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

  • PAPILIO: Wind-powered streetlight

    Well here is a clever idea by Berlin designer Tobias Trübenbacher. It is a wind-powered streetlight — one that also detects when people are nearby and emits an insect-friendly light spectrum. Lots of cities already rely (partially) on solar powered lights and signage. But that doesn’t always work if the street doesn’t get a lot of direct sunlight or if you happen to be in a darker city. So perhaps wind is the answer. I could imagine this working very well here in Toronto in the middle of the winter at the intersection of Bay and King. And if you remember my post from earlier in the week about a roadmap to net zero energy, it is pretty clear that both solar and wind electricity are going to need to become far more prominent in our cities.

    If you can’t see the embedded video above, click here.

  • Experiential art center opens in Miami’s Allapattah neighborhood

    A new 50,000 square foot experiential art center (EAC to those in the know), called Superblue, has just opened up in Miami’s Allapattah neighborhood. It includes installations by Tokyo-based teamLab, Amsterdam’s DRIFT, James Turrell (amazing), as well as many others.

    This is noteworthy because experiential art is both fun (and Instagrammable) and because it is another example of the continuing rise of Allapattah. Art, design, and culture are usually pretty good for city building.

    At the same time, the New York Times raises an interesting question: “Is this a forward step in the march of modernism or a debasement of art into theme-park entertainment?” Arthur Lubow goes on to say:

    The popularity of this genre is driven by contradictory desires, as demonstrated memorably by the line of visitors in 2019 who waited up to six hours for a one-minute stay amid the twinkling lights in Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirror room at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea. Malnourished by their phones and computer screens, people yearn for real-life visceral experiences. And yet they remain stuck in the gravitational pull of virtual reality: The experiences they seek are ones they can record on their phone cameras and post on social media.

    I get this logic.

    But my own view is that just because something has commercial appeal, it shouldn’t mean that the art is any less serious. And just because people want to photograph and share it, doesn’t necessarily mean that they aren’t appreciating it in the same way as someone just standing around and pondering it.

    Perhaps this is a good time to mention that Snap has also just announced the next version of its Spectacles. These ones come with the promise of augmented reality. What is real anymore?

  • An imperfect laneway worth replicating

    We stumbled on Bar Volo last night on our evening walk (pictured above). It’s on St. Nicholas Street, which I guess is technically a street. But it feels and acts more like a laneway. I was naturally pretty excited by this discovery and so I tweeted this out. I was then called out for glorifying this laneway because: 1) this is only one small storefront, 2) the rest of the laneway is kind of pooey, and 3) there are other, better, examples of complete laneways in the city such as throughout Toronto’s Yorkville neighborhood. Okay.

    What got me excited is that this is a recent development — there’s a residential building above this welcoming bottle shop — that managed to successfully create fine-grained urbanism and activate a laneway frontage that could have very easily gone underutilized. Now imagine if every new development with some sort of laneway frontage did things as meaningful as this. Piece by piece, we would be building another layer to our city. (I like to think that we’re contributing to this vision with our laneway towns at Junction House. They are, by the way, 100% sold out. Go laneway living.)

    It’s easy to get excited by the bigger urban moves. A new tall building or a Ferris wheel on the waterfront, perhaps. But sometimes the answer is as simple as a small brewery, a narrow and imperfect laneway, and a roll up garage door.

  • Houses with large yards and where you have to drive to places

    The National Association of Realtors in the US has a “Community and Transportation Preference Survey” that it conducts usually every two years. Last year (2020), wasn’t supposed to be a survey year, but given the pandemic, they decided to run it in June and see if people’s preferences had changed at all during that time.

    Last June feels like eons ago to me and I bet that if you asked people how they were feeling today it may be slightly different. Nonetheless, the survey asked 2,000 adults from the fifty-largest metro areas a bunch of questions about where and how they live and where and how they might want to live in the future.

    The topline results can be found over here. But for a bit of context, 58% of respondents were people who lived in a single-family detached house; 26% of respondents were people who lived in a building with two or more apartments and condos; and the rest of the respondents were split across townhouses, rowhouses, mobile homes, trailers, and other. (I’m kind of curious about the 2% who answered with other.)

    One of the questions that I thought might be interesting to this audience is this one here about housing preferences going forward:

    The question asks the respondents to imagine that they are moving into another home. It then asks about priorities and, more specifically, about their preferred trade-off between amenities and walkability versus a large detached house with a big yard.

    Overall the split in preferences has remained close to 50/50 over the last three surveys. But there appears to be a small uptick toward large homes and less amenities. I wouldn’t be surprised if the pandemic contributed to this thinking last summer. But who knows if this will persist. At the same time, actions speak louder than words.

    My response to the above question would be less space, greater walkability, and more amenities. I have no desire to live in a low-rise grade-related house, especially one that is disconnected from the city. I like urbanity. What about you?

  • Cities in the 2020s

    Since the beginning of this year, the London School of Economics has been running a debate series called, Cities in the 2020s: How are cities responding to profound global change? The next event is about localizing transport and it’s scheduled for May 20, 2021. If you’d like to attend, click here. It’s free and open to all. The one thing I would add is that I am getting the strong sense right now — as cities, other than Toronto, begin to reopen — that people are starting to remember just how much more fruitful in-person interactions are compared to being on screen. There’s no comparison. In fact, earlier today I had in-person work interaction that resulted in a positive outcome that I am certain would not have happened otherwise. And as an ENTJ (business school made me take these personality tests), I find that I derive a lot of my energy from being around other people. As long as these sorts of things remain true, I believe that we will stay tethered to our cities and reliant on things like mass transit.

  • Make your voice heard in the City of Toronto’s “Garden + Suites” housing survey

    As many of you know, Toronto currently allows “laneway suites” across the entire city on an as-of-right basis. What this means is that no variances or special planning permissions are generally required to build. Assuming you meet the by-law, you can go straight to a building permit.

    This is how Mackay Laneway House was built and, though it required an extra layer of approvals from the forestry department because of a large on-site tree, getting a building permit was relatively straight forward. I think it took between 6-8 weeks from initial submission.

    As part of the City’s efforts to increase overall housing supply, another form of accessory dwelling unit is currently being studied: garden suites. Public consultations are now underway and, from what I have heard, the hope is to make these similarly as-of-right before the end of the year. Hopefully it’ll be earlier.

    I think this will be a positive thing for Toronto and so I would encourage all of you to complete the online garden suite survey that the City has open until June 1, 2021. Public consultation is an important part of the planning process and too often it is the voices of a few representing the views of many.

    So if you’ve got 5 minutes, now is your chance to speak up.

  • In support of rubber chicken

    This morning I attended ULI Toronto’s annual “Meet the Chief Planners” event. (Some of my random tweets from the morning can be found here.) Now in its 7th year, it is a great event where all of the chief city planners from around the Greater Golden Horseshoe area come together with professionals from the land use community to network and discuss the future of our cities.

    Normally it happens in the evening over dinner and drinks, which is how I attended last year right before our first lockdown (we were at the elbow bump and foot tap stage of the pandemic). But this year it was of course online.

    First, I would like to say thank you to Multiplex Construction Canada (our partner on Junction House) for the invite. And secondly, I would like to say kudos to Richard Joy and the rest of ULI Toronto for coordinating such a great event with over 400 virtual attendees.

    However, the main point that I would like to make today is that I don’t know how anyone can attend a virtual conference and believe that this is some sort of “new norm.” I don’t know about all of you, but I am ready to go back to rubber chicken dinners and too many glasses of affordably priced wine — pronto.

    I say this not to criticize any of the groups that are working hard today to organize virtual events. I am a big fan of ULI and the work that they do. I would encourage all of you involved in the built environment to join immediately if you’re not already members.

    Instead, I say this as yet another piece of evidence for why I won’t stop writing and talking about the resilience of our cities. Video calls are such an awful substitute for sitting around a table with people and breaking bread. It’s not even close.

    And so as I sat at my home office desk this morning, listening to the conference and eating McDonald’s hotcakes (because, hey, Uber Eats and because, hey, it’s Friday), I couldn’t help but be reminded of how bullish I am on cities and city life. This, I thought to myself, is why cities are such a centralizing force.

    Ultimately, it is also why groups like the Urban Land Institute are so important. It is because our cities matter a great deal and because they’re not going anywhere. If you aren’t sick of me talking about the resilience of cities, you can also find me in this recent RENX article called, “Toronto residential tower boom shows no signs of slowing.”

  • Placemaking as economic development engine

    Earlier this year, the first phase of The Underline opened up in Miami’s Brickell neighborhood. Designed by James Corner Field Operations, The Underline is an eventual 10-mile linear park that will live underneath the city’s elevated Metrorail and run from the Miami River all the way south to Dadeland South Station.

    The first phase — called Brickell Backyard — is the shortest phase at only 0.5 miles. But it cuts through one of the densest parts of the city, if not the densest. Total construction costs for this phase came in at $16.524 million and here’s where that funding came from (source is The Underline):

    $7,688,760 Miami-Dade County
    $1,944,000 FDOT TAP Grant
    $2,000,000 State of Florida
    $4,871,690 City of Miami
    $19,808 FDOT

    The Underline is clearly looking to the example of New York’s High Line, which was also designed by Field Operations. And for good reason: The High Line is a shining example of placemaking as economic development engine.

    The first two phases of The High Line cost around $153 million to construct. But as of 2014 (when I wrote about it here) it was already attracting some 5 million visitors a year and was believed to be responsible for about $2.2 billion in new economic activity. I’m sure the numbers are much higher today.

    As city builders, we are always looking for ways to create value and spur economic development. But it’s perhaps important to keep in mind that the underlying goal isn’t all that complicated: Create cool places where people want to be.

    Images: The Underline

  • Where Americans moved over the last year

    According some recent data from the US Census Bureau and USPS (via this CityLab article), the number of Americans who registered (between March 2020 and February 2021) that they were making a permanent move somewhere else, only increased by about 3%. And the vast majority of people that did move tended to simply spread out and move within the same metro area — about 84%. About 7.5% moved within the same state. And about 6% moved to some other top 50 metro area in the US.

    Some are of the opinion that these moves to the outskirts of cities would have happened regardless. The pandemic simply sped things up. Perhaps. But whatever the case may be, CityLab and others have argued that an “urban exodus” is likely the wrong way to describe what is happening. Despite reports that everybody seems to be moving to Texas and Florida (yes, Miami saw a spike), most people are simply spreading out in geographies where they already happened to live.

    The notable exceptions are the Bay Area and New York. San Francisco and San Jose — both of which usually register as being two of the most expensive housing markets in the US — saw permanent moves increase by 23% and 17%, respectively. Compared to other metro areas in the US, these figures stand out. (I assume this data is collected after somebody goes to the post office and says that they want to change their address forever.)

    But we are already seeing net outflows from San Jose and San Francisco start to taper off (see above). It’s also important to keep in mind that these cities were losing people well before the pandemic started. They are expensive places. And the fastest growing cities tend to be ones that sprawl, have a more elastic housing supply, and are consequently more affordable. That said, I suspect we’ll see this tapering off continue. The “urban exodus” isn’t going to be what it’s cracked up to be.

    Images: CityLab

  • Nearly half of the world’s population now lives in a country with a fertility rate below replacement levels

    Prior to COVID, many projections had the world’s population plateauing sometime in the second half of the 21st century. This is expected to happen because about half of the world’s population now lives in a country where the fertility rate is less than the replacement rate of 2.1 children for every woman. See above chart from The Economist.

    At the start of the pandemic, there was talk of a possible COVID baby boom. People were/are stuck at home and so that would surely translate into more sex among partners. But that doesn’t appear to have been the case for many countries. According to The Economist, births fell by 15% in China last year. The same drop was recorded in the United States last year between February and November.

    Because of this trend, the above projections are now being adjusted and pulled forward, with some predicting that the world’s population could plateau as early as the 2050s. That’s only about 30 years from now, which means that quite a few of us could end up living in a world with a declining population. This is likely to have both positive and negative consequences.

    There are nearly 8 billion people in the world today with China and India being the countries with the greatest numbers. But it’s interesting to consider how recent this figure really is (compounding takes time to gain momentum).

    The world didn’t hit a billion people until the 19th century, and the second billion was only reached by the 1920s, which in the grand scheme of things, isn’t that long ago. Since then the global population has exploded with about 6 billion people being added in only the last 100 years. That’s pretty wild when you think about it.

    P.S. I recently discovered a site called outline.com. It allows you to read, highlight, and annotate articles that you find online. But it also seems to allow you to read articles behind paywalls. Perhaps some of you will find that useful.

    Chart: The Economist