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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  • The Architect’s Newspaper — 2022 Best of Design Awards

    This week AN announced its 2022 Best of Design Awards, which is intended to celebrate outstanding built and unbuilt architectural projects from around the world. And this year I am excited to share that Studio Gang was awarded two editors’ picks: one for 11 Hoyt in Brooklyn (Built-Residential, Multi-Unit) and one for One Delisle here in Toronto (Unbuilt-Residential, Multi-Unit). Selfishly, it of course makes me very happy to see our project being celebrated for its architecture. Go team! But from a less selfish perspective, it also makes me very happy to see Toronto being recognized in these awards. Because this is about city building, right?

  • A “New” New York

    Earlier this year, the Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, and the Governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, assembled a panel of civic leaders and industry experts to try and come up with a plan for a “New” New York.

    Initially, this panel was intended to be entirely focused on reviving the city’s business districts, and in particular those that have been slow to recover from the pandemic. But scope creep happens and it ultimately grew to include two other important goals: make it easier to get around and encourage “inclusive, future-focused growth.”

    The recommendations from this panel were released today and it’s in the form of a report with 40 specific initiatives. In keeping with its original intent, the first recommended initiative is one that you would expect: “Make Midtown and other business districts more live-work-play.” And what that means is the following:

    We will remove barriers that have kept Midtown and other business districts stagnant by making it easier to convert and redevelop outdated office buildings to other uses, including residential, thereby empowering the market to create more vibrant, mixed-use districts. We will also update old-fashioned regulatory codes that have prevented small businesses from locating, expanding, and innovating in those districts, providing zoning flexibility for businesses to thrive. And we will unite our business districts behind a shared goal of vitality by aligning incentives for businesses to help maintain vibrant business districts.

    New York isn’t the first city to be encouraging office-to-residential conversions and it certainly isn’t going to be the last. I think most of you know that I am a firm believer in office-centric cultures and that I’m in mine 5 days a week. But this is a recalibration that is going to need to take place in some submarkets.

    And here is one of the capitals of the world — New York City — telling us that it needs to happen there.

  • Density is good

    When it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, we know this:

    Households in denser neighborhoods close to city centers tend to be responsible for fewer planet-warming greenhouse gases, on average, than households in the rest of the country. Residents in these areas typically drive less because jobs and stores are nearby and they can more easily walk, bike or take public transit. And they’re more likely to live in smaller homes or apartments that require less energy to heat and cool.

    We also know this:

    Consider housing. For decades in the United States, the majority of new homes have been built in the suburbs and, increasingly, exurbs, where climate footprints are larger. As a result, for many people today, it is often easier and cheaper to find a home in a high-emissions community than a lower-emissions one.

    An important caveat to these points is that if you use consumption-based carbon accounting — that is, you consider all of the goods and services that people tend to consume — then other things like income also play a major factor. Wealthy households, for example, tend to fly more frequently, and that is bad for emissions.

    But even with this more accurate accounting, the two biggest contributors to a household’s carbon footprint still tend to be housing and driving. And that’s why when you look at emission maps, like these over here, the urban core still usually performs the best. Density, it turns out, is hard to beat.

  • This is not a hotel

    I am not the target market for Restoration Hardware, I mean RH. But I do think it is interesting the way they are evolving their brand. At the beginning of 2021, the company announced a $105 million equity investment in a development project in Aspen, where it is planning a new guesthouse and, more broadly, a new “RH ecosystem” that will include residences, restaurants, a spa, etc. It hasn’t opened yet, but RH does now have a guesthouse in New York. To be clear, it is not a hotel:

    So what is RH trying to do with all this?

    Surface Magazine recently argued that they are trying to become the “public” version of Soho House. That is, a lifestyle omni-brand that isn’t membership-based, but that will still make you feel rich and special while you eat, sleep, play, and shop for various things for your home. Now, I do think that their target customers aren’t exactly the same person. But of course, I see the parallels. And it’s certainly interesting from an experiential retail, brand ecosystem, and real estate development standpoint. It gets the brand everywhere.

  • [Project Profile] High Street Apartments, Thornbury

    It is an overwhelmingly positive thing for cities when you can somehow figure out how to turn a site like this (which looks to have been a single-family home):

    Into 13 homes and new ground-floor retail that looks like this (non-Google street view images can be found here):

    This particular example is at 752 High Street in Thornbury, which is an inner suburb of Melbourne. Designed by Gardiner Architects, the build has 4 floors of residential, a 5th floor rooftop amenity, and a single elevator with a single wraparound staircase. It was also constructed out of cross-laminated timber.

    For more about that process, here’s a short video:

    If you watch the video, you’ll hear the architect talk about how his firm had been working on this project for about 8 or 9 years. I have no idea the backstory and I’m not about to speculate, but clearly 8-9 years is far too long for only 13 new homes. And the reality is that we often don’t make it easy to build this kind of infill housing.

    Broadly speaking, if you’re trying to encourage this scale of housing, I think at a minimum you want to look at 3 things: (1) the planning permissions need to be flexible and as-of-right, (2) you need to look at the local building codes to see if there are any obstacles in place that don’t necessarily make sense for this typology, and (3) you want to look at the impact fees being levied.

    It’s hard not to imagine our cities being better off having more apartments like High Street.

  • New ideas like buildings people don’t want

    There is a very common story that plays out in cities. It starts with an area that has seen disinvestment and is probably a little seedy and/or dangerous . This creates an environment where rents and real estate as a whole are relatively inexpensive. New, cool and creative businesses start to move in (attracted by said inexpensiveness) and the area begins to turn around. Eventually it becomes suitable for institutional-type investors, and this ultimately leads to everything becoming expensive as a result of demand outstripping supply. Gentrification complete.

    The great irony of this story is that you sometimes, or oftentimes, lose the very things that made the area cool and interesting in the first place. Here is an example from Miami:

    The result has been a property speculation boom that, when combined with the city’s relatively low wages, put many businesses and residents on the street. Asking rents for industrial space, for instance, went up by 53 percent in the last year alone. Nobody can afford to buy, let alone rent, adequate space for a music venue because so much land has been snapped up by outside investors with a predilection for grand, “world-class urban” designs. 

    And for some areas, it is arguably the result of a careful and deliberate plan that was put in place nearly two decades ago:

    Teele’s commissioner district in the early 2000s included both Park West and the historically Black neighborhood of Overtown. At the turn of the millennium the area was blighted and crime-ridden thanks to years of racist, regressive policy decisions from segregation to redlining. His plan was simple but incredibly effective. He spearheaded a campaign to revitalize the area by granting a limited number of 24-hour liquor licenses to clubs like Space. Dozens of venues rose up on and around 11th Street, including vast, multi-room clubs like Metropolis, live venues like Studio A and Grand Central, and more intimate spots like Vagabond. Sporadic police raids also gave the area a druggy, dangerous reputation, inadvertently raising its allure. 

    This reoccurring arc has led some people to conclude that cities and/or areas seem to want to follow a kind of binary outcome: they’re either dying or they’re too successful. Why can’t we just have urban homeostasis? I don’t think this is necessarily always the case. Cities go through cycles just like any other market. I also know that it’s complicated. But I do feel strongly that we need to be mindful that part of what makes cities such wonderful places is that they are factories for new ideas and creativity.

    I can’t remember when or exactly how he said it, but YouTuber Casey Neistat once described New York City as an incredible island (Manhattan?) where misfits from all over the world come to do whatever the hell they want. And that part of the reason for this is that nobody cares what you do, because everyone is just so damn busy. You could certainly argue that New York isn’t what it used to be. But the lesson here remains the same: Cities are at their best when they allow humans to create, build, experiment, and express themselves.

    And oftentimes a great place for that is in a space that nobody else wants.

  • What AI thinks about missing middle housing

    I don’t know if any of you have had a chance to play with ChatGPT yet, but it is pretty incredible. Here is something that my friend David Fitzpatrick, who is a planner, tweeted out:

    https://twitter.com/_DavidFitz/status/1600886386734682112?s=20&t=nxrqQJM8AQ6unugSs7eP9w

    There is really no way of telling that AI produced this. It sounds natural and, in this particular case, it also feels like it understands that this is an ongoing debate: “the by-law may not provide enough flexibility to allow for…”

    It’s a good thing I don’t write for a living.

  • On-street EV charging stations are the next street light

    On-street electric vehicle charging points are starting to roll out across Toronto. Here is one that I came across this morning in the Junction on Annette Street. The stations are from Flo.

    At its core, this is, of course, a great thing. Ubiquitous charging points are a critical component of overall EV adoption. But at the same time, it was a good reminder that (1) above-grade electrical wires are ugly (this is the typical Toronto approach) and that (2) on-street EV charging is a design challenge that is going to need to be solved.

    In the above example, the charging stations were mounted to an existing electrical pole and two bright yellow bollards were installed on either side to make sure nobody smashes into said charging stations while they’re parking and/or trying to watch TikTok videos on their phone.

    But what happens when nearly everyone has an EV? There are only so many electrical poles, so we will need to move on to standalone stations at some point, and that is obviously already being done. But if we’re going to have charging points practically everywhere, how should they work and what should they look like?

    I am sure that lots of very smart people are already thinking about this. But as someone who is not directly involved in this space, it feels like we need to think about these in a similar way to street lights. Because they are going to be just as ubiquitous, if not more so. That means there is a strong cause for making them both functional and beautiful.

    In fact, this feels like a real city branding opportunity.

  • How to cheapen a new building

    Anyone who has ever worked on a development pro forma will know that the process generally works like this: You start with a bunch of assumptions. You assemble those assumptions in a way that will allow you to determine if the project in question is feasible. And then, you realize that almost everything is more costly than you initially thought and that the project may not actually work. Oh shit.

    In fact, a sure-fire way to know that you’re on the right track is if the numbers sort of don’t work. If the returns look too good to be true, they almost certainly are and you’re likely missing something big and meaningful. As we have talked about before on this blog, development happens on the margin. That means that you have to work at it. You have to be creative. And often you have to find ways to increase revenues and cut costs.

    The common way to find money is through something known as value engineering, which is just a fancy way of saying, “I need to cut costs, so let’s see what I can tolerate losing from this project.” That’s generally how it works. And we do it on every project. You’re trying to find high-cost items with relatively low perceived value.

    This process often gets a lot of criticism because people view it as a distasteful cheapening of a project. But the reality is that it is usually an important part of maintaining project feasibility. You may really want to use that fancy material you can only get from Switzerland, but maybe development charges were just increased and now you need to offset those new costs by finding savings somewhere else.

    This isn’t a perfect analogy, but imagine you were shopping for a new car. You might start out by wanting the fully-loaded version, but then you see the price and realize you can’t afford it. So you decide to start trimming features and add-ons until you get to a place where you feel more comfortable. I would imagine this happens with cars, and I’m not sure it’s right to point to that person after and say, “oh my god, I can’t believe you cheaped out and didn’t buy the fully-loaded version.”

    At the same time, I think it would be perfectly reasonable to argue that you don’t need to spend a lot of money to (1) care deeply about the work that you do and (2) have taste. You can’t fight the economic realities of the world, but you can care and you can be creative. And I don’t think it’s too much to advocate for these things.

  • Cruise expands autonomous taxi service in San Francisco

    Cruise, which I wrote about earlier this year, has just announced that its autonomous taxi service will soon be available to the general public 24 hours a day, across all of San Francisco. Initially the service was only available between 11PM and 5AM (when traffic volumes are lower), and in certain parts of the city. It was also free to use. In total, the company now has about 300 AVs operating across San Francisco, Austin, and Phoenix. And it has been charging for rides since June of this year.

    If you’re curious about what it’s like to ride in one of these, check out the above video.