On Monday, Christopher Hume of the Toronto Star responded to the recent backlash against Sidewalk Toronto with a piece called, Anger over Google’s vision for Toronto waterfront is misguided. The below excerpt is what I was trying to diplomatically allude to with my post on… Read More
Bloomberg recently published a good summary of Zillow’s business and their move into algorithm home buying and flipping. (They are trying to avoid the “flipping” moniker because of the negative connotations associated with it.) Zillow started buying homes directly from owners last spring. They charge… Read More
Yesterday’s post was about Amazon pulling out of NYC. Today I thought we’d talk about another contentious city building debate that is happening closer to home. This week Sidewalk Toronto announced that it would like to expand its development focus beyond Quayside to the entire… Read More
As I am sure you have all heard, there’s a lot of debate in New York right now (city and state) about whether they should reject Amazon’s decision to open up a new headquarters in Queens. Urbanist Richard Florida has been arguing that one of… Read More
Perhaps for obvious reasons, I am interested in how important issues get debated. I have written before about how I think the community engagement process for new developments is largely broken. I think it naturally incents certain kinds of feedback. Recently, I’ve been playing around… Read More
According to Amazon’s recent annual 10-K filing, the company leased and owned (most of their space is leased) about 288,419,000 square feet of space around the world at the end of 2018. Of this number, about 80% is used for “fulfillment, data centers, and other.”… Read More
This Toronto Life article about a 32-year-old who has managed to buy 10 homes in the city is very Toronto Life. At a time where many young people are struggling to afford housing, here is a millennial who has bought 10 of them (albeit with… Read More
I finally did it. Over the weekend I ported this blog over from Tumblr to WordPress. I had been thinking about doing this for a while, but kept putting it off (1) because of the work involved and (2) because I was worried about my… Read More
I’m working on integrating an iPad (back) into my workflow as a developer. I used an iPad 2 (c. 2011) while I was completing my MBA. I mainly used it for taking notes and saving money on hard copy textbooks. But after it got old and painfully… Read More
