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: Urbanism

  • Walkable areas are a scarce commodity in cities

    According to this recent report by Smart Growth America, which looked at “walkable urbanism” in the largest 35 metro areas in the US, only about 1.2% of land is, on average, built out in this way. Everything else needs to be driven.

    But here’s the thing. Humans seem to really enjoy walkable urbanism, and will usually pay more for it:

    City dwellers will pay to live in a walkable location. Real estate in these areas averages a 34% price premium per square foot in for-sale housing and 41% for multifamily rental apartments.

    It also, by definition, punches above its weight:

    Walkable neighborhoods in just those 35 metro areas account for 19.1% of the total US real GDP and 6.8% of the total US population, by the researchers’ calculations.

    That’s how density works. You get to do more, with less.

    At the same time, not every place should be Midtown Manhattan (which the report labels as the highest walkable urban place with a floor area ratio of 40). There are a wide range of densities that will work, including modest ones (FARs between 1-3).

    Here in Toronto, many of our single-family home neighborhoods have densities that are zoned for a maximum FAR of 0.6, which is quite restrictive if you’re hoping to build something like a multi-unit building.

    This is, of course, the point. But imagine what all could be done here with even an incremental change.

  • No right on red, except with green arrow

    I have a road sign question for all of you today. Here is a photo (from Google) of Bloor Street West and Symington Avenue in Toronto. It is an offset intersection. And as you will see, there are signs saying no right-hand turns on red, “except with green arrow.”

    Also present at the intersection is a traffic light with the ability to communicate in four different ways: a green circle, a yellow circle, a red circle, and a green arrow pointing right. My question to all of you is this: when is it permissible to turn right?

    It is clearly not permissible to turn right when the light is red. But can you turn right with either a full green circle or a green right arrow, or can you only turn when there’s a green arrow pointing right? i.e. No right when there’s just a green circle.

    If you can, please leave a comment below. Depending on how this goes, I could be either winning a bet or losing a bet.

  • High Park vs. Central Park

    This compare-and-contrast tweet between Toronto’s High Park and New York’s Central Park was not meant to suggest that New York is a perfect comparable to appropriate (Toronto is not New York), or that foliage isn’t important in our urban environments. Instead, it was meant to highlight that:

    • The towers north of High Park (and north of Bloor Street) could almost certainly never be built in today’s planning environment. The recently built point towers exist because the slab towers were already there.
    • This condition of height/density tucked and setback off of main streets is something that you will find across Toronto, as well as in a number of other cities.
    • Sometimes it can be rightly argued that this is being done in order to preserve a fine-grained and pedestrian-scaled public realm, which is important. But in other cases, like the one above, it feels like a clear reluctance to accept big-city status and any sort of urban grandeur. Are we still trying to be a Victorian city?
    • Equally important in the design of public spaces are the edges and “walls” that frame it. And High Park’s edges need work. Why is there almost nowhere to go and hang out on the main edge of Toronto’s principal urban park? You have to go up to the Junction for that.
    • In general, the land around many of our higher-order transit stations is grossly underutilized. And this is a perfect example of that. What should happen here are some large-scale upzonings.

  • Yes, the most surveilled cities in the world are in China

    Toronto has a lot more CCTV cameras than I would have thought.

    According to this (2022?) data from Comparitech, there is estimated to be about 19,236 cameras installed around the Greater Toronto Area. With a population of around 6.31 million people, this translates into a per capita rate of 3.05 (CCTV cameras per 1,000 people). What this means is that there is almost surely footage of me enjoying a late-night shawarma sandwich after the bar somewhere on the streets of Toronto.

    In some ways, this is a high number of cameras. Tokyo, which is usually considered to be the largest metro area in the world with nearly 40 million people, only has 1.06 cameras per 1,000 people. Dhaka is 0.71. Sao Paulo is 1.04. Osaka is 1.57. And Montreal is 1.03. Though to be totally fair here, Rio de Janeiro is up at 3.34 (and it may be the most dangerous city mentioned in this post). Paris is 4.04. New York is 6.87. Los Angeles is 8.77. And London is 13.35.

    But where things get really exciting is in authoritarian places. Moscow is estimated to have 16.85 CCTV cameras per 1,000 people. And in China as a whole, there is estimated to be roughly 540 million cameras scattered around its cities, which works out to an average of 372.8 cameras for every 1,000 people. For a city like Shanghai, this crudely equals something like 10.6 million cameras.

    It turns out that surveillance is pretty important for things other than shawarma-eating videos:

    Vyborov wasn’t arrested that day, but the police informed him that he was under surveillance through Sfera, one of Moscow’s face recognition systems, for participating in unsanctioned rallies. Considered one of the most efficient surveillance systems, Sfera led to the detention of 141 people last year. “Facial recognition, and video cameras in general in a totalitarian state, are an absolute evil,” Vyborov says.

    Here’s the other thing. Safety is usually touted as the reason to have lots of cameras. But Comparitech’s data suggests that there’s an almost non-existent correlation between lots of cameras and lower crime. I mean, just look at Tokyo. It is basically the model megacity, and its per capita camera rate is only 1.06. The real utility, it would seem, is using cameras and face recognition software to restrict personal freedoms.

  • Bad and good street networks

    Let’s add some historical context to yesterday’s post about autonomous vehicles. As the regular non-autonomous version of cars started to infiltrate our cities in the early 20th century, largely following the creation of the mass-produced Ford Model T, there was a general view that cars were dangerous and a menace to cities. Arguably, not much has changed.

    So in the 1930s, the Federal Housing Authority decided to publish a pamphlet explaining what street networks it thought were suitable for this new emerging car world and which street networks were not. The exact terms that they used were “bad” and “good”, and here’s what that looked like (taken from this CNU article):

    The “bad” ones are largely how the US liked to design its cities before the arrival of the car. Some historic settlements, like Boston and Manhattan south of 14th street were based on different street logics, but as far back as the 1680s, William Penn had already started laying out a grid iron plan for Philadelphia. And in reality, this kind of street pattern goes all the way back to ancient cities.

    However, when the car arrived, these grid iron plans were thought to offer an inadequate amount of separation between people and machine. The solution was to optimize around the car and introduce a clear hierarchy of different streets. Big streets for moving cars quickly, and smaller streets, like cul-de-sacs, for people to live on.

    These “good” examples, of course, represent the modern suburb. But we now recognize that these types of street networks are unequivocally terrible for walkability, the environment, public health, social equity, and a whole host of other things. I mean, look at this extreme example of two suburban homes in Orlando whose backyards adjoin but are technically separated by 7 miles and a 20-minute drive!

    My point with all of this is that, for many/most at the time, this was progress. Cars were the future and there was optimism about the kind of freedoms and other benefits that they would bring to people. And this optimism is perhaps not all that different from what many people feel today, myself included, when it comes to autonomous vehicles.

    So on the one hand, you could point to the car and say, “look at all the damage that this thing did to our cities. Let’s not do that again. Autonomous vehicles must be stopped.” But that’s akin to wishing the car was never invented. Another option is to point to the negative externalities associated with the car and say, “look at what we’ve done. We can do better. Let’s make our cities better.”

    Positive change, no matter how late, is always a possibility.

  • The Tokyo Toilet – Part 2

    You can tell a lot about a place by the quality of its public toilets. I don’t know about you, but if I’m at a restaurant and the toilets are filthy, I automatically assume that the kitchen is at least as filthy.

    And so what does it say about Japan that it decided to hire the country’s leading architects to design 17 new public toilets in Tokyo?

    I first wrote about “The Tokyo Toilet” back in the summer of 2021. But now that the majority of them have been constructed, I figured it was time to revisit the project.

    The two toilets designed by Shigeru Ban are particularly noteworthy in that they are clear glass boxes that become automatically opaque when in use. This was done so you can see if there’s anyone lurking inside.

    I also love this one by Kazoo Sato.

    But of course, all of them are remarkable and all of them are probably better than the general level of public architecture that you’ll find in most other cities.

  • Istanbul may have the worst traffic congestion in the world

    I just learned about the TomTom Traffic Index today. It covers 404 cities across 58 countries, and uses anonymized traffic data from more than 600 million drivers (people who use TomTom’s tech) to come up with a list of the cities with the worst traffic congestion.

    Here’s the global top 10 (for 2021):


    And here’s the North American top 10 (also for 2021):

    The way to interpret these congestion level percentages is to think of them as additional time over and above baseline free-flowing traffic times. For example, a 62% congestion level for Istanbul, means that a trip that would take 30 minutes without any traffic congestion, will instead take, on average, 18.6 minutes longer (0.62 x 30 minutes).

    We all like to complain about traffic in our home city, but these percentages certainly help to put things into a global perspective.

  • F-150 trucks are powerful and rugged

    It is perhaps well known that the Ford F-Series has been the best selling vehicle for the last 41 years in the US. In 2022, sales surpassed 640,000 trucks, meaning one was sold about every 49 seconds. Of course, much has been written about what this means for overall safety in our cities. According to Axios, the average 8 year old is completely out of view when in front of an F-150. And the death rate of car drivers colliding with a truck versus even an SUV, looks something like this:

    Another important thing to point out is what has happened to the bed sizes on these trucks: they have continuously gotten smaller. Between 1961 and 1979, the bed portion occupied 64% of the length of the truck. But starting in 2021, the bed had gotten down to 37%. The reality, at least according to this consumer survey, is that the most frequent use case for these trucks is actually just “shopping/errands.” It is not hauling or towing.

    So like all cars, and most things, probably the real reason these trucks are so popular is that they evoke a particular self-image. In this case, it is something about appearing “powerful” and “rugged.” Lots of people clearly want these adjectives. But even if powerful and rugged aren’t what you’re going after, it is almost certain that you have simply chosen different words and found different ways to communicate that self-image.

  • Victoria, BC passes missing middle housing initiative

    The City of Victoria, BC did a good thing last week: It passed its “Missing Middle Housing Initiative“, which means that up 6 dwelling units (their language not mine) will soon be permissible on every single-family lot in the city, and up to 12 dwelling units will be permissible in “corner townhouses”. These land uses changes come into effect on Sunday, March 12, 2023 (45 days after adoption).

    Here on the blog, we’ve been talking about this shift toward intensifying our single-family neighborhoods for many years. And momentum clearly continues to grow. At face value, this appears to be one of the more enlightened moves by a city: 6 homes and 12 homes. Though these headline numbers may have something to do with the average lot sizes in Victoria. Either way, the devil is in the details. And here are some of those details:

    What is positive to see is that a number of other zoning requirements have been updated. Because it’s not enough to just say, “Hey, we’re going to allow more homes on each lot. There, we’ve done something. Developers, go and do that.” Here, the allowable height has been increased, setbacks have been decreased, and the floor space ratio (site density) has been increased from 0.5 to 1.1 (assuming you do at least one amenity contribution).

    I don’t know if this is exactly right and if it’s everything that developers will need in order to start building a lot more missing middle housing in Victoria. (If you’re a local developer, please let me know in the comment section below.) But I think it’s certainly a step in the right direction.