Brandon Donnelly
Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly.
Brandon Donnelly
Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly.
Fred Wilson wrote a great post on his blog today about New York City’s “transit mess.”
In it he talks about congestion pricing (which, as you all know, I support); the mess that is the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA); and this 37-page report on how to improve the MTA.
Here is an excerpt from his post that I liked, but that won’t be popular with everyone:
That is an idea [congestion pricing] that has been proposed a number of times over the years, most notably by Mayor Bloomberg during his tenure. It is a good idea and long overdue. A dense urban environment should have excellent mass transit and incentives to use it and should have disincentives to drive cars. Taxing cars in Manhattan and using the revenues to maintain and improve our subways seems like an obvious thing to do.
I would encourage you to give his post a read. The New York Times also reported on this topic (and the above recommendations) this week. They called it, 7 ways to fix the MTA (which needs a $60 billion overhaul).
This week Elon Musk’s Boring Company ran a Tesla through its 1.14 mile-long test tunnel in Hawthorne, California. This was accomplished by using a set of tracking wheels that Elon said, “turns a car into a rail-guided train & back again.” Apparently it is safe up to 150 miles per hour. Here is a video from yesterday’s unveiling (click here if you can’t see it below):
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQn-D-i5lyM&w=560&h=315]
Some, or perhaps many, are skeptical of how this could work at scale in a dense urban environment. The company is imagining a world where every house or office building has one of these lifts (shown in the video) in their garage or basement. But there’s no question it is very cool and apparently this test tunnel only cost about $10 million per mile to dig. That’s progress in and of itself.
BNN Bloomberg just published this article on the Toronto condo market. It is based on a roundtable discussion that was held at their Toronto office last week with Jim Ritchie of Tridel, Jared Menkes of Menkes Developments, Shamez Virani of CentreCourt, and Jane Renwick of Diamond Kilmer Developments.
The overarching theme is that, after a couple of frenetic record setting years, the market should settle down in 2019, which is likely a good thing. Hopefully that will also temper construction cost inflation. We have been seeing double digit increases over the last few years (hence some of the cancelled projects).
But as Jared points out, the fundamentals here are still strong and there are a number of supply constraints creating upward pressure on pricing:
Jared Menkes, executive vice president of high-rise residential at Menkes Developments was unwavering for the future. “There’s a lot of red tape that’s slowing down bringing more product to market,” Menkes said. “I promise you, pricing is going up.”
For the rest of the article, click here.
Fred Wilson wrote a great post on his blog today about New York City’s “transit mess.”
In it he talks about congestion pricing (which, as you all know, I support); the mess that is the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA); and this 37-page report on how to improve the MTA.
Here is an excerpt from his post that I liked, but that won’t be popular with everyone:
That is an idea [congestion pricing] that has been proposed a number of times over the years, most notably by Mayor Bloomberg during his tenure. It is a good idea and long overdue. A dense urban environment should have excellent mass transit and incentives to use it and should have disincentives to drive cars. Taxing cars in Manhattan and using the revenues to maintain and improve our subways seems like an obvious thing to do.
I would encourage you to give his post a read. The New York Times also reported on this topic (and the above recommendations) this week. They called it, 7 ways to fix the MTA (which needs a $60 billion overhaul).
This week Elon Musk’s Boring Company ran a Tesla through its 1.14 mile-long test tunnel in Hawthorne, California. This was accomplished by using a set of tracking wheels that Elon said, “turns a car into a rail-guided train & back again.” Apparently it is safe up to 150 miles per hour. Here is a video from yesterday’s unveiling (click here if you can’t see it below):
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQn-D-i5lyM&w=560&h=315]
Some, or perhaps many, are skeptical of how this could work at scale in a dense urban environment. The company is imagining a world where every house or office building has one of these lifts (shown in the video) in their garage or basement. But there’s no question it is very cool and apparently this test tunnel only cost about $10 million per mile to dig. That’s progress in and of itself.
BNN Bloomberg just published this article on the Toronto condo market. It is based on a roundtable discussion that was held at their Toronto office last week with Jim Ritchie of Tridel, Jared Menkes of Menkes Developments, Shamez Virani of CentreCourt, and Jane Renwick of Diamond Kilmer Developments.
The overarching theme is that, after a couple of frenetic record setting years, the market should settle down in 2019, which is likely a good thing. Hopefully that will also temper construction cost inflation. We have been seeing double digit increases over the last few years (hence some of the cancelled projects).
But as Jared points out, the fundamentals here are still strong and there are a number of supply constraints creating upward pressure on pricing:
Jared Menkes, executive vice president of high-rise residential at Menkes Developments was unwavering for the future. “There’s a lot of red tape that’s slowing down bringing more product to market,” Menkes said. “I promise you, pricing is going up.”
For the rest of the article, click here.
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