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

  • The car revolution is being powered by software

    Frederic Filloux publishes a regular newsletter called the Monday Note. It’s generally all about tech and new emerging business models. His latest post, called “Code, on wheels,” is about Tesla and the software revolution that is currently underway in the car industry. And it’s a good reminder of just how unique Tesla appears to be as a car company and how software is bound to infiltrate all aspects of our economy. Already you’re hearing people make a distinction around “pure” software companies. This is necessary because of how ubiquitous it has become.

    Here is a a longish excerpt from Filloux’s article:

    But the ultimate leap in value will be the creation of an application ecosystem. The limit will only be the imagination of app creators. As an example, airport operators are likely to develop apps to manage car traffic and passenger flows. Here is a use case: Your flight departing from San Jose Airport leaves in an hour. Your dual app system — one in your phone, the other in the car — checks the flight status, the gate, and the traffic. It notifies you when it’s time to leave. Once in the vicinity of the airport, the app guides you to the parking space nearest to the gate. An alternative and slightly more futuristic scenario involves you dropping your car in front of the terminal, then letting the autopilot send the car to the long-term parking lot a few miles away (this will soon become feasible as geofenced environments such as airports will be well-suited for Level 4 autonomous driving).

    Again, this implies major changes in the way car software is currently handled. These scenarios require the car and the phone apps working seamlessly, exchanging data in real-time with the airlines, the airport, the navigation system of the car, the parking infrastructure, and eventually, the autopilot. We are not there yet, but by that time, the dust will have settled: either carmakers will have developed their own OS — along with the SDKs to foster the development of third-party apps — and/or, tech giants will have taken-over, leveraging their current market positions in the phone sector to impose their own norms. I always thought that Apple had that in mind when it hired legions of engineers for its Titan project and filed applications for self-driving cars to the California Department of Motor Vehicles. I doubt that they completely gave up on the idea of replicating what they achieved for the 500 billion smartphone market with the 3 trillion dollar car sector.

    There are many in the planning world who are quick to dismiss autonomous electric vehicles as being more of the same. They’re still cars, right? For better or for worse, the internal combustion engine was massively transformational to cities — just as previous advances in transportation were. But what comes next is still mostly unknown because, even if you assume that autonomy is a foregone conclusion, it’s unclear how this and an app ecosystem could change how “cars” function in our cities. What will be the spatial impacts?

    It is, however, clear to me that when things do start to really change, it will be because of software.

    Photo by Jannis Lucas on Unsplash

  • Non-consensus thinking

    The venture capital industry likes to talk about the importance of investing in ideas that are and turn out to be both non-consensus and successful. The idea here is that if an idea or opportunity is already consensus, then there’s too much money flooding into that space and it becomes too difficult to make money. This is particularly true in venture capital where a select few companies usually end up generating most of the returns. This is a high risk business. Supposedly, even the best VCs end up having to write off a big portion of their deals.

    But I don’t think that this logic need only apply to venture capital. In real estate development, you are often faced with similar situations. For example, if an area is already consensus — that is, it is already considered to be highly desirable — then capital is going to naturally flow into it and land prices will be relatively high. These high land prices might be justified by the revenue side of your pro forma, or they might not be. I know many developers who avoid “core” locations simply because the land is too much and the margins are too little.

    On the other hand, if an area is non-consensus — that is, you’re not sure people will want to rent or buy new space in the area — then the land prices should reflect this. But here’s the thing. What you’re doing is trading, among other things, a lower land price for greater market risk. Because the non-consensus bet could turn out to be either successful or unsuccessful. People will either want to occupy space here or they won’t. And remember, by definition, it being non-consensus means that most people believe they won’t — or at least not at the prices you might need in order to make the math work.

    What all of this means is that if you’re right about something that most people think is wrong, then you have the opportunity to do quite well. (Though I am not suggesting that you need to follow this framework in all situations.) This is on my mind right now because it feels to me that there are certain consensus opinions emerging as a result of this pandemic. For example, opinions around the demise of office space and the demise of downtown living. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that I think these death-of-the-city predictions are largely bullshit.

    I could be wrong. Or I could be right.

  • Azaleas — L-shaped infill housing

    This is an interesting infill housing project in Villa Allende, Argentina. Designed by Studio LZ, the community contains seven homes, built across a 600 square meter site. Each L-shaped home is 63 square meters and hugs a private courtyard space (many of which have an outdoor BBQ). On the main floor of each home are the kitchen and living areas. And on the second floor are two bedrooms, as well as a second bathroom.

    It’s a simple but clever design. Looking at a plan of the project, you can see that, despite its compactness, the L-shaped houses have been arranged in such a way that there are no direct facing conditions. The courtyards and window exposures alternate. It’s almost as if they are Tetris pieces that have been pulled apart. The result is a dense community that still manages to offer some of the benefits of low-rise housing.

    Photos by Gonzalo Viramonte

  • The Copenhagen kolonihave

    Well this is an interesting concept. One part allotment garden and one part summer home. Copenhagen’s kolonihave is a community of small homes and gardens within biking distance of Copenhagen’s city center. A place to get away and maybe plant some fresh mint for mojitos. It shares some similarities with the Toronto Islands (land trust) in that the owners own their home, but lease the land. Except in the case of Toronto you’re not allowed to use your island residence as a summer home. If you want to live on the islands, you need to tough out the winters and make it your principal residence. Regardless of the ownership structure, there is something clearly endearing about these small homes and gardens. And I bet that there would be a lot of demand for something like this if it could be done at any sort of scale.

  • Before and after: Sugar Beach turns 10 years old

    One of my favorite public spaces in the city is easily Sugar Beach at the foot of Jarvis Street. So I couldn’t resist sharing this before and after tweet by Waterfront Toronto. Sugar Beach turns 10 years old next week. It’s nearly a teenager.

    For those of you who were around and paying attention a decade ago, there was a bit of controversy over the cost of this park — specifically its pink umbrellas. The budget for the park was $14 million and each umbrella cost $11,000.

    It’s one of those things that’s easy to single out and make a big deal out of — if that’s what you’re trying to do. “How much? $11,000 for a candy pink beach umbrella? Come on.”

    But as Waterfront Toronto explained in this blog post from 2014, each umbrella was fabricated out of a solid piece of fiberglass and was designed to withstand hurricane winds, as well as a good old fashioned Toronto winter. They also serve as lighting for the beach at night.

    Part of this is coming from lessons they learned on previous waterfront parks, where the umbrellas weren’t as expensive and haven’t been as resilient to the elements. So there is a whole life cycle cost analysis to be considered here.

    Now I don’t profess to be an expert on candy pink beach umbrellas, but I will say this: Sugar Beach wouldn’t be Sugar beach without them. And ten years later, it’s easy to argue for this being one of the most successful public spaces in the city.

    P.S. If I could make one small request for Toronto’s waterfront, it’s that we need to better engage the lake. We need proper places to swim. Think of the Strandbad Tiefenbrunnen or the Seebad Enge in Zurich. We may need to tidy things up a little, but it’ll be worth it.

  • The global effort to build more bike lanes

    I received an email this week from a senior real estate executive who was sharing the fact that, in response to COVID, he had decided to give up driving completely. He was now cycling everywhere — whether for work or for personal errands. And it was doing wonders for his health and his overall well-being.

    Indeed, this feels like some sort of golden era for urban cycling. Back in May I wrote about how Toronto City Council had just approved the largest ever one-year expansion of bike lanes. Some 40 km. When have we ever moved this quickly and without months (okay, years) of painful debate? Probably never.

    Of course, it’s not just Toronto. This is happening all over the world. Here are some of the numbers (taken from this recent Journal article):

    • Paris added 400 miles of pop-up bike lanes across the region — all of which didn’t exist before the pandemic – some of the streets being tracked have seen a doubling in usage
    • Oakland closed almost 10% of its streets to cars
    • Montreal is adding an additional 70 miles of pedestrian and cycle paths
    • Bogota is the midst of planning for 47 miles of temporary bike lanes
    • The UK has fast tracked over $315 million in capital spending for bike infrastructure — referring to this as a “once-in-a-generation” opportunity
    • New York’s bike share service (Citi Bike) saw year-over-year usage surge 67% in the first 10 days of March alone — before any shelter-in-place rules were even imposed

    There are obvious reasons for this rush to build out cycling infrastructure. We’re in the midst of a global health crisis and people are staying away from public transit in big numbers. But I think it’s also important to keep in mind that in many / most cases, there is really no other viable mobility solution. You cannot take all the people that used to ride the tube in London and plop them into cars. There isn’t enough space.

    So cities all around the world are doing the sensible thing and acting fast to make sure that it’s safer for people to move about on bikes. But as we all know, humans tend to have a bias toward the status quo. And so when this is all said and done, I suspect that many of these pop-ups will end up sticking around. And that will be a good thing for cities.

  • The West Toronto Railpath

    blogTO recently published a piece about the West Toronto Railpath: “the city’s hidden urban trail next to the train tracks.” In this particular instance, the headline is actually pretty accurate. (If you know blogTO, you’ll know what I mean.) I think that there are a lot of Torontonians who don’t know this railpath exists. Build over top of a decommissioned rail line (but adjacent to an active one), the railpath is a 2.1 km trail that runs from the Junction in the north (basically adjacent to Junction House) to Dundas West & Sterling Road in the south. But there are plans to extend it further south to Queen West. Public meeting number two was held back in February of this year (presentation here) and construction of the extension is expected to start as early as next year. The City has to acquire some additional lands in order to make this all happen.

    Here’s a map from the City showing both the current West Toronto Railpath and the planned extension:

    What I like about this map is that it starts to show you just how multi-modal the city is becoming and how important these individual initiatives are for our broader mobility network. Here you can see how the WTR currently connects into the Bloor GO / Union Pearson Express station and how the extension will bring it within striking distance of the planned King-Liberty Village station. You can see how the railpath will interface with the Davenport Diamond Greenway that I wrote about last month (mustard color). And you can see the various pedestrian/cycle crossings that have already been built to better stitch the city together. Though hidden to some, these pathways, greenways, and crossings are critical to how many people commute and enjoy this great city. I have certainly been doing a lot of the latter this summer. Almost exclusively atop two wheels.

  • Housing supply in the Bay Area


    Back in March, SPUR Regional Strategy published a report called: “What It Will Really Take to Create an Affordable Bay Area.” Much of its focus is on all of the housing that the San Francisco Bay Area should have been building over the years and all of the housing that it will need to start building in order to prevent things from getting worse.

    Here are a few stats to put things into perspective. Since 2000, the Bay Area has added about 1 million people (about a 15% increase). From 2011 to 2017, the Bay Area also added some 658,000 jobs, but only created about 140,000 new housing units. That’s 4.7 jobs for every new house built. SPUR further estimates that over the last 20 years, there has been a shortfall of almost 700,000 new housing units.

    If you look at the above chart showing residential building permits issued between 1980 and 2018, you can see that the Bay Area was actually more prolific in the 1980s — peaking at nearly 50,000 units per year. Those levels have yet to happen again, despite the region growing in population. (If you looked at new housing units per capita or some other normalized metric, the supply decline would be even more pronounced.)

    Part of the reason for this is that the supply of housing in the 1980s had a higher percentage of low-rise single-family homes. We could get into a discussion about sustainability, but that’s not the topic of today’s post. The reality is that this housing typology was easier, faster, and cheaper to build as compared to today’s urban infill housing. We have made it very difficult to build.

    To download a copy of the SPUR report, click here.

  • Was NYC’s urban density really the problem?

    I posted this chart on Twitter last night. It’s from the WSJ showing new weekly confirmed COVID-19 cases in Florida, New York, and the U.S. as a whole. Now, the first thing I will say is that I relinquished my hopes of becoming an amateur epidemiologist back in April. I have no idea how this is all going to play out. But as an urbanist, it is interesting to note that back in April, many believed that New York City’s urban density was a real problem and the almost singular cause of its high number of cases (despite many other big and dense cities around the world doing much better). There was also a belief (or hope) that warmer temperatures might have a positive impact on transmission rates. That’s maybe why Florida was doing relatively better. But things have flipped. Cases in Florida are up and California just surpassed NY for the US state with the most number of cases. So who knows what will happen next. But what I do know is that wearing a mask isn’t a big deal (I have mine with me all the time) and that big urban centers will be just fine. City Observatory recently published apartment search data suggesting that dense cities have actually been getting more, rather than less, attention in the wake of COVID. That doesn’t surprise me.

  • Our ambient computing future

    I noticed this week that Google has started to overlay augmented reality-type place markers onto Street View. The markers are designed to help surface the kind of local business information that you might otherwise find in search — phone number, hours of operation, and so on. Apparently not everyone is seeing them, but the feature is starting to roll out in certain cities. Above is a photo of Dundas Street West in the Junction.

    This transforms Street View into even more of a wayfinding tool, but it also offers up a glimpse of how the world might look with augmented reality. But to make this ultimately happen, you really do need to figure out how to get people to start wearing smart glasses. Lots of companies, including Google and Snap, have been trying. None of their products have really stuck — though Snap’s Spectacles are easily the best looking ones.

    However, last month Google did announce that it had acquired Canadian smart glasses company, North. I was invited to try out a pair of North Focals 1.0 glasses, which I wrote about over here. They were exceedingly cool, but definitely not ready for mainstream and daily usage. The sides were thick and you had to wear a ring joystick in order to navigate through its menus. Too much work. Too nerdy.

    But that’s okay because Google didn’t buy North for the Focals product. They bought them for talent, patents, and for probably a bunch of other things. They bought them to help Google invest in its “hardware efforts and ambient computing future.” The little markers you might now be seeing on Google Street View are likely part of that.