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.
Click here if you can’t see the embedded video above.
This is a 93 square foot former boiler room that was transformed by San Francisco-based architect Christi Azevedo into a full service guest apartment. The ground floor only measures 8’2″ x 11’6″ and so a taller volume was created to house a separate sleeping area and bathroom above. Designing small spaces forces you to be creative and consider each element carefully. This tiny home is a good example of that.
When you look at some of the most iconic home designs from around the world — which Bloomberg CityLab has been doing — there are some trends that emerge. One of them has to do with desirability. Whether we’re talking about Stockholm or Montreal, a lot of the housing that is today cherished, started out as fairly utilitarian. There was a need for housing and so governments and developers stepped up to build, often as cost effectively as possible. The result was housing that a lot of people seemed to dislike. At least initially.
Here are a few excerpts from a recent post by CityLab talking about Montreal’s famous walk-up apartments:
Their shape was dictated by the dimensions of the lots sold by developers: Narrow at the front, they run as deep as 120 feet and open onto an alley, leaving enough space for backyards and sheds behind. Inside, the units are not particularly big, with duplex apartments, often rectangular in shape, typically from 750 square feet to 1,000 square feet. Triplex apartments are a little larger and sometimes configured in an L-shape, a trick that builders used to make the most of the lot’s depth while getting some side light. Rooms unfold on one or either side of a corridor, with the kitchen at the back.
Despite their reputation for charm today, the plexes were long criticized for their overcrowding and lack of light. Working-class homes were sometimes known as “the poor man’s coffin,” says Noppen.
“These are very narrow, dark, long buildings, which above all, were overcrowded,” he says. Today the apartments may be sought after, as “part of a considerable gentrification movement, but that’s because, two, three people live inside — that used to be 15.”
I think most people forget that the housing we love today was probably built by a developer and almost certainly done in the pursuit of profit. Which begs the question: What has to happen before people suddenly start appreciating? Eliminating overcrowding certainly helps. But is it also a question of time? Do we just need time for the housing to settle in and get absorbed into the market? Or do we simply tend to dislike that which is new and so we need something even newer to hate before we can appreciate the now old?
The research isn’t absolutely conclusive, but Matt Clancy — who is an assistant teaching professor of economics at Iowa State — makes an interesting case (over here) about entrepreneurship being mostly contagious.
The article cites a long list of studies that have more or less found that being around entrepreneurs can have a measurable positive effect on whether you yourself might also become one.
There is evidence to suggest that this is true whether you’re a scientist working with someone who has previously commercialized a piece of research, a community with entrepreneurial neighbors, a student with an entrepreneurial mentor, or a child with parents who have started their own business(es).
According to one Swedish study, the children of entrepreneurs are about 12 percentage points more likely to start a business at some point in their life compared to people with non-entrepreneur parents.
But as I said at the beginning of this post, the research isn’t entirely conclusive. Could a proclivity for risk and independence be instead genetic? Could it be that entrepreneur types simply seek out other entrepreneurs to hang out with? Perhaps these associations aren’t causal. Maybe.
But my gut tells me that there has got to be some contagiousness. Here’s an excerpt from Matt’s article:
…being around someone who has done it plants the seed in your mind that it’s a possibility, something you really could do. For most of the studies, the population exposed to entrepreneurship is a population that wouldn’t normally consider it. For them, exposure has a measurable positive effect.
What this once again tells me is that there’s immeasurable value in people clustering in cities, local communities, offices, coffee shops, and many other spaces. It’s a hard (probably impossible) thing to replace. And it could be the difference between taking initiative and starting a business, and not doing that.
Today’s post is going to be a self-serving one.
Some of you might remember that back in June I wrote about One Delisle being a finalist for four 2021 BILD Awards. One of them was the People’s Choice Award, where I also mentioned that voting would open in August. Well, it is now August (yes, already) and voting is open. If you’d like to cast a vote, you can do that over here. (No login necessary.) There are some wonderful projects on this top 10 list. But in my entirely biased opinion, One Delisle is the project for you.
My friend Christopher Bibby sent me this article over the weekend. It’s by Brian Potter — who writes an excellent newsletter on Substack about construction things — and it’s about why it’s so hard to innovate in construction.
To explain this, he starts by showing that the distribution of cost outcomes in construction projects tend to be both skewed toward the right and “fat tailed.”
What does this mean? It means that construction projects have a tendency to run over a budget. And that they are much more likely to be over budget than under budget (right-skewed distribution). According to some data from the US Navy, the difference in likelihood is 10x.
At the same time, there are also instances where projects don’t just run over budget, they run really over budget (fat tail). All of this is different from your normal distribution where you have a symmetrical curve and thin tails. I guess construction isn’t normal.
One of the reasons for this abnormal distribution is the fact that construction suffers from what Brian calls “cascading failures.” This is kind of intuitive, but it is everything in construction: In order to complete Y, you need to complete X. If X is delayed, then everything is delayed.
Because of these dynamics, changes to the construction process are perceived as incredibly risky. This has created a bias toward incremental rather than fundamental innovations.
For the full article, click here. It’s worth a read.
I was recently having a discussion on Twitter about midrise buildings and architect Dermot Sweeny raised the important distinction between creating “spines” and creating “districts.”
What he was referring to with “spines” was the way in which Toronto is intensifying its “Avenues” with midrise buildings. It is a kind of linear form of intensification which almost always means that each building must transition in some way to the low-rise housing that typically abuts our Avenues. This is far less relevant in districts.
We have started to increase housing supply in our “Neighborhoods” through things like laneway houses and garden suites, but in most cases, we are arguably not creating urban districts.
This is of course a touchy subject. But I think it’s an important discussion to be having for a number reasons:
Can you think of any others?
Photo: Old Montrêal (Shot on iPhone)
These are photos from the terrace of a restaurant in Old Montreal called Boris Bistro. It’s not new — it’s been around since 1999 — but that doesn’t change the fact that its outdoor space is absolutely magical.
The terrace sits behind an old stone facade on McGill Street that is held up with a three-storey steel structure. Hello façadism! I have tried to figure out the vintage of the original building through a cursory look online, but I came up with nothing. (Drop it in comment section below if you happen to know.)
What we were told at the restaurant was that the original building burnt down, leaving just the facade and then an open space behind it. The size of the trees on the terrace do suggest that it’s been this way for a long time.
There’s an office building beside it that looks to be of a 90s vintage (465 McGill Street) and this open space was apparently a place for office workers to go smoke. But now the ground floor of the office building and the terrace function as one large contiguous space.
The result is what you see above. Magic.
Montréal has been city building for a lot longer than Toronto. Some 400 years depending on how you calculate it. This history has created one of the most beautiful built environments anywhere in the world.
I saw a headline yesterday that the CDC was now reporting that vaccinated people can spread COVID just as easily as unvaccinated people. I then thought to myself, “this is not a good headline if you’re trying to encourage people to get vaccinated.”
What I guess this is saying is that vaccinated people who end up contracting COVID (“breakthrough” cases) have similar viral loads to people who are unvaccinated. So it makes sense that they would then be able to transmit the virus to others.
But the more important point remains that vaccinated people are less likely to spread the virus to others because they are less likely to actually get it in the first place.
Yes, the vaccines are not 100% effective. But supposedly the latest hospital data suggests that vaccines remain 87% effective at preventing hospitalization. This, of course, means that some vaccinated people will still get sick and that, yes, they might transmit it to others.
But for the vast majority of people that shouldn’t be the case.
Update: My point is that clear and consistent messaging is important.
Plans to redevelop Ontario Place (here in Toronto) have been in the works for many years, even before it closed in 2012. Supposedly it was losing over $20 million a year at that time. It had obviously lost its relevance.
Back in 2010 (or thereabouts) I was actually part of a team that responded to an RFP to redevelop the waterfront lands. In fact, I was the human who physically submitted the proposal. I was still patiently waiting to hear back about whether or not we were selected, but based on today’s news I’m going to assume we didn’t get it.
This morning, the Ontario government announced the following vision (architecture by Diamond Schmitt):
The team also includes Austrian resort developer Therme, Quebec-based recreation firm Écorécréo, and US-based concert company Live Nation. The proposal itself includes a new outdoor “adventure park”, an indoor spa and waterpark, and a year-round concert venue. Premier Ford has also made it clear that there will be no casino, no residential, and that none of the land will be sold to the private sector.
That’s essentially all I know about the proposal.
Water features, palm trees, and a new beach all sound great to me. I just hope that (1) something actually happens and that (2) it is truly remarkable.
Earlier this month Snapchat announced the acquisition of Vertebrae, which is a 50-person company that allows brands to create and manage 3D versions of their products. Why does this potentially matter? Because Snapchat is already doing stuff like this:
(If you can’t see the embedded video, click here.)
This was a recent partnership with Gucci that Snapchat is calling the first ever “virtual shoe try-on activation.” The way it worked for the nearly 19 million people that it reached was pretty simple. Point the Snapchat camera at your feet. Try on a bunch of new Gucci shoes. Buy by tapping “shop now.”
As we all consider what it will mean to go shopping in the future — and what kind of real estate will be most valuable — this kind of innovation strikes me as being a very big deal.
