it’s largely impossible to know. If we allowed these uses and nothing happened, then we’d have a better idea that there’s little demand for it. (I say a better idea because there still could be other obstacles in the way.)

    On the other hand if we decided to mandate non-residential uses in our laneways and nobody did anything, two things might then happen. One, we’d be similarly led to believe that there’s little to no demand. And two, we’d probably be sacrificing the residential use, for which we can say today there is clear demand.

    There are also the considerations that demand will almost certainly change over time and be inconsistent across different locations. For instance, maybe retail doesn’t work in this laneway, but it will work in that laneway. Can we actually plan for this?

    Top-down approaches generally assume that we know all or many of the answers. It presumes that we know that this street should have ground-floor retail and this street should not. It’s also about control. More bottom-up approaches admit that it’s impossible to plan for everything and that there could be latent potential that we’re not even thinking about.

    Of course, there is something naturally unsettling about this approach because it is, by definition, unknowable. And it relinquishes a certain amount of control. Maybe a restaurant will appear here or maybe it won’t. Maybe someone will open a small office in this laneway or maybe they won’t. Either way, the potential for change exists.

    But I think this should be seen as empowering, transparent, and highly efficient. It is a way of reducing the barriers to entry and allowing more urban creativity and ambition to shrine through. I believe, for example, that if we made it easier, cheaper, and possible to open a small restaurant (perhaps in a laneway), we would have more and overall better restaurants in the city.

    And as we have seen in the case of Tokyo, the result of more flexibility is not necessarily chaos. It can be a highly livable city that has people wondering, “how did they manage to plan such a large city so well?”

    Photo by Kentaro Toma on Unsplash

  • What’s real anymore?

    Generative AI has made it a lot easier to make things up using software like Photoshop. This, of course, isn’t a new thing. But it has gotten significantly easier for people like me who aren’t experts in photo editing.

    Here are two examples that I created this morning. The first is a photo of me from last summer in the Salt Flats of Utah:

    And here I am again after adding new clothes, a dog friend, a couple taking photos, a more impressive backdrop, and some sort of body of water in front of me:

    The second is a photo from Paris:

    Now here it is again with tall buildings in the background, glass storefronts, a few neon signs, string lights above the middle of the street, a bollard blocking car access, and a few more people:

    These aren’t entirely perfect if you’re really paying attention. But for the most part, I think they’re pretty convincing — especially the second one.

    Generated images are only going to get better going forward and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. But we do have to start training ourselves to question whether something is real or doctored. It’s already hard to tell.

  • Don’t screw it up, New York

    New York City is set to become the first in the US to implement a congestion charge (a form of road pricing). I first wrote about this back in 2018, and then again in 2019, but now it is looking more and more like it may actually happen sometime next year.

    I think all urbanists agree that this is an important step in the right direction. But some are now worried that New York isn’t going about it in the right way. Here is an excerpt from a recent Vice article by Aaron Gordon:

    With all these plans, you could be excused for thinking New York is doing congestion pricing—a potentially transformative policy that would be a first in the nation—right by not only charging drivers to access some of the densest, most valuable land in the world, but also giving them alternatives. Unfortunately, New York isn’t doing that, and in fact looks set to completely screw up congestion pricing so badly it may discredit the policy in a way that makes it harder for other cities to adopt it. Rather than approaching it as a lynchpin to a wide-ranging effort to reshape Manhattan’s relationship to the private car, congestion pricing has become solely about money—specifically, paying off enough of the credit-card bill New York has run up with a variety of ill-conceived and poorly-executed projects that it can get more credit cards.

    You can rightly say that this is decades in the making. Mayor Bloomberg first proposed the idea back in 2007, and I’m sure there were others before him with a similar idea.

    So Gordon raises a valid point: It’s important that NYC gets this right. Otherwise, it’s going to be that much more difficult for other North American cities to even think about implementing road pricing.

    For the full Vice article, click here.

  • Paris in August 🇫🇷

    We’re no longer in Paris. We’ve been back in Toronto for about 3 weeks now. But the pictures live on and I finally got around to processing all of the ones that I took on my Fujifilm X-T3 (23mm f/2).

  • Venice announces new “entrance fee”

    Over the weekend, we spoke about using road pricing as a way to correct supply and demand imbalances on city roads and highways. Because it turns out that when roads, or anything else for that matter, are free, people tend to use them a lot more. It’s why when you suddenly submeter utilities in an apartment building, consumption tends to drop off significantly. Now it’s no longer “free”.

    It’s for this exact reason that Venice — a city that has been complaining about too many tourists for many years — has decided to implement a new entrance fee. Starting spring 2024, day trippers will have to pay €5 to enter the “old city” of Venice.

    If you own a home there, you’re exempt because presumably you’re already paying property taxes. And if you’re staying overnight, you’re also exempt, because presumably you’re going to be paying whatever hotel taxes the city levies. But if you’re just coming in for the day, you’re going to need to pay.

    Now, I don’t know if €5, structured in this way, is going to fully address the city’s overtourism concerns. Maybe it needs to be a lot more. But it is a step in the right direction. If you have too much demand for a certain amount of supply, you can generally lower demand by increasing the price. Perhaps the only exception is a Birkin bag. Apparently you can charge any price for these.

    Photo by Martin Katler on Unsplash

  • New York City enacts strict short-term rental law

    This past week, New York City enacted a new short-term rental registration law that is not very friendly toward platforms like Airbnb and VRBO. Here are some of the new rules:

    • All hosts must register with the city
    • No more than 2 paying guests can stay in a short-term rental at one time, regardless of the size of the home (does this mean families are excluded?)
    • Hosts and visitors must leave all doors inside the dwelling unlocked (presumably this is to stop people from creating self-contained suites within a larger home)
    • And the host must be physically present while the dwelling is being rented

    So in a way, this takes us back to the original use case of Airbnb: “Hey, I have extra space in my home. Would you like to rent this mostly clean air mattress in my living room and be my roommate for a bit?” Of course, this is not how most people like to Airbnb today. And so this is also a kind of ban on short-term rentals in New York City.

    It’s certainly stricter than the regulations we have in Toronto. Here, it must be your principal residence. Meaning you’re only legally allowed to operate one short-term rental at a time. But you don’t need to be physically present while the home is being rented. If you want to earn some extra cash while you’re away in Rio de Janeiro for New Year’s Eve, you can do that.

    However, the rules are still fairly strict. For instance, if you have a basement apartment or a laneway suite on your property, you are not technically permitted to short-term rent these dwellings, even if you live in the main portion of the home. It has to be your exact principal residence.

    Presumably the intent behind this is to not remove any housing from the long-term rental market. And if it’s your principal residence, then yeah, there’s no net loss. Though this feels like an overreach to me. It’s the same property and a homeowner could very easily decide to not even do a long-term rental in these secondary suites.

    But overall, I guess it’s still slightly more flexible than forcing hostel-like short-term rentals. Long live the hotel?