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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  • Architect Bjarke Ingels announces new “design living” company

    News has just dropped that architect Bjarke Ingels, Roni Bahar, and Nick Chim are launching a new “design living” company called Nabr. Their website says that it is “coming soon to Silicon Valley” and so presumably there will be tech involved and we should actually be calling it a startup.

    The video embedded at the top of this post (link here) will tell you a little bit about it. But from what I can glean from their website, the focus is on using technology and modular construction to deliver housing that is more personal / adaptable, more sustainable, and more attainable. There is a note on their site about buying with only 1% down.

    We have talked a lot on this blog about the antiquated and slow-moving nature of design, development, and construction. So what it absolutely clear is that there are many problems to be solved here. I am excited to see what the team brings forward.

  • America’s return to the office

    Envoy, which is a workplace platform that offers products such as these, recently used its data to publish a kind of return to work index. More specifically, they used millions of anonymized employee and visitor sign-ins from their platforms to figure out who was returning to the office. Their dataset covers over 14,000 locations and all 50 states. And what they found was what you see at the top of this post, which is a look at workplace foot traffic in the top 10 US metropolitan areas compared to a May 2020 baseline. On average, traffic is up over 200%. And for some metropolitan areas, like the Philadelphia metro, it is up over 360%. There was a blip around January, but I think the trendline here is pretty clear.

    For more on Envoy’s return to work index, click here.

  • Development as a leading indicator

    Building new buildings takes a really long time. It is not uncommon for development timelines to to span 5-10 years, and sometimes even longer. It is particularly frustrating when you see unnecessary roadblocks and delays throughout the process. But that’s a topic for another post.

    Perhaps one of the positives of these timelines is that they force you to think well into the future. Take for example electric vehicles. Most car manufacturers have already announced aggressive electrification targets for the year 2030.

    What that means is that if you’re starting a new project today, you have to assume that it will be completed into a world where many more people will be coming home and plugging in their car. Perhaps it will be the majority of people. So you probably need to plan for that.

    Another way to think about development is that it is a leading indicator for what’s coming. If we stick with the example of cars and parking, I think it’s pretty clear that parking is becoming increasingly scarce in our biggest cities. The pressures are simply too great.

    In all of our Toronto projects, we are currently building no more than about 0.4 parking spaces per suite. And there’s pressure to bring this number down even further. There are lots of examples of zero parking. The biggest reason is costs, but we also know that big cities don’t function well when everyone is driving around.

    This is also not a new trend.

    If you look at the multi-family buildings that Toronto completed in and around the 60s and 70s, many will have parking ratios in the range of 1-2 parking spaces per suite. This is totally untenable in today’s environment (except for a small subset of the market) and I bet you that a lot of this parking is now sitting vacant.

    Things change. Development can sometimes tell you what those changes might be.

    Photo by Michael Fousert on Unsplash

  • The Netherlands is short 330,000 homes

    The price of an existing home in the Netherlands increased 14.6% in the first 6 months of this year alone, according to this recent FT article. This is in comparison to 6.1% for existing homes across the EU on a year-over-year basis. Some economists estimate that the Netherlands is short about 330,000 homes right now and that it needs to build at least 1 million more over the next decade to better align supply and demand. I know that there is a lot of debate about the extent to which supply alone can solve problems of affordability. And indeed there are other factors at play here, such as low interest rates. But 330,000 is a lot of missing housing and numbers like this are not unique to the Netherlands. Most big cities have a supply of housing that is highly inelastic because of how difficult we make it to build. Most of us recognize this. But it remains a problem.

  • Boiler room turned guest apartment

    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.

  • At what point does one start appreciating new housing?

    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?

  • Is entrepreneurship contagious? (And a bull case for urban clustering)

    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.

  • Voting now open for BILD’s People’s Choice Award

    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.

  • Construction is right-skewed and fat tailed

    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.

  • Districts versus spines

    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:

    • Increasing housing supply is a good thing
    • Angular planes and other transition measures make housing more expensive
    • Urban places are, I would argue, better defined through districts rather than spines
    • Mixed-use (employment) becomes more viable with districts
    • Transit infrastructure is better utilized with radial density around its stations

    Can you think of any others?

    Photo: Old Montrêal (Shot on iPhone)