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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  • Sloping columns and columns in tension

    I had an interesting meeting today talking about the structural approach behind this OMA-designed project in Brooklyn (pictured above).

    I have always found structural engineering fascinating. Structures, along with physics, were some of my favorite classes from high school all the way to grad school. So even though I don’t think my personality is ideally suited to engineering, if I were ever to become an engineer, I’m fairly certain that I would need to be a structural one.

    For this project the big structural challenge was the large cantilevers that you see above in the tower on the left. As I understand it, there a number of ways to deal with this. One way would be to just design large transfer slabs and/or beams. But given the size of this tower, these would end up being very deep, and so you’d be really compromising the spaces where these structural transfers occur.

    How they actually dealt with it is through sloping columns (which you can see in the above photo if you look closely). What these columns do is gradually transfer the loads across multiple floors in the building, until they reach structure that runs all the way down the tower.

    At the same time, the spaces underneath the sloping columns are essentially “hung” from above. Meaning the columns are in tension, instead of being in compression, which is typically how columns work. The result is that you get some sloping columns in the suites. But I think that’s kind of cool. If you’re nerdy enough to care, it tells you how the structure of the building is working.

    Obvious disclaimer: I am not a structural engineer. You probably want to consult one if you’re looking to do a cantilevered tower with sloping columns.

    Photo: Elevated Angles via Highbury Concrete

  • Lyft might sell its bikeshare business

    So apparently Lyft is the largest bikeshare operator in North America. They operate around 68,000 bikes and scooters, which equaled some 52 million rides last year. Ridership also continues to grow. Since 2020, ridership has grown in cities like New York (+56%), Chicago (+79%), Boston (82%), and Denver (+170%).

    However, this part of Lyft’s business was in the news this week because the company announced that they are entertaining proposals to sell it, as well as “strategic partnerships.” The company has said that it remains committed to offering bikes through the Lyft app, but clearly it is trying to shore up its balance sheet.

    This raises some interesting questions. Can bikeshare be a profitable and sustainable for-profit business? Or do we now need to be thinking of it as an important public service that is deserving of subsidies — similar to how public transit and cars/roads work in most cities? My own view is that these networks are here to stay regardless of how profitable or unprofitable they might be.

    For additional stats on Lyft’s bikeshare business, click here. One of the figures that I found interesting, but not surprising, was that 71% of riders use bikeshare for “fun.” This is by far the most popular use case. The next most popular use is “errands” at 39%.

  • Can I take your order — from somewhere else?

    There is a Freshii at the bottom of our office building that is staffed by exactly one human. This human’s main job is to prepare food orders and then distribute those food orders to the humans waiting for lunch.

    If you’d like to place an order, well that is done through an iPad-like device on the counter and a video feed of someone that is seemingly located very far away from the bottom of our office building. You just tell the person on the screen what you’d like and they ring it through.

    And if you’d like to add a drink to your order, simply grab it yourself, hold it up to the iPad, and then boom. There’s very little room for chitchatting. This is an important lunch transaction.

    Virtual humans are not a new thing. Some, though not many, residential buildings use them in place of in-person concierges. I don’t know exactly how much money this saves, but I would imagine that it’s meaningful. You can now leverage one human across multiple buildings.

    So I think there’s no question that the world is heading in this direction. That is, less rather than more human interaction. But clearly this is all about utility. It’s about delivering you a healthy lunch bowl as quickly and efficiently as possible.

    If you’re instead looking to sit by yourself at a bar and learn something from the bartender, or you’re looking for a truly remarkable hospitality experience — well those are different things all together.

  • Line 1 to dinner

    On most days, I walk to the office. That is going to be changing later this summer, but what I’m about to say will still apply.

    Because I walk more often than I drive, whenever I have to go somewhere that necessitates a car and that obligates me to leave during the evening rush, the first thing I usually think to myself is “shit, it’s going to really suck getting out of downtown.”

    I have very little patience when it comes to sitting in traffic. So when I’m faced with this kind of situation, my mind immediately goes to: “okay Brandon, what are your other options here?”

    And this is exactly what happened this past Friday. I had a dinner up in Vaughan after work and I opted to take the subway to VMC station (the northern terminus of one of Toronto’s lines).

    It was actually my first time riding this new line extension and it was cool to see the area around the station. It’s not yet a 15-minute community, but I believe it can get there with some narrow streets and the right kind of ground floors.

    The entire trip took about 45 minutes, and I can tell you that on more than one occasion I thought to myself, “this is way better than sitting in traffic.”

  • Canada is a suburban nation

    Dr. David L. A. Gordon leads a research project at Queen’s University that is focused on determining the proportion of the Canadian population that lives in a suburb. Why this is interesting is because the data isn’t normally looked at in this way. As I understand it, the way Statistics Canada thinks about things is that you’re either rural or you’re urban, living in a major population center.

    But this isn’t exactly right. Obviously there’s a difference between living in a dense transit-oriented community and living in a car-centric one. The former is actually “urban” and the latter is not.

    So what the research team set out to do was more accurately classify Canadian cities. And after doing that, they ended up with four categories within each census metropolitan area: (1) active core, (2) transit suburb, (3) auto suburb, and (4) exurban. See above example. What they then discovered is that about 66% of Canadians live in a suburb. And in our largest cities — Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver — the figure is over 80%.

    Canada is often referred to as one of the most urbanized nations in the world. But as we can see here, that’s not exactly true. Canada is more accurately a suburban nation.

    Image: Canadian Suburbs

  • America’s most affluent cities

    This is an interesting chart from Bloomberg showing the most affluent metropolitan areas in the US in 1949. As you can see, at the top of this list is Detroit, followed by mostly older industrial centers.

    Now here’s the list today:

    It’s largely a different list; but importantly, it’s not an entirely new list. San Francisco was a wealthy city in 1949 and it remains one of the wealthiest today. But could that be changing? Given the city’s current challenges, some are questioning whether it might end up as another Detroit.

    I don’t see that happening. And for what it’s worth, here’s evidence of nearly 75 years of resiliency.

    Images: Bloomberg


  • The end of the single-family home hegemony

    I opened Twitter today and one of the first tweets that I saw was about Austin passing a new resolution that allows 3 homes on every lot by-right; lowers the minimum lot size to 2,500 sf; and expedites planning approvals for triplexes and fourplexes. I then scrolled a bit further and found a tweet on how Vancouver is about to vote on a new motion that will allow 4-6 homes on every residential lot as-of-right. (The US typically uses the term “by-right”, whereas in Canada we use “as-of-right”.)

    None of this is surprising. As many of you know, Toronto just did something similar by allowing fourplexes + a laneway or garden suite on every residential lot. But all of this is still noteworthy because it reinforces one simple fact: cities across North America are all starting to rethink their low-rise single-family neighborhoods. I know that many of you will say that fourplexes are not enough. We should be doing more. But I think this is an important step.

    The single-family home hegemony is ending. We are now asking our cities to do more with the same amount of land.

  • Feel-good stories about city building

    One of the things that I have learned over the years from sitting on panel discussions about city building is that, if I talk about the challenges and economic realities of development, I will be less popular than if I just tell feel-good stories about urbanism and architecture. The latter is often what people want to hear. It’s more exciting.

    But to ignore the economic realities of the world is to ignore real solutions. And this, as I have talked about before, is one of the main qualms that I had with architecture school. Money, economics, and real estate matters were tertiary, if not entirely taboo. Just focus on the purity of design and everything else will resolve itself.

    Now don’t get me wrong, I love design. It is fundamental. But so are a bunch of other things, which is why I think this article, by Benjamin Schneider, hits the nail on the head. It is specifically a review of a MoMA exhibit called New York, New Publics, but really the overarching message is this one here: “Enough with the feel-good architecture.”

    To tell a feel-good story within this framework, urban development projects must be edited and curated to cleanse them of these associations. Favored projects must somehow appear to transcend capitalism, NIMBYism, an anti-urban federal government, and the compromises inherent in the transformation of the built environment. Because this is impossible—except in the case of marginal beautification projects—the public is left with false expectations about how cities get built, making the hard stuff even harder to pull off.

    City building always involves compromises. But the more we’re upfront about what they are, the sooner we’ll get to more optimal solutions.

  • Parking minimums are so last decade

    What is the case for having parking minimums? (i.e. Mandating a certain number of parking spaces in new developments.) I guess the argument is that if you don’t require developers to build it, they won’t build enough. And then people will not have parking and so they will be forced to park on the street somewhere. This might annoy the incumbent residents, who will in turn complain, and so it is best and safest to just to build a lot of parking.

    This is pretty much the only reason that I can think of for why a city might want to maintain parking minimums. Because, what’s the worst thing that could happen if you didn’t build enough parking? In the best case scenario, the developer builds fewer parking spaces and people are fine with it. This is ideal because it means people are getting around in other ways: walking, cycling, taking transit, and/or using car share. So it is the most sustainable outcome!

    A bad scenario would be that the developer builds too few parking spaces, nobody will rent the spaces, and then goes bankrupt. This would be very bad for the developer; however, it would be a lot less of a concern for the city. The developer is the one who screwed up. Too bad for them. So when I see new transit-adjacent developments — like this one here in Burnaby, BC with 14 levels of below-grade parking — one can’t help but think: WTF!

    To be clear, this is not a criticism of the developer. I don’t do that sort of thing on this blog. This is a criticism of parking minimums. They are so last decade. And I’m even being generous with this timeline.

  • “Offices are over”

    This is an interesting article from Brookings that talks about the “myths of converting offices into housing.” What I especially like about the article is that it’s nuanced, and it directly addresses many of the myths that currently surround offices. The first one is that “offices are over.”

    Regular readers of this blog will know that I don’t agree with this. And the article provides some good data points to support this:

    • Office utilization may be below pre-pandemic levels in many cities, but the data suggests that we have not yet hit a plateau. Utilization rates continue to increase, albeit gradually. So if we are to be more precise here, it’s not that some people will never return to the office, it’s just that it’s taking longer than I think many people expected.
    • That said, this is not the case in all cities. Downtown Salt Lake City, as we have talked about before, is the busiest it has ever been. Similarly, ridership on the Utah Transit Authority network is up 26% from pre-pandemic levels.
    • Europe is generally ahead of North America with utilization rates in the 70-90% range, according to JLL. And Asia is even further ahead with rates in the 80-110% range. Meaning that, similar to downtown Salt Lake City, there are (many?) cities in Asia where more people are in the office today compared to in 2019.

    So I would not be so quick to claim that “offices are over.”

    For the full article, click here.