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

  • A study on expanding housing options in Toronto

    The City of Toronto is currently studying ways to increase housing options/supply and planning permissions in areas of the city that are designated as Neighbourhoods in the Official Plan.

    These are areas that are sometimes referred to as the “Yellowbelt”, because they are seeing very little intensification and, in a number of cases, actually losing population. (They’re also colored yellow in Toronto’s land use map.)

    Ultimately, the goal is to encourage more “missing middle” type housing forms; housing that is denser than single-family homes but smaller in scale than say mid-rise housing like Junction House.

    Here are a couple of interesting charts from the City. Based on Toronto’s Official Plan, “Neighbourhoods” make up 35.4% of the city’s land area.

    In Toronto’s Zoning By-law, the “Residential” category makes up 47.1% of the city’s land area.

    Digging deeper, 31.3% of Toronto’s total area is zoned for only detached houses — which would mean no missing middle type housing. But 15.8% of the city’s total area is already zoned to permit other types of low-rise residential buildings, such as duplexes and triplexes.

    So why isn’t more of that happening?

    As we’ve talked about before on the blog, the problem is that it is exceedingly difficult to make the math work on projects of this scale, which is why most developers don’t want to do them. The web of bureaucracy that you need to navigate in order to build anything in the city is also imposing for non-developers (and developers really).

    But to be a developer, I think you need to be an optimist. So I am going to remain hopeful that this study — and the pilot they want to do in Ward 19 — will result in a streamlined solution for housing of this scale.

    Images: City of Toronto

  • The future of central London

    The Centre for London has just published an interesting report called, Core Values: The Future of Central London. Like most city centers, Central London (or the Central Activities Zone as the report calls it) punches well above its geographic weight.

    Central London occupies about 0.01% of the UK’s total landmass, but is responsible for about 10% of its economic output. It represents about 2% of London’s total footprint, but is responsible for about 40% of total employment and about 45% of economic output.

    Here’s another interesting stat:

    From 1961 to 1983, the residential population of CAZ boroughs in London fell from about 2.5 to 1.7 million. And things really didn’t begin to turnaround until the late 1980s. It took until 2018 for the population to return to 2.5 million. Makes me wonder: How concerned do you think people were in the late 1970s about housing affordability in Central London?

    To read the full report, click here.

    Chart: Centre for London

  • Economies of agglomeration in London

    The media tends to describe agglomeration economies — one of the benefits of big urban areas — as being entirely serendipitous. Minimize travel. Maximize chance encounters at the local coffee shop. And then all of a sudden patents will go up and new startups will emerge. That does that happen, I’m sure, but there’s a bit more structure to a lot of these encounters. Economies of agglomeration is not just about serendipity. It is about the benefits of and the decision to concentrate economic activity.

    Last week, a think tank in the North of England (IPPR North) published a report outlining, among other things, job creation and productivity across England. Based on these metrics, London and the South East dominate, with “productivity” in London being by far the highest. Almost half of England’s new jobs over the last decade were in these two regions. Above is a chart from the Financial Times. The trade-off is wealth and income inequality. And the report does look to how the government could address this centralization of power and wealth.

    Like Singapore’s low fertility rate, this is an instance of leaning into the wind.

  • Have three, or more if you can afford it

    At the beginning of this year, Singapore expanded its preschool subsidies and improved its support for assisted reproduction and fertility treatments. The goal: more Singaporean children. According to the World Bank (via the Wall Street Journal), Singapore has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world at about 1.14 children per woman as of 2018. This is down from about 3 in 1970, when the government was actually worried about the opposite problem — too many children.

    Of course, this trend is not unique to Singapore. This is generally the way the winds are blowing in the developed world. Young people are spending more time on education, career, and travel. And they’re delaying marriage (or not getting married). On top of this, family-sized housing has become fairly expensive in most big cities. The fastest solution is to ramp up immigration, but many countries, including Singapore, have concerns about what this does to the “national identity.”

    So there seems to be a preference for throwing money at the problem and promotional material with slogans like this one: “Have three, or more if you can afford it.”

    Chart: WSJ

  • Learning from Steve Falk

    Building new housing — in the places that really need it — is exceedingly difficult. This recent New York Times article by Conor Dougherty is a good example of that. It tells the story of a man named Steve Falk.

    Steve was previously city manager for Lafayette, California (a suburb of San Francisco), but he eventually grew frustrated by his inability to affect positive change, and actually build things. He ended up resigning.

    Below is a quote from the article. Steve is talking about housing affordability and supply.

    “I’m not sure individual cities, left to their own devices, are going to solve this,” he told me once. “They don’t have the incentive to do so, because local voters are always going to protect their own interests instead of looking out for people who don’t live there yet.”

    Steve is right in this assertion. I think it was Charlie Munger who once said, “Show me an incentive and I’ll show you an outcome.”

    I don’t know the specifics of the proposed 315 unit apartment building in Lafayette (perhaps it was ugly), but the article claims it was an as-of-right proposal close to a BART station (transit).

    How does that turn into 0 units and numerous lawsuits, while we all continue to debate housing affordability? Something is broken.

  • Measuring street-network disconnectedness around the world

    Here is a recent research paper by Christopher Barrington-Leigh and Adam Millard-Ball that looks at the connectivity of local street networks across the world. They refer to this as “street-network sprawl” and they measure it using a Street-Network Disconnectedness index (SNDi).

    This is important for many reasons. Compact street networks with shorter blocks and fewer dead ends are far more conducive to different forms of mobility, including transit. Street networks are also incredibly sticky. Once laid, they rarely change. And if they do, it’s over very long periods of time.

    The study period in the paper is 1975 to 2013. What they found is that in 90% of the 134 most populous countries in the world, the street network has become less connected since 1975. What this means is that we have been making it harder to service our communities with transit.

    That said, there has been a reversal in “high income” countries, most notably in North America. If you take a look at the above graphs, you can see a fairly dramatic drop off, signalling a reduction in the construction of low-connectivity streets. Southeast Asia, on the other hand, is trending in the opposite direction. Note Bangkok in the upper righthand corner.

    For a copy of the full research paper, click here.

    Images: Global trends toward urban street-network sprawl

  • This is not an art show

    Later this month a new exhibition will open at the Guggenheim Museum called Countryside, The Future. Produced by architect Rem Koolhaas and Samir Bantal (Director of AMO), the focus of the exhibition is on non-urban areas — or, the 98% of the earth’s surface not occupied by cities. The 21st century is being called an urban century. But the argument here is that “the countryside is now the site where the most radical, modern components of our civilisation are taking place.” If you’re going to be in New York, this one should be worth checking out. It’s on my list. Here is a teaser video that was just released by the Guggenheim:

  • Building a new city in Colombia

    This month’s issue of Monocle Magazine has a feature on a new masterplanned community to the north of Cartagena called Serena del Mar. Currently under construction, the entire 971 hectare community is slated to be finished by 2030. When complete the developers believe it will house upwards of 200,000 people — effectively an entirely new city.

    It will also be entirely self-governing. There will be no mayor or city council. Revenue to operate the community will be collected through a mandatory monthly fee, though low-income residents will be exempt from paying it. As I understand it, large projects in Colombia have historically been mired in corruption issues, and so this is probably a response to that.

    But the approach has naturally caused a bunch of skepticism. Does this bifurcate the city between public and private? Is this a vote of no confidence on Cartagena’s current governance structures? Building a city from scratch is also exceptionally difficult (there’s a quote in Monocle from Toronto’s own Shawn Micallef on this). Cities usually take time to evolve and settle in.

    I don’t know enough (or anything, really) about Colombia, Cartagena, and this development project to comment specifically. And so I won’t. But these are the questions that are being asked of contemporary masterplans. There’s a reason most (or all) of the tech companies involved in large scale masterplans have banned the word “campus” from their lexicons.

  • The lost history of Seneca Village

    This is a fascinating short video (by Vox) about a former neighborhood in Manhattan known as Seneca Village. Today, its land forms part of Central Park.

    Most of us would probably agree that building Central Park was both a good idea and a powerful example of the value of foresight.

    But that doesn’t mean that the area’s pre-park history is something that should be forgotten. (Thanks for sending this along, Jeremiah Shamess.)

    If you’d like to learn more about Seneca Village, check out this NY Times opinion piece by Brent Staples. It’s called, The Death of the Black Utopia.

  • Labor force and housing units across Silicon Valley

    I don’t love how this WSJ article starts. It seems to place the blame on technology companies for “pumping the west coast full of choking traffic and expensive homes.”

    But I do really like these charts:

    They show the gap between the increase in labor force and the increase in housing supply across the various cities in Silicon Valley.

    The solid line is the percentage increase in labor force since 2010 and the dotted (bottom) line is the percentage increase in housing units since 2010.

    The darker the color, the bigger the gap.

    Many new jobs. Lots of wealth created. Not nearly enough housing. And yes, there have also been a number of negative externalities.

    The full article is definitely worth a read. It’s about Google’s development plans for downtown San Jose.

    Charts: WSJ