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.
I am in Park City for the weekend because we just started site works for Parkview Mountain House (PMH).
When you’re building in the mountains, there are generally two types of sites: sites that are uphill from the road and sites that are downhill from the road.
The latter is significantly harder to build on because you have to first create access to the lot, which means bringing in soil and creating a ramp. You may also end up craning in materials.
Thankfully, our site is on the uphill side. You bring in an excavator, dig into the mountain, and then you have a flat workable site.
That’s what we’re doing on site right now and it’s what you’re seeing above — a big hole in the side of a mountain. And it’s pretty exciting.
I learned this morning that Statistics Canada publishes a real-time population counter and that it is currently hovering at just below 40 million people:
So by the time that many of you read this post, Canada will likely be over the 40 million mark. If you’d like to see for yourself, you can do that here.
It’s 158m tall and about 40 storeys (which makes it comparable in height to One Delisle). It’s extremely narrow in one direction (see above), and so from central Paris it is intended to be read as a kind of thin pencil tower. But when viewed in the east-west direction, you get the full width of its trapezoidal shape (see above, again).
Not surprisingly, this has been a highly contentious development — which is why it was 15 years in the making. It is now under construction, though, and it is expected to be completed sometime in 2026. But this is likely to be the last tower in Paris for quite some time.
Partially because of this Triangle Tower, Paris has just decided to ban tall buildings in the city. The new height limit is now back to 37 meters (or 12 storeys), which is essentially the same height cap that was put in place in 1977 following completion of the Tour Montparnasse.
So this is seemingly how things work in Paris. Somebody builds a tall tower. People mostly hate it. And then the city bans tall buildings for a number of decades. The previous height cap was relaxed in 2010. (Also, for those of you who are wondering, La Défense, which is generally where Paris puts its tall buildings, is outside of the city limits.)
Regardless, I think there’s no question that this new Triangle Tower is destined to become an iconic punctuation in the city’s skyline. Which means that we’re probably going to have to update our thinking. If Paris, today, is sometimes thought of as a city with two principal towers — the Eiffel Tower and the “awful tower” — it will soon be a city with three principal towers.
Perhaps the only question that remains is: Will people learn to love it like the Eiffel Tower or will it end up as another Tour Montparnasse?
And it retracts/opens up like this (the glass panels stack neatly to one side when you want to create a traditional balcony and guard condition):
Obviously the idea here is to create outdoor spaces that can be enjoyed for more months of the year. In the summer it opens up so you get a typical balcony condition. And then in the cooler months or on a windy or rainy day, you get a solarium. Maybe it even works in the winter with the right sun exposure.
But obviously there is a cost to adding something like this to new projects. So my development question to all of you today is: Would you be willing to pay a premium for a balcony glazing system like the one shown here? And if so, how important would you rank a feature like this for multifamily buildings?
If you have a few minutes, please let me know in the comment section below.
Decentralization, in the crypto/blockchain/web3 sense of the word, is a crucial thing. Here is an excellent article talking about why it is the key innovation of blockchain technology and why it is a central feature in this new emerging web3 world.
But of course, it can all get very complicated. So I thought this — and in particular the sentence in bold below — was a good way of describing the benefits:
“…decentralization enables web3 systems to be credibly neutral (they cannot discriminate against any individual stakeholder or any group of stakeholders, which is critical to incentivize developers to build within ecosystems) and composable (to mix and match software components like Lego bricks). As a result, web3 systems function more like public infrastructure than proprietary technology platforms. In contrast to the gated software of Web2, web3 protocols provide decentralized internet infrastructure on which anybody can build and create an internet business. Crucially, in web3, this can be done without the permission of the original deployer of the protocol or the need to use a centrally controlled interface.“
This resonated with me because think about how important public infrastructure is to our cities. Most of us take it for granted that, when we need it, we can just plug in and access electricity, water, sewer, and other public infrastructure.
But throughout history, these services have been fundamental to the growth of our cities. They empowered scale and better health outcomes, among other things. So it’s exciting to think that we are now living through the creation of something kind of similar in tech.
Cities are complicated. And we have spoken before about how it can sometimes feel like they never really reach homeostasis. In extreme cases, it might seem like they’re either decaying and losing people, or they’re too successful.
I was reminded of this again this morning while reading an article about how Rome’s historic city center is being overrun with Airbnbs and tourists, and how it is pushing out the locals. It has, arguably, become too successful as a tourist destination.
But the question I have is: What’s the right amount of tourism? If 25,000 listings is too many for Rome, what’s the right number? And do cities ever really achieve homeostasis, where, you know, things feel just right? Here’s an excerpt from the above article that describes what parts of Rome were like before the tourism boom:
Ms. Rapaccini remembers when Monti was a quiet, authentic haven for arty types and locals. She and her late partner, the film director Mario Monicelli, who received six Oscar nominations, moved to Monti in 1988. The area wasunfashionable, dirty and full of prostitutes, but beautiful in its gritty way, “like a little village” even though it was in the heart of a big, bustling city, she recalls. The apartments were cheap and the area began to attract film types, journalists and artisans – none of them rich – who mixed easily with local workers and shop owners.
It’s a romantic description of what sounds like a pretty gritty area. Unfashionable, dirty, and full of prostitutes is apparently better than full of annoying American tourists. And perhaps it is. But then what was the area like before it was unfashionable, dirty, and full of prostitutes? Was that also better?
I have no idea. But cities are constantly changing and evolving, and they were doing it long before any of us arrived, especially in the case of an ancient city like Rome. Maybe that’s what makes it so difficult to hang onto that exact moment in time when everything was just right.
When interest rates are low, people generally want to buy more highly-levered assets, such as real estate. This, of course, makes perfect sense, because lower rates mean more buying power. But how badly someone wants to buy more real estate should, at least in theory, depend on their particular situation.
If you’re buying a pre-construction home, the current rate should matter less than what it might be in the future when it comes time to close (usually you can only lock in a rate for so long). That said, lower rates can help people feel richer because it buoys the value of their other assets/investments. So in this regard, low rates do help the pre-construction market.
On the other hand, if you’re buying a home to immediately close on, then current rates matter a great deal. This is the rate that you are going to be paying. However, in Canada, the typical term for a fixed-rate mortgage is 5 years. Meaning that after 5 years the rate resets to whatever market is at that time. So eventually, the mortgage does become an adjustable-rate one.
In the US, this isn’t the case. The most popular mortgage is a 30-year fixed-rate loan, meaning the rate stays the same for the entire 30-year period. What this means is that Americans should — again, in theory — want to buy more real estate — the most — when rates are low. That’s the time to back up the truck and lock in a sweet rate for the next three decades.
As many of you know, I am an advocate for high-speed rail in Canada. Specifically along the Windsor-Quebec City corridor, which is the most densely populated part of the country. And so I found this comparison interesting:
“If there is one project that would create thousands of jobs, improve business productivity, clean up the air, reduce the output of greenhouse gases and cut the demand for endless highway construction, it would be high-speed electric rail between Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal, where population densities are high enough to make the project sensible. Cost estimates are all over the map. The University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy put the price tag at about $12-billion, which is $2-billion less than the bucks being thrown at the Volkswagen battery plant alone. But forget it – the Canadian government wants more cars, not fewer. Canadian cities will remain car sewers forever.”
The above excerpt is from this opinion piece talking about EVs and the public subsidies being paid to encourage battery production within Canada. I get that we want to be part of this important mobility shift. But we are way behind when it comes to high-speed rail.
And by behind, I mean that we don’t have it at all in this country.
Global super-prime ($10m+) residential sales bounced back in Q1 2023, with 417 sales across the 12 markets tracked in Knight Frank’s new Global Super-Prime Intelligence report. That’s up 11% on the 376 recorded in Q4 2022 and the highest volume since Q2 last year.
The biggest market in Q1 this year was Dubai (88 sales), followed by Hong Kong (67), New York (58), Los Angeles (46), Singapore (37) and London (36). While volumes rose in Q1, the total value of sales fell 4% to $7.2 billion. The most expensive average super-prime sales took place in Geneva ($23.8m) and London ($20.4m)
What is perhaps most interesting, though, is how central Dubai has become in the flows of global capital. In 2019, Dubai accounted for 2% of all super-prime sales in the 12 markets that Knight Frank tracks.
Today, looking back at the most recent 12-month period, Dubai now accounts for 17% of all super-prime sales, placing it ahead of London, New York, and Los Angeles.
Part of this jump likely has something to do with the “housing disaster” that Dubai was going through back in 2019. But even still, it is impressive to see just how quickly the city has managed to build and position itself as an alpha global city.
I much prefer walkable cities, but clearly there are enough other people who don’t care about that sort of thing.
Last month, Waymo (Alphabet) and Uber announced a new multi-year partnership that will bring Waymo’s autonomous vehicles to Uber in the Phoenix area later this year. Already, Waymo operates across 180 square miles of the city, making it the largest fully autonomous service area in the world. But now, or I guess later this year, people will be able to order a Waymo AV through the Uber app.
Not a lot of people seem to care about autonomous vehicles anymore. For a while, every conference had people talking about how they were going to reshape our cities. But then the technology didn’t arrive quite as quickly as people were hoping, and so everyone lost interest and move on to other more exciting things. But clearly things are still happening. And this announcement strikes me as being an important one.
