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 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.

  • Personalities and places

    Here is an interesting study about personalities and places (Journal article here and study here). It is interesting because so many of us are working from home and away from our regular environments. But it is also interesting because a lot of us, here on this blog, are in the business of creating spaces. And these environments have an impact on all of us.

    The researchers for this study started by assessing the personalities of some 2,000 university students. The objective was to determine their baseline temperaments according to the “Big Five” personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Once that was established, the students were sent out into the world with a location-based app on their phone.

    Four times a day, the participants were asked to enter their current location, as well as answer a few questions about their current state of mind. The big takeway from this study is twfold and is as follows: “People actively select their environments, and the environments they select can alter their psychological characteristics [both] in the moment and over time.”

    The first bit is perhaps not all that surprising. We all have different personality traits and we choose environments that suit what we like. Extroverts, for example, tend to spend less time at home and more time at restaurants, bars, clubs, and at friends’ places. (Presumably this means that quarantine was a lot harder for extroverts.)

    The second part of this finding suggests that once we have actively chosen where we want to be, that environment then impacts how we feel at that exact moment, as well as over a certain period of time. You’ll have to read the study for the nuances around this. But it is fascinating to me because it helps me explain why I feel different now that I’m mostly working from home.

    Beyond poor video call connections and the lack of in-person collaboration, there also seems to be the psychological impact of not being in a particular environment. Not having to commute is a nice feature, particularly for some, but it also means not being around colleagues and not being able to meet for that impromptu craft beer. Turns out those things matter for our mental state.

  • “Missing middle” units represented 1% of all residential units proposed between 2014 and 2018

    As many of you already know, the City of Toronto is currently studying ways to increase the supply of “missing middle” type housing in our low-rise neighborhoods. This week they published a new report called, “Expanding Housing Options in Neighbourhoods.” The Globe and Mail has already written about it over here, but I would like to share some numbers from the report to help put things into context. All of these are verbatim from the City’s report. I’m just arranging them neatly into blocks.

    Development applications active between 2014 and 2018 were reviewed to identify those representing “missing middle” housing typologies, i.e. more than 1 proposed residential unit and 3-6 storeys. 144 “missing middle” applications out of 508 total active applications in Neighbourhoods were identified during this time frame.

    The missing middle applications represent 5,090 units approved or built in Neighbourhoods. The vast majority of these applications—94% of applications and 89% of proposed residential units—are 4 storeys or less, consistent with the general height limits for Neighbourhoods in the Official Plan.

    Of the 5,090 proposed residential units, almost half were part of large site redevelopment projects, often townhouse subdivisions on former school sites in inner suburban areas of
    Scarborough, Etobicoke, and North York. The remaining half of proposed missing middle type units were in lowrise intensification and infill of existing housing, with activity clustered primarily within the former City of Toronto.

    The approximately 5,000 missing middle type units in development applications represent
    approximately 1% of the 400,000 total proposed residential units in projects active between 2014 and 2018    , while the approximately 2,500 net new units added through as-of-right building permits from 2011 to 2018 represent only 0.6% of the total proposed residential units.

    One percent. I guess that’s why it’s called the missing middle.

  • Where developers won’t build even with $0 land

    Building on yesterday’s post about inclusionary zoning, below is a telling diagram from the Urban Land Institute showing which areas of Portland can support new development and which areas cannot. To create this map, ULI looked at achievable rents in each US census block to determine, quite simply, where rents will cover the cost of new development (all types of construction).

    However, in their models they are also assuming a land value of $0. And typically people want you to pay them money when you buy their land. So in all likelihood, this map is overstating the amount of blue — that being land where new development is feasible.

    But it does tell you something about developer margins. A lot of people seem to assume that the margins on new developments are so great that things like inclusionary zoning can simply be “absorbed” without impacting overall feasibility. The reality is that there are large swaths in most cities where development is never going to happen even if you were to start handing out free land.

    This map is also helpful at illustrating some of the impacts of IZ. If you assume that rents are the highest in the center of the city and that they fall off as you move outward, then the outer edge of the above blue area is going to be where development is only marginally feasible. And so any new cost imposed on development would naturally start to uniformly eat away at the blue feasible area — that is, until rents rise enough to offset it.

    Of course, this is a simplified mapping. Land usually costs money. Land values might also be highest in the center and fall off as you move outward, or there could be pockets of high-cost land. There may be more price elasticity in certain sub-markets compared to others. So the impacts of a new development cost may not play out as neatly as I outlined above.

    Regardless, there will be impacts, which is why I find this map telling even if it isn’t fully accurate or up to date. Maybe some of you will as well.

  • Reallocating urban space

    Back in March and April, the belief seemed to be that cities had lost their allure. Density had proven to be a bad thing and we were now all going to live in the country and spend our days working via Zoom. But as our cities begin to slowly reopen, something else seems to be taking place. In fact, the great irony of this pandemic is that it will probably strengthen our cities in the medium and long-term.

    We’re pedestrianizing our streets. (Above is a photo of King William Street in Hamilton that I took last week. London is similarly looking at pedestrianizing parts of Soho.) We’re encouraging restaurants to expand their patio footprints. We’re adding bicycle lanes faster than we ever have before here in Toronto. And we’re finally becoming a little less uptight about the public consumption of alcohol. This is among many other things.

    The reopening of our cities isn’t going to happen overnight. Some, if not all, will probably stumble as we find our way. But as unfortunate as this period of time is for most of us, it is forcing us to reconsider how life is lived in our cities and how we allocate urban space. Some of this will be temporary, but I suspect that a great deal of it will actually stick.

    We’ll then wonder, “why didn’t we do this sooner?”

    Photo: King William Street, Hamilton

  • Drinking in the park

    There has been no shortage of prognostications about the demise of cities, offices, and a bunch of other things, as a result of this pandemic. And by now, a lot of you probably know that I think most of this is overblown. I worked in the office today, did things on my three-screen setup, and had a burrito for lunch. It was lovely. But here are a few things that I do believe will happen: Canada will continue to relax its alcohol laws in the wake of this pandemic, most if not all of these relaxations will stick after we get through this, and city life, believe it or not, will be just fine.

    Earlier this month, the City of North Vancouver council voted 6-1 in favor of allowing alcohol consumption in some parks and some public spaces this summer. The mayor believes that they are the first city in BC to pass such a bylaw and I reckon that they are among the first in Canada (Quebec is generally the most chill). One of the justifications for this change is that about 80% of residents in North Vancouver live in a multi-family dwelling. And so this is a way for people, who don’t have backyards, to have a civilized drink on some grass.

    Will our puritanical province follow suit? My bet is yes.

  • Driving, walking, and taking transit during coronavirus

    The above chart from Bloomberg City Lab shows driving, walking, and transit mobility for 12 cities during this pandemic. The data source is Apple’s mobility index, which is based on travel queries within its app. So this isn’t going to capture how everyone is moving about, but presumably it is somewhat indicative. Although I couldn’t tell you the last time I used an app to tell me where to walk. Maybe that’s just me though.

    A few things are worth point out. As we have seen before on this blog, Seattleites (do people actually use this demonym?) stopped using transit at a faster rate than most other cities in the US. And according to the above chart, they have also been slower to return to it. This has me continuing to wonder, “why is Seattle such an outlier?” Generally though, these graphs do seem to suggest that people are shying away from transit.

    Taipei looks to have fared the best out of this subset of cities, which is consistent with what has been publicly reported about its handling of the pandemic. Taipei has turned out to be an exemplar city during all of this. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that it remembers SARS and knew what to do — the least of which was to simply take it seriously at the outset.

    Image: Bloomberg City Lab