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.
Well, that project is now complete and stabilized, and it turns out that it was the first CLT apartment building ever built in NYC, which is quite an accomplishment.
On her blog, Joanne describes the project as being a “labor of love”, and that certainly sounds right. But they are now also onto their next CLT apartment building at 122 Waverly Avenue (called Frame 122).
This would suggest that whatever their development model is, it is working for them. My assumption is that they want to both make our cities more sustainable and own high-quality rental assets for the long-term (possibly forever).
If you’d like to see how 122 Waverly was assembled, here’s a short video that Joanne recently posted on her blog:
I was in Toronto’s Kensington Market over the weekend and so naturally I decided to tweet out a glib remark about how the neighborhood should be mostly pedestrianized. This, as many of you know, has been an ongoing debate in this city for as long as I can remember. But there are, in fact, things happening. Watermain replacements are scheduled for the area in 2024 and 2025 and so the city is rightly using this as an opportunity to rethink the area’s streets. Here’s the official website for the project. Here’s the staff report that was adopted. And here’s what design changes are right now being proposed.
One of the things that you’ll find in these documents are answers to the following question: “How supportive are you of the proposed design for the Pedestrian-only Zones?” And the results are pretty interesting. When the question was proposed to all respondents (the total number being 1,165), 90% were either very supportive or supportive of the Pedestrian-only Zones. And when narrowed to “visitors” of the area, the number appears to increase to 94% supportive. However, when this same question was asked to “people who live/work/own within the affected streets” the number drops to 55% supportive, with 28% being “very unsupportive” of the idea.
One of the concerns with pedestrianization is that it could make it difficult for businesses to operate in the market. This is an understandable concern. But in my lay opinion, this is a problem that has already been solved in many other cities around the world. Delivery vehicles would still be allowed to load/deliver, and you control their flow through things like mechanical bollards. The other concerns raised by community seem to suggest something different. They seem to suggest that pedestrianization might make the area too desirable. More specifically, it might “accelerate gentrification” and cause “traffic and other issues in the neighborhood.” I’m assuming the traffic being referred to here is non-vehicular, because we are, after all, talking about pedestrianization.
This dichotomy is an interesting one. On the one hand you have visitors and customers who overwhelmingly want the area to be pedestrianized or, at the very least, have pedestrian-only zones. But on the other hand, the businesses themselves seem to be concerned about their operations and the area becoming too successful. On some level, I guess, this makes sense, if your concern is displacement and/or the area becoming too corporate or whatever. But it’s also counterintuitive. Usually when you run a retail-oriented business you like things that (1) make your customers happy and (2) drive foot traffic.
So how do we go about reconciling this city building divide? Well, like many/most urban initiatives these days, you run a pilot! And that’s exactly what the city plans to do. There will be more consultation sometime next year, and then construction is planned for 2024-2025. Once that wraps up, the plan is to test out the various pedestrian-only zones. So I reckon we could be 2026 before we truly know where this is landing. I remain optimistic. But until then, please continue to refer to my glib weekend tweets.
Last week the Prime Minister of the UK, Rishi Sunak, announced a number of initiatives designed to support drivers. The slogan is “slamming the brakes on anti-motorist measures” and you can find more information about it, over here.
Naturally this is sparking the usual debate about driving vs. all the other forms of mobility. But it also seems to be part of some sort of broader political strategy intended to distance his party from things like environmental sustainability, net zero targets, and 15-minute city design.
If you’re looking for a way to process the above announcement, this recent FT article by John Burn-Murdoch is an excellent place to start. Firstly, the UK (outside of London) is generally poorly served by public transport. This is an important thing to know. By the below measure — percentage of large cities that have trams, a metro, or urban light rail — it is even worse than the US:
In fact, one way to think about and measure mobility in the UK is to think in terms of the following geographic categories: there’s US cities, European cities (including London), and then there’s the rest of the UK. In the case of US cities, they have very clearly optimized around road infrastructure. Meaning, the vast majority of people don’t take transit to work, but the area (km2) you can cover by car (in 30 mins) is high.
Look at Houston and Dallas on the left side of this graph:
On the other hand, European cities (again, including London) have optimized in the opposite direction. A lot more people walk, cycle, and take transit to work. In the case of cities like London, Paris, Barcelona, Bilbao, Prague, and others, the number is greater than 60%! However, they’re sucky places to drive, as I learned this past summer. The area you can cover by car within 30 mins, is relatively low (bottom right of the above graph).
The challenge for British cities (excluding London), is that they seem to be right in the middle (burgundy dots above). Poor public transport (low percentage of trips to work). And poor road infrastructure (limited area accessible by car within 30 mins). So it is perhaps no surprise that Sunak is honing in on this issue. London is not representative of Britain. And based on the above data, the majority of people living in British cities are almost certainly mobility frustrated.
Of course, to correct this issue you have two options. You can move toward the left (in the above chart) and optimize for road infrastructure. Or you can move to the right and optimize for public transport and other forms of mobility. Based on last week’s announcement, Sunak has chosen the left.
Non-profit Vivre en Ville launched a new rental registry in Ontario last week. It is an extension of the one that they launched in Quebec last spring. The way it works is that it allows anybody to enter how much they’re paying in rent. In other words, it’s a crowdsourcing platform.
The site then displays this information on a map so that everyone can see current and past rents. The data points are all anonymous and no personal information is linked to them, but the idea is to “preserve affordability in the residential market by providing access to important rent information.”
Obviously, the thinking is that greater transparency will lead to more affordable housing. Presumably because you’ll now be able to see if you’re somehow being bamboozled, among other things.
I’m not 100% convinced that this will be the case, but I am of the general opinion that more transparency and more information is better than less transparency and less information.
I also find it interesting that there seems to be a lot of people willing to take the time to share this kind of information. According to the Toronto Star, they launched in Ontario with over 3,000 rental inputs. And according to their website, the full registry has over 40,000 inputs.
Here is an argument that Philadelphia-based Diana Lind recently made on her blog, The New Urban Order:
I believe we’re at the beginning of the end of private car ownership in American cities. This idea came from thinking about the next steps when our RAV4 dies in the coming year or so: not only shouldn’t we replace it, but we won’t want to replace it. Right now only about a quarter of Americans do not drive to work, and only 9 percent of Americans do not have access to a car at all. But I think that in the coming decade there’s going to be a ton of potential to convert people living in dense cities and neighborhoods away from private cars.
There are a number of reasons for why she believes this is going to be the case and, to quickly summarize, they are: remote work, declining birth rates, more old people, Uber and other services, and autonomous vehicles. And generally, I would agree that there is a strong case to be made here.
But one thing that she does not explicitly talk about is the relevance of built form in this move away from private car ownership. She does mention “people living in dense cities” (see above), but does this mean that we are to assume density will remain a prerequisite, as it mostly is today?
Urban density dictates so much of how we move around. When I was driving around Paris during the summer, I couldn’t wait to return our car and get back on foot. You should have also seen the gymnastics we pulled off to refill the tank. Driving in the city was annoying. Paris is designed for walking, taking the metro and, now, cycling.
On the other hand, when I land in Salt Lake City (Park City), the first thing I do is head to the car rental area. The city is getting better at trying to reorient itself, and there is a tram (Green Line) that runs from the airport through downtown, but it very much remains a driving city. And ideally you want something like a Toyota 4Runner that will take you through snow and up steep pitches.
So while I agree that, directionally, Diana is right, I think the question remains: What does this mean for individual cities and their built environments? In a city like Paris, it is obvious. Private car ownership is highly likely to continue declining. But in a place like Salt Lake City, I think it’s going to be much more challenging and take a lot longer.
One of the small things that I found really interesting in this week’s class — besides, of course, figuring out how the hell to use le subjonctif — was the expression “en province.” In France, this effectively refers to any place in the country that isn’t Paris — the capital city/region. And it turns out that many other countries employ a similar kind of vocabulary.
According to Wikipedia, people in Peru say “en provincias”, people in Mexico say “la provincia”, people in Poland say “prowincjonalny”, and people in Bulgaria say “в провинцията”, whatever that means. What is fascinating to me about this is that it implies a very capital and urban-centric mentality. You’re either in the capital city or you’re, well, in the provinces.
It’s also not something that is used in either Canada or the US. In Toronto, you’ll hear people say that someone is “up north” and, in Philly, you’ll hear people say “down the shore” to indicate that they’re headed in the general vicinity of the east coast. But as far as I’m aware, there isn’t a specific term that is used to describe any and all lands that exist outside of our capital cities.
Maybe it’s because Ottawa isn’t our biggest city and so it would be silly to designate everything outside of it as being some sort of provincial non-capital territory. But I wonder if part of it is because we don’t have the same urban-centric mentality. Could it be that we just don’t value and think about our principal cities in the same way?
Matthew Slutsky (formerly of BuzzBuzzHome fame and now of Livabl fame) recently invited me on his podcast to talk about some of our current and upcoming condominium projects, as well as about the market in general.
Despite my best attempts, I only briefly talk about NFTs and crypto (in the context of our One Delisle project). So if any of you are sick of hearing that from me, the episode should be overall fairly tolerable.
To have a listen, click here. It’s about 30 minutes.
Sadly, this can very easily happen in the world of crypto. If you connect your wallet to a bad actor and sign a malicious transaction, it is possible for someone to drain all of your assets (coins, NFTs, and so on). It’s pretty terrifying. And I’m sure that a lot of people will see this and say to themselves, “that’s why I don’t like crypto! It’s too risky. Too many scammers. Bunch of rat poison.”
There is no question that crypto is risky. It’s also not very user friendly. Clearly even sophisticated users can get tricked into signing the wrong kind of blockchain transaction. It happens all the time. But this is also a nascent space. And maybe this will become less common in the future as things mature.
Either way, there are things you can absolutely do today to protect yourself if you’re planning to own and do crypto things. One of the most important rules to follow is this one here: you should have at least 3 crypto wallets. Let’s call them cold, warm, and hot wallets (which is often how they are described in web3 land).
A hot wallet is the one you use to connect to sites, mint things, and do whatever else. Because of this, you want to keep almost nothing in it. If you want to mint an NFT, transfer in only whatever crypto is required to complete that transaction. That way if something bad happens, it’s not devastating. Once your mint is complete, transfer out the NFT to a colder wallet.
A cold wallet is essentially your vault. This is where you store your Mona Lisas. These are the NFTs (or whatever else) that you plan to own for the long-term. The only transactions with this wallet should be to move things in and out of it. You should never connect it to any sites/services, even if they’re reputable ones. Once you do that, it’s no longer a cold wallet. It’s now a warmer wallet.
A warm wallet lives somewhere in between. You connect it to sites/services that you trust, and you use it to hold NFTs that you might be looking to sell in the short-term (to give just one use-case example). In my case, brandondonnelly.eth is my warm wallet. It’s where I mint the NFT photography that nobody ever buys.
I realize that all of this probably sounds convoluted, especially to those who are unfamiliar with this space. But in today’s world, if you want to be crypto literate, you need to take things like this into consideration. My NFTs might be finally totally worthless, but I love my growing art collection and I like it being on ice in a vault.
We know that, for a variety of reasons, more and more people are living alone. As of 2018, single-person households represented about 28% of all households in the US. This is up from 13.1% in 1960.
Here in Canada, single-person households became the predominant household type in 2016 (we’re also at 28%) for the first time in Canada’s 150+ year history. And the numbers are even higher for some European countries. In Finland, Germany, and Norway, more than 4 in 10 households are single-person.
Part of this has to do with people living longer. In Canada, 42% of people aged 85 or older (and living in a private household) live alone. But part of this is also cultural. Japan has one of the oldest populations in the world, but it doesn’t have the highest percentage of single-person households. Although, the number is relatively high and increasing. It’s nearly 40%.
Whatever the case may be, you could argue that there appears to be some sort of global trend line toward more people living alone. But here’s an important question: Is this a good thing?
Albert Wenger recently argued in this blog post that, actually, we need new forms of living together. Whether it’s multigenerational living or coliving with like-minded friends, there are clear benefits to living with other people. You get to share resources. You get elders that can look after kids. And you get company.
There’s also an opportunity to curate your environment. As Phil Levin puts it on his coliving blog Supernuclear: “If your home is filled with motivated people, you will be more motivated. [And] if your home is filled with funny people, you will laugh more.”
Albert posits that office conversions (which are obviously in vogue right now) could serve as an opportunity to rethink our built environment around coliving. And while this is certainly true, I’m not sure we need it to happen. There are ways we can live together today, within our existing environment, if we want to.
According to Bloomberg, there are a number of reasons for this: low housing supply, a constrained geography, a key interest rate that is less than half of the ECB’s, and Google. Google is one of the largest employers in the city, with more than 5,000 employees. And supposedly the starting salaries for a software developer there can reach 200,000 Swiss francs (nearly CA$300,000).
I also just learned that the minimum wage in Switzerland is 23.90 Swiss francs per hour. Based on 160 hours per month, that’s 3,824 francs per month or 45,888 francs per year. In Canadian dollars, that’s over $68,000 per year. Pretty healthy. Although, as we can see here, Zurich is also expensive.
