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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  • Measuring downtown recoveries using mobile phone data

    The School of Cities at the University of Toronto and the Institute for Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley have been using mobile phone data to track the recovery of 62 downtowns across North America. This work has been being published at downtownrecovery.com, but it has also been widely cited.

    First, to be clear on how this works, the data they are collecting is not dependent on people actually making calls or actively consuming data on their phone; instead it is simply based on people having a phone with them and being physically located in one these 62 downtowns. It also covers the period between January 2019 and November 2022, and includes cities with least 350,000 people.

    I’m not exactly sure how long the phones need to be in a particular place or how they treat time in their data, but the unit of measure is something that they call a “Point of Interest.” This includes things like restaurants and shops, so presumably this data isn’t just saying, ” I went downtown and sat in my office for 8 hours.” It could also be, “I went downtown and ate good pasta.”

    I say this because, based on my understanding of the data, having a high Recovery Quotient (RQ) could mean a number of different things. It could mean that more people are back in the office, but it could also mean that the downtown isn’t a monoculture and that it has other things going on besides just work.

    In any event, here’s what they have found:

    The headline finding is that San Francisco has the lowest RQ at 31% and Salt Lake City has the highest at 135%. There does appear to be a bias toward higher recoveries with mid-sized cities, and one of the reasons for this is that these recovery quotients appear to be correlated with average commute times:

    Some of the other strongly correlated explanations, include the percentage of jobs in professional, scientific, and technical fields:

    And the number of days that events were shut down during the pandemic (note the Canadian cities on the right below; welcome, New Orleans):

    I suppose one way to grossly oversimplify these findings is to say that some people have been avoiding going downtown if they can’t quickly drive there (and have to take transit), if their job more easily allows them to work from home, and if things were shut down for too long during the pandemic. Because if it was, they maybe forgot about all of the fun things that typically happen downtown.

    Image: The School of Cities

  • IKEA has just hired photographer Annie Leibovitz to document normal people doing normal things in their homes

    Last year, IKEA went around the world interviewing some 37,000 people in 37 countries about what it takes to “make us feel at home.” And one of the things that they discovered was that nearly 50% of people do not feel like their home reality is authentically represented by what they see in the media. In other words, there is a disconnect between how we actually live at home and how the media suggests we are or ought to be living.

    To explore this disconnect a little further, IKEA has just announced that photographer Annie Leibovitz will be the company’s inaugural Artist in Residence. Leibovitz is best known for her celebrity photographs. But for this assignment, she’s going to be travelling to the US, the UK, Japan, Germany, Italy, India, and Sweden, to photograph normal people doing normal things in their homes.

    This is a fascinating idea because we know that there are all kinds of cultural biases around housing. Here in North America, for example, there is a longstanding history of hating apartments. If you wanted to properly raise a family, you needed a morally correct form of housing; meaning, a grade-related house. But this reality isn’t universally possible in most big cities today, and that is probably one of the reasons why we now have this disconnect:

    …why do people feel like they’re not represented in the media, that they’re left out? ‘In the same way that there has been a typical idea in the fashion industry about what size a woman should be, there’s been a typical idea of what a home is,’ wagers Leibovitz. ‘But now we’ve opened up in all sorts of ways, and there’s a difference between a home and feeling at home. And the latter can happen in many different places and maybe that’s more important now than an actual home.’

    On a more basic level, I think people are also just endlessly curious about how people live and what their homes are like. So regardless, this should be interesting.

    Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

  • Wealthiest cities in the world

    According to this annual survey by Henley & Partners (first chart from Bloomberg), these are the top 10 wealthiest cities in the world when you count the number of high-net-worth individuals (i.e. people with investable wealth greater than US$1 million):

    However, if you instead count billionaires, the top city flips from New York City to the Bay Area (which includes San Francisco and all of Silicon Valley). This isn’t all that surprising.

    Also not surprising is the precipitous decline in the number of HNWIs residing in Hong Kong. From 2012 to 2022, the number declined by 27%. That said, a bunch of other cities fared even worse. The city that lost the most millionaires over this same decade was Moscow. It declined by 44%.

    For those of you wondering about Toronto, we placed 12th, just after Chicago, with 105,200 millionaires, 193 centi-millionaires, and 18 billionaires:

    The next city in Canada on the list is Vancouver, and following that is Montreal:

    It is interesting to see how much further behind Montreal places with these metrics given that it is an urban region with about 1.6x the population of that of Vancouver’s.

    Also interesting — given its size and global importance — is Paris (18th when it comes to HNWIs):

    However, when it comes to seasonal draw, Paris is second only to Miami, which appears to be the undisputed global destination for rich people in the winter. Paris has 126 centi-millionaire residents, but during its peak holiday month (presumably summer), this number is believed to increase to over 300:

    Finally, looking at Park City, Utah, it has 8 permanent centi-millionaires and this number is thought to increase to over 100 during the winter snowboarding season. And to be clear, this transient population figure only includes people who own a second home there. It does not include rich people paying US$3,700 per night to stay at Deer Valley. That’s pretty good for a small town of only 8,500 permanent residents.

    To check out the full list of 97 cities, click here.

  • Why so few people drive in Tokyo

    Daniel Knowles, who is a correspondent for the Economist, recently authored a book called Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It. I haven’t read it, yet, but I did just read this excerpt about Tokyo, and it was jam-packed with interesting stats.

    Here are some of them:

    • Among developed cities, Tokyo has the lowest car use in the world. About 12% of trips are completed with a car, whereas 17% of trips are done with a bicycle. Most people walk and/or take transit. Tokyo has the most-used public transit system in the world — about 30 million people each day.
    • Car ownership across Japan is about 590 vehicles per 1,000 people. This is comparable to many European countries. In the US, it’s about 800 vehicles per 1,000. However, this figure drops in Tokyo. Here, the average is about 0.32 cars per household, which was interesting to see because most new housing projects in downtown Toronto have parking ratios that are much lower than even this figure.
    • The average size of a home in Tokyo is 65.9 square meters of usable area. By comparison, the average size of a home in London is 80 square meters. But given that according to Knowles, the average household size in London is 2.7 people, whereas it’s 1.95 in Tokyo. So per capita, Tokyoites actually have more space than Londoners.
    • 35% of streets in Japan are not wide enough to fit a car. If you add in streets that are wide enough to fit a car but not wide enough that a car could stop and not entirely block traffic, this figure jumps to 86%. This to me is a massively significant statistic, because if you want people to walk places you need small streets.
    • 95% of streets in Japan do not allow any sort of street parking — day or night.
    • The average Japanese car owner drives around 6,000 kilometers per year. This is about a third of what the average American does. In my case, it looks like I have averaged about 8,868 kilometers per year over the last 5 years. Though a big chunk of my kilometers would be from longer one-off snowboarding trips. In other words, I don’t drive all that often in the city.
    • Japan has some of the most expensive road tolls/prices in the world. Meaning, Japan does not actively subsidize driving and instead just charges drivers accordingly. Apparently the average is about 3,000 yen per 100 kilometers, which is about CA$30 per 100 kilometers.
    • In addition to not subsidizing cars, Tokyo is also one of the few cities in the world where their public transit does not need to be subsidized. A big part of this has to do with high ridership, but the other important part is that its transit authorities also develop real estate. Shockingly, this means that it tends not to build standalone and single-storey transit stations (ahem, I’m looking at you Crosstown LRT). Instead, they build lots of density where it always belongs: on top of transit.

    I may just have to read Knowles’ book.

  • Kith and New Balance collaborate on new Frank Lloyd Wright trainer

    In 1932, Frank Lloyd Wright — the architect who hated tall people — published a book called The Disappearing City. And in this book, he proposed a city planning concept known as the Broadacre City. Wright would go on to spend the rest of his career trying to both promote and perfect this concept, but the salient point is that it was fundamentally anti-urban:

    Imagine spacious landscaped highways …giant roads, themselves great architecture, pass public service stations, no longer eyesores, expanded to include all kinds of service and comfort. They unite and separate — separate and unite the series of diversified units, the farm units, the factory units, the roadside markets, the garden schools, the dwelling places (each on its acre of individually adorned and cultivated ground), the places for pleasure and leisure. All of these units so arranged and so integrated that each citizen of the future will have all forms of production, distribution, self improvement, enjoyment, within a radius of a hundred and fifty miles of his home now easily and speedily available by means of his car or plane. This integral whole composes the great city that I see embracing all of this country—the Broadacre City of tomorrow.

    It’s important to remember that this was first proposed before the arrival of today’s suburbs. So this was Wright’s response to the squalors of urban life at that time. Many have called the Broadacre City a precursor to the modern suburb and, in many ways, that makes sense. Integral to his plan was, “the man seated in his automobile driving on highways.”

    But others see the plan as something totally different. It was about low-density and self-sufficient communities that could sprout up along highways, and not necessarily rely on some sort of decaying urban core. It was thought of as a place for Americans to return to the land.

    Whatever your opinion, you’ll be happy to know that Kith has just collaborated with New Balance and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation on a trainer that commemorates this utopian vision. It is called the New Balance Made in USA 998 – Broadacre City, and naturally it comes in a variety of colorful earthy tones.

    So if you’re looking to celebrate the ethos of Wright and eschew the modern and walkable city, these are, I would think, the shoes for you. Apparently they’re available online, or at Kith Tokyo, which is maybe intended to be ironic? Let’s sell this Broadacre shoe from the largest urban center in the world.

    Or maybe I’m overthinking this.

    Photo: Kith

  • Two-way, all-day regional rail

    Neat B and I had a very good friend’s 40th birthday dinner in the Junction this evening.

    So naturally, we walked over to the UP Express station from our offices in the Financial District and took the train one stop to Bloor Street. When we got off — along with everyone else who uses our airport link as a regional express train — we then walked the West Toronto Railpath up to the restaurant on Dupont Street. All in all, it took us about 35 minutes. We hopped on the 5:30PM train and we arrived at Lucia around 5:50PM.

    I know that a lot of people use this particular train to get to and from work, but I’m always so happy whenever I do it. I will take this over being stuck in traffic every day of the week. And for me, it is a powerful reminder of just how critical “two-way, all-day regional rail service” is to this urban region. We can talk all we want about better traffic signals, ramping up enforcement, or whatever, but the real solution to solving traffic congestion is getting people moving in other ways.

    Anyway, I digress. Here’s a photo of the delicious pasta we had:

    Happy birthday Philip!

  • We’re building an airport!

    One of our partners shared this video with me today:

    And it is possibly one of the greatest 39 seconds of interview you’ll ever watch.

    It is a video of Jim Fahy interviewing James Horan about the construction of Ireland West Airport. The important context is that Horan was a parish priest in Knock, County Mayo, and he desperately wanted an airport so that pilgrims could more easily visit the Knock Shrine.

    However, critics felt that an airport in County Mayo was just not feasible. The area was too foggy and too boggy (I had to look this one up).

    But Horan successfully campaigned to have one built and he did somehow find the money. Though maybe not the following week. The campaign apparently took a lot out of him, and he died shortly after the airport opened.

    But in the end, he got it built.

    It takes a special kind of person to accomplish what most people view as boiling the ocean (i.e. an impossible outcome). And when you watch the video, it will become obvious to you that James Horan was that kind of person.

  • New York City is piloting about a dozen motion sensor cameras

    This won’t come as a surprise to many of you. But I recently attended a community meeting where someone was advocating for adding new lanes to a particular road. Their argument was that traffic congestion is forcing too many cars to sit needlessly idle and that that is bad for the environment. The proposed solution of adding new lanes would get traffic moving, reduce idling pollution, and therefore be overall better for the environment.

    I disagree entirely.

    But transportation planning seems to be one of those things that many people feel is intuitive. It’s one of those things where people feel confident saying, “I know how to fix this. We just need to do this.” But the reality is that cities are incredibly complex organisms and it’s not always obvious what should be done. So I think that a big part of making our cities better comes down to having much better data. And that’s why I’m very intrigued by the work that startup Viva, and others, are doing.

    Viva uses small street-light mounted cameras and machine learning to track urban mobility (see image above). Currently they track 9 different modes: pedestrian, bicycle, e-scooter, motorcycle, car, van, light truck, semi-truck, and bus. And after they collect this data, the relevant information is extracted and then everything else is deleted for privacy reasons. There are also plans to make this data openly available to the public so that people can use it and/or build on top of it.

    Obviously this is still going to raise privacy concerns and that is something that will need to be carefully addressed. But I do think that the data from a platform like this is going to be invaluable for cities. Among many other things, it will help us to better allocate space among the various modes and design much safer streets. Hopefully it can also help to take some of the politics out of these sorts of decisions: “Here’s the data. Take a look.”

    Viva currently has 1,000 sensors already installed in London (where they are being used to evaluate the impacts of congestion pricing), and about half a dozen in New York. So it’ll be interesting to see what this leads to. And who knows, maybe it will actually turn us all into amateur transportation planners. We’ll certainly have access to a lot more data.

    For more information on Viva, here’s their website.

    Image: Viva

  • Examining a circular floor plate in Rio de Janeiro

    I came across this apartment on ArchDaily this morning and I immediately thought to myself, “this looks like the Lagoa neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro.” (Rio is one of my favorite cities and we nearly spent a few weeks of winter 2021 in this particular area.) So I opened it up and it turns out I was right. It’s a recent apartment renovation, in this building, by Rio de Janeiro-based architects MZNO.

    I then got onto the floor plan:

    Circular building floor plates invariably create fan-shaped suite layouts like this one here. From my experience, these can create some really beautiful spaces up near the face of the building, but they tend to work better when you have a bit more space to play around with. You’re also going to end up with diagonal walls and probably a radial structural system. In this case, the suite is just under 1,000 sf.

    I wondered if this might have been two suites that were joined together, with the previous demising being the radial shear wall behind the couch (see above). There seems to be two entrances to the suite on this plan. But then I looked at active listings in the building and this seems to be a typical layout. So I think they just stripped things down to the existing structure in order to open up the plan.

    The other item that stood out to me on the plan was the long corridor off the primary bedroom. But again, looking at other plans in the building, I can see that it was initially designed as a walk-in closet. This makes more sense, but it’s also a compromise brought about by this being a relatively deep plan.

    The bedrooms are “tetrised” together to make efficient use of a limited amount of linear glazing. An alternative trade-off (in this second plan) would have been to give it more frontage, and then bury the office (escritório). But I suppose there’s a good argument to be made that it’s better to have more light in your office than in your bedroom.

    MZNO was probably thinking along these same lines when they designed the linear kitchen in the way that they did in the first plan. By aligning it perpendicular to the suite’s exterior glass, you’re able to gain access to a view and some light even when you’re toward the back of the suite.

    Finally, the other thing about circular buildings is that they allow you to do cool circulation spaces like the above. In this case, all of the common area corridors are single-loaded, and wrapped around a huge lightwell in the middle of the building. This maybe isn’t so good if you suffer from vertigo, but it’s obvious that these corridors are serving as an extension of people’s living areas.

    And since this is Brazil, they’re naturally filled with greenery.

    Images: MZNO & Loft

  • Corktown Condos to launch sales this spring

    Earlier this week, I shared this image of Corktown Condos on my Instagram. It represents the first phase of Slate’s two-phase project in Hamilton, and I’m excited to announce that we’ll be launching sales this spring (both in Hamilton and in Toronto).

    We love Hamilton. It has walkability, transit, a wonderful stock of old buildings, and a dynamic and growing cultural scene. In other words, it has all of the characteristics that we look for when it comes to new projects. And here, our approach to city building is exactly analogous to what we did in Toronto at Yonge & St. Clair.

    Those of you who are familiar with our work will know that Slate owns 8 office buildings in midtown, including all four corners of the Yonge & St. Clair intersection. And that we have spent the last decade investing in these buildings, investing in the public realm, investing in public art, and working to support businesses in the area. Then in 2021, we launched sales on a landmark condominium tower called One Delisle that is now under construction.

    Here in Hamilton, we are similarly investing in economic development and in housing. Last year, it was announced that we acquired approximately 800 acres of industrial land and buildings on Hamilton’s waterfront. This site alone has the potential to create up to 23,000 new jobs across the region and inject up to $3.8 billion into Ontario’s economy. It will likely also take some time and be measured in decades.

    We prefer to think of ourselves as city builders. And that means taking a long-term view and thinking about the broader city — not just about our individual projects. So for us, Corktown is part of a much larger and longer-term commitment to the City of Hamilton. And we couldn’t be more excited to share it with all of you in the coming weeks.

    Stay tuned. And if you’d like to register for Corktown, you can do that over here.