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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  • San Francisco is kind of on the verge of abolishing single-family zoning

    The headline sounds pretty promising: San Francisco is on the verge of abolishing single-family zoning, and will soon allow 4-plexes across the city and up to 6 units on corner lots. It is also clear recognition that, “hey, we have a housing problem and should probably figure out a way to increase overall supply.”

    Unfortunately, when you look at the policy details, you’ll see that this is likely to be more symbolic than effective. What is being proposed is to take the 40% of San Francisco’s land area that is zoned exclusively for single-family houses and upzone it to allow for duplexes on an as-of-right basis.

    And then, if you happen to have owned the property for at least 5 years — or inherited it from a family member that did — you can apply for a special “density exception” from the city. This would allow you to build 6 units on corner lots and 4 units on all remaining mid-block lots.

    But here’s the other thing: if you are granted this density exception, the additional units (beyond your as-of-right two) will be subject to rent control. So the important question here is about whether or not anyone will end up building more than luxury duplexes and, if they do, will there be enough scale to produce a meaningful impact.

    I’m not familiar with development cost structures in San Francisco and I’m not sure if there will be any incentives/subsidies for delivering these additional rent controlled units, but the above feels like far too many barriers if the goal is more housing.

    But it remains a step in the right direction. Symbolism certainly has its merits.

    For other posts on infill housing, click here.

    Photo by Braden Collum on Unsplash

  • Why traffic fatalities are lower in Canada than in the US

    We’ve talked about this before. If you live in New York City, you’re probably about a third as likely to die from a transportation-related accident as compared to the average American. And if you live in Paris, you’re probably about a third as likely to die from a transportation-related accident as compared to the average New Yorker.

    These stats might feel a bit intuitive to you. Both New York and Paris are big and dense metros with high public transit ridership. And that usually translates into less car accidents. As for the divide between these two cities, Paris is in Europe. It’s old. Most of its streets were built before the car had been invented. And all of these things are generally good for pedestrians. Makes sense.

    But David Zipper asked a good question today: So what’s going on with Canada? Canada is not in Europe (though some might argue that it sits culturally somewhere between the US and Europe). It’s not that old. And it generally has a car-oriented landscape just like the US. So why is it that in 2020, Americans were 2.5x more likely than Canadians to die in a car crash? The trend lines are also diverging between these two countries. Between 2010 to 2020, US road deaths increased 19% on a per capita basis, whereas Canada’s rate declined by about the same rate, according to David.

    Ultimately, we are probably going to need Malcolm Gladwell to write a book about this so that we can really figure out what’s going on. But in the interim, David does propose a few possible explanations ranging from Canadians buying slightly smaller vehicles to Canadians being slightly more law-abiding than Americans and so less likely to run people over. But one of the most persuasive explanations for me is that maybe our urban landscapes aren’t actually the same.

    More than a third of Canadians live in our three biggest cities: Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. And this number would be even higher if you looked at the full urban catchment areas of each. Either way, this is a significantly higher concentration than in the US, where about 13% of Americans live in the metro areas of New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

    Part of this difference is because the US has almost 9x more people and has many more big cities to choose from. But it doesn’t change the fact that, despite our reputed love for things like forests and beavers, Canadians are actually quite urban. And as we have discovered, that’s a good thing for pedestrians.

    Photo by Jamshed Khedri on Unsplash

  • Renewable power now accounts for about 13% of global electricity generation

    This is an interesting chart from Nathaniel Bullard over at Bloomberg Green. In 1985 (the start of this chart), coal-fired power was responsible for about 38% of global electricity generation. This particular stat hasn’t changed all that much since then — the current figure is around 36% — but renewables have gone from 0.8% to 13% of global electricity. That is something. Since 2010, renewables are adding about 0.8% market share each year, and presumably this rate will only increase going forward. (Here, renewable power is defined as wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, and small hydropower.)

    Chart: Bloomberg Green

  • [Video] City building to achieve our carbon emission targets

    Today was the SvNSpeaks event that I blogged about last week. As a reminder, the conversation was about how best to remove overly prescriptive and rigid development policies in order to better achieve our climate change goals. John Lorinc and I ended up agreeing on a lot of points, so maybe that suggests there’s a relatively clear path here. Now it’s just a matter of taking action.

    It was a recorded event on LinkedIn, so if you’d like to have a listen, you can do that over here.

  • What should Toronto do with its major streets?

    The City of Toronto’s Official Plan directs growth to areas of the city that it refers to as Centres, Avenues, Employment Areas, and the Downtown. In other words, these are the areas where most new development is intended to take place. So if you own land in one of these areas, it is probably worth more than if it were outside of them, all other things being equal.

    Avenues are what you might expect. They are major streets that run throughout the city (pink ones in the above map). But not all major streets are “Avenues.” There are lots of major streets that provide connectivity across the city but still feel like residential streets (tired ones I might add) and that have land use policies that only allow low-rise housing. I have always viewed this as a mismatch and I have long been critical of it on the blog.

    But as part of the City’s Expanding Housing Options in Neighourhoods (EHON) initiative, this exact problem is being looked at. And I think it is one of the most important land use studies currently underway in the city. Because if we are truly serious about housing affordability and our low-carbon goals, we are going to need to blanket our city with a lot more transit-supportive density. And our major streets are great place to start.

    I just hope that everyone involved will be as bold and visionary as possible. If you have any thoughts, please leave them in the comment selection below. And for the latest on this study, click here. It is an agenda item at next month’s Planning and Housing Committee meeting.

  • Phoenix’s cool pavement pilot program

    When I was in Phoenix this past spring I noticed a number of people carrying their big dogs around. At first I wasn’t sure what was going on. I thought maybe the dogs were injured and couldn’t walk. But then it dawned on me that maybe the ground was too hot for the dogs to walk on it. Phoenix is kind of hot sometimes and so this appears to be a thing.

    In response to this kind of hot problem, the city has a pilot program underway where they’re testing out something that they are calling “cool pavement”, which is essentially a highly reflective coating that gets layered on top of your traditional asphalt streets. Here’s a video showing some of it getting applied:

    The idea here is, of course, to lower the surface temperature during the day and also reduce the overall urban heat island. And after the first year of the pilot program, the results have been encouraging. Cool pavement had an average surface temperature that was 10.5 to 12 degrees Fahrenheit lower than traditional asphalt during the middle of the day.

    But there have been some tradeoffs. Because of its higher reflectivity, mean radiant temperatures increased by about 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, which means that these streets feel warmer to humans when they’re around them. That’s obviously not ideal, but it could be a necessary trade-off to reduce surface temperatures across the city.

    For more information on Phoenix’s cool pavement pilot program, click here.

  • The story behind those pixelated video game mosaics in Paris

    If you’ve ever been to Paris, you’ve probably noticed the small pixelated art pieces that are scattered all around the city on buildings and various other hard surfaces.

    Or maybe you haven’t seen or noticed them in Paris, but you’ve seen similarly pixelated mosaics in one of the other 79 cities around the world where they can be found.

    Or maybe you have no idea what I’m talking about right now. Huh? Here’s an example from Bolivia (click here if you can’t see the embedded post below):

    These pixelated urban art pieces are the work of French artist Invader. Modeled after 8-bit video games from the 1970s and 1980s, Invader has been installing these mosaics since 1998 as part of his broader “Space Invaders” project. The first one was installed in Paris.

    No two pieces are alike and they’re all made out of ceramic tiles so that they last. Invader also meticulously researches and then records each install location. He is basically trying to take over the world with his “invasions”. As of today, there are 4056 invaders in 80 cities.

    Here’s a map. Sadly there are none in Toronto.

    The goal of the project is to liberate art from what Invader calls “its usual alienators”, that being museums and other institutions. It is about bringing art out and into the public realm so that everyone can enjoy it. And this is precisely what makes his mosaics so wonderful — it is their playful integration into the urban landscape.

    But these aren’t exactly sanctioned pieces of art. If he started out by asking, the answer probably would have been no.

    Invader thinks of himself as a kind of hacker of public realms. He keeps his identity concealed. He installs these mosaics during the night (from what I have read). And sometimes he gets in a lot of trouble.

    Sometimes they also get removed by the building owner, though at this point his mosaics are pretty well known, so I can’t imagine many owners not wanting to be “invaded.”

    But let me ask all of you this: If you owned a building in a major city and woke up tomorrow morning to a Space Invader on the front of it, would you celebrate it, apathetically leave it, or would you remove it immediately?

  • Mid-market missing middle housing in Victoria

    I am a big fan of Victoria-based developer Aryze. And their Pearl Block project is a good example of why. Developed on an awkward triangular lot that had been sitting vacant for nearly 65 years and that presumably every other developer had been overlooking, the project brought six family-oriented townhouses to the Oaklands neighborhood of Victoria, BC.

    Each of the towns has 3 bedrooms. Each has a living room facing the street (but with privacy from the neighbor). Each has a large rooftop deck (with 5 foot parapet walls so no kids fall over). And according to the developer, each sold for less than the average price of a single-family home in the Oaklands area. Not surprisingly, the project also won all sorts of awards.

    It is a great example of the kind of beautiful and mid-market missing middle housing that so many of us are always talking about. Why build 1 home when you can build 6? Why build 6 homes when you can build 18? Still, there remains far too many obstacles in the way of any sort of housing that doesn’t conform to the status-quo:

    It shouldn’t be this difficult. And it shouldn’t take this long. Actually, let me rephrase this. It can’t be this difficult and it can’t this long; that is, if we’re expecting to actually come close to meeting the demand for new housing. There is no great mystery as to why the missing middle is, you know, missing. We made it that way.

    Keep up the great work team Aryze.

    Photography: Ema Peter via D’Arcy Jones Architects

  • Zoning controls, sprawl, and housing affordability

    Maybe it’s confirmation bias, but I continue to feel like there is a groundswell of interest in trying to improve housing supply and overall affordability. The YIMBY movement continues to gain steam. Here are are few excerpts from a recent M. Nolan Gray article where he calls for an end to zoning as we know it today:

    In nearly every major U.S. city, apartments are banned in at least 70 percent of residential areas. San Jose prohibits apartments in 94 percent of its residential areas. The most a developer can build in these zones is a detached single-family home.

    The results speak for themselves. Houston builds housing at 14 times the rate of peers like San Jose. And it isn’t just sprawl: In 2019, Houston built roughly the same number of apartments as Los Angeles, despite being half its size. Since reforms to minimum-lot-size rules were put in place in 1998, more than 25,000 townhouses have been built, overwhelmingly in existing urban areas.

    To be clear, Houston has made its share of planning mistakes. But, free of zoning, the city can constantly remake itself. That Houston is now one of the most affordable and diverse cities in the country is no accident.

    The relationship between housing affordability and constraints on development is a well-documented one. If you want more affordable housing, you generally want fewer, rather than more, constraints on delivering new housing.

    But as I was reading through the article, I couldn’t help but think more specifically about the relationship between sprawl and affordability. Because it is also true that, for a variety of reasons, the former has tended to help the latter (or at least coincide with it), which is why Gray felt it was important to say “and it isn’t just sprawl” when talking about Houston.

    Part of this relationship has to do with the fact that expansionist development tends to be of the low-rise stick-built varietal, which is a relatively cost effective way to build. Whereas the higher density infill stuff tends to be built using more expensive materials like reinforced concrete. But of course there are many other factors at play, including lower land costs.

    So I think one really interesting question is this one here: To what extent could we break this relationship between sprawl and affordability with what Gray is advocating for? In other words, how cheap could we make new infill housing in our older cities if we were to greatly loosen zoning controls or possibly even remove them all together?

    I don’t know the exact answer, but I know that directionally it would be better.

  • Learning from Lisbon

    This happened earlier in the week:

    And it got me thinking about how much I love Lisbon:

    But the important story here is that these tweets made it abundantly clear to me that (1) people from all over want far more from their parks and public spaces and that (2) Lisbon’s kiosks are a truly beloved urban feature.

    I’m putting this all out there because I received a ton of inbounds following these tweets, and I would love to find a way to execute on the kiosk idea that I outlined in the above twitter thread. So if you’d like to help, please continue to get in touch.