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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  • + POOL receives “confirmation to proceed with due diligence”

    I learned this morning that + POOL (pictured above) recently received an official” confirmation to proceed with due diligence.” This is after more than a decade of planning, fundraising, negotiations, prototyping and, I’m sure, a bunch of other stuff. City building takes a long time. I’m not exactly sure where this milestone sits in the full spectrum of idea to realization, but it certainly sounds like meaningful progress.

    The idea behind + POOL is pretty simple: People like to swim in water. But the East River is dirty and not the best place to swim (supposedly it’s been this way — unswimmable — since the 1930s). So why not create a dedicated swimming pool in the river and why not make it so that it filters the dirty East River water at the same time. Pretty clever. (The plus sign format is so that it can be split up into four separate uses.)

    New York City is in the midst of creating some incredibly unique public spaces. The other big news is that Little Island opened up this past weekend within the larger Hudson River Park. Also more than a decade in the making, the free 2.4 acre public park, which was designed by Thomas Heatherwick, is the result of a $260 million donation from Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg.

    Start with an idea. Put some money around it. And then fight like hell for many years. That’s how these remarkable urban spaces are getting created. This is also pretty much how real estate development works.

  • An international travel boom is coming

    I was reading up on vaccine passports this morning. What is clear is that countries are scrambling to figure this out right now, though I understand Israel is already up and running, as is South Korea, which has a system built on top of the blockchain. (This feels like a great use case for the technology.)

    What is also clear (see above charts) is that many countries are highly motivated to figure this out sooner rather than later. The geographies that are weighted toward tourism dollars don’t want to miss out on yet another summer travel season. And given how dominant Europe is in terms of international arrivals, I suspect that they might end up leading the way in terms of rolling out some form of internationally accepted passport system. I would imagine that true universality is going to be a challenge though.

    Domestic travel in the US has already bounced back in a significant way. Looking at TSA screenings for the first half of this month (May 2021), travel right now is at about 70% of 2019 volumes. This is in comparison to just under 10% last year (May 2020). Once international travel gets streamlined in the second half of this year, I’m sure the same thing will happen on that front.

    One of my predictions at the beginning of this year was that we would see an explosion in global travel, probably in the second half of the year. I stand by that view. Many/most of us have spent the last year in various forms of lockdown and many/most of us have spent the last year with almost no work-life balance (a symptom of WFH).

    According to some recent data from home website Zillow, the company saw traffic skyrocket in 2020 from 1.5 billion visits to 9.6 billion visits (compared to the year prior). This is people looking at homes, and, in many cases, looking at homes that are more expensive than what they currently own. Real estate websites, you could argue, became a form of escapism last year, which is something that travel is normally pretty good at.

    People are restless and ready to unplug. I reckon that’s going to happen in a meaningful way later this year.

    Charts: Financial Times

  • PAPILIO: Wind-powered streetlight

    Well here is a clever idea by Berlin designer Tobias Trübenbacher. It is a wind-powered streetlight — one that also detects when people are nearby and emits an insect-friendly light spectrum. Lots of cities already rely (partially) on solar powered lights and signage. But that doesn’t always work if the street doesn’t get a lot of direct sunlight or if you happen to be in a darker city. So perhaps wind is the answer. I could imagine this working very well here in Toronto in the middle of the winter at the intersection of Bay and King. And if you remember my post from earlier in the week about a roadmap to net zero energy, it is pretty clear that both solar and wind electricity are going to need to become far more prominent in our cities.

    If you can’t see the embedded video above, click here.

  • Experiential art center opens in Miami’s Allapattah neighborhood

    A new 50,000 square foot experiential art center (EAC to those in the know), called Superblue, has just opened up in Miami’s Allapattah neighborhood. It includes installations by Tokyo-based teamLab, Amsterdam’s DRIFT, James Turrell (amazing), as well as many others.

    This is noteworthy because experiential art is both fun (and Instagrammable) and because it is another example of the continuing rise of Allapattah. Art, design, and culture are usually pretty good for city building.

    At the same time, the New York Times raises an interesting question: “Is this a forward step in the march of modernism or a debasement of art into theme-park entertainment?” Arthur Lubow goes on to say:

    The popularity of this genre is driven by contradictory desires, as demonstrated memorably by the line of visitors in 2019 who waited up to six hours for a one-minute stay amid the twinkling lights in Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirror room at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea. Malnourished by their phones and computer screens, people yearn for real-life visceral experiences. And yet they remain stuck in the gravitational pull of virtual reality: The experiences they seek are ones they can record on their phone cameras and post on social media.

    I get this logic.

    But my own view is that just because something has commercial appeal, it shouldn’t mean that the art is any less serious. And just because people want to photograph and share it, doesn’t necessarily mean that they aren’t appreciating it in the same way as someone just standing around and pondering it.

    Perhaps this is a good time to mention that Snap has also just announced the next version of its Spectacles. These ones come with the promise of augmented reality. What is real anymore?

  • An imperfect laneway worth replicating

    We stumbled on Bar Volo last night on our evening walk (pictured above). It’s on St. Nicholas Street, which I guess is technically a street. But it feels and acts more like a laneway. I was naturally pretty excited by this discovery and so I tweeted this out. I was then called out for glorifying this laneway because: 1) this is only one small storefront, 2) the rest of the laneway is kind of pooey, and 3) there are other, better, examples of complete laneways in the city such as throughout Toronto’s Yorkville neighborhood. Okay.

    What got me excited is that this is a recent development — there’s a residential building above this welcoming bottle shop — that managed to successfully create fine-grained urbanism and activate a laneway frontage that could have very easily gone underutilized. Now imagine if every new development with some sort of laneway frontage did things as meaningful as this. Piece by piece, we would be building another layer to our city. (I like to think that we’re contributing to this vision with our laneway towns at Junction House. They are, by the way, 100% sold out. Go laneway living.)

    It’s easy to get excited by the bigger urban moves. A new tall building or a Ferris wheel on the waterfront, perhaps. But sometimes the answer is as simple as a small brewery, a narrow and imperfect laneway, and a roll up garage door.

  • A roadmap for the global energy sector

    The International Energy Agency (IEA) has just published what it is calling the first comprehensive roadmap for transitioning the world to a net zero energy system by 2050. Turns out, it’s only going to take a complete overhaul of pretty much everything to hit this important target. We are going to need to start investing some $820 billion each year (starting in 2030) on our electrical grids to support the electrification of the global economy. 90% of electricity generation is going to need to come from renewables, with 70% likely coming from solar PV and wind alone. 60% of global car sales will need to be electric by 2030. We’ll need to completely halt the sale of internal combustion engine vehicles by 2035. And by 2040, we will need to have retrofitted at least half of our existing building stock.

    Make no little plans. For a copy of the report, click here.

  • Impostor cities

    Canadian cities are well known in the world of film for their ability to stand-in for other global cities. They rarely play themselves, which actually pisses me off. Because I take it as a sign that we’re not doing nearly enough to make Canadian cities the most beautiful and remarkable cities in the world. Canadian cities should play starring roles. Movies should want to feature them, rather than repurpose them.

    That said, it’s an interesting phenomenon to explore. And that’s exactly what the Canadian pavilion will be doing this year at the Venice Biennale. The exhibition is called Impostor Cities and it will explore the various buildings and cityscapes that have been featured in films but that most people probably had no idea were Canadian.

    It is perhaps a new perspective on Canadian cities, bringing our stand-ins into the limelight. And it’ll be available online and onsite (yes, real life) starting May 22. I’m sure it’ll be great. I just hope that it makes us realize how embarrassing it is that our cities aren’t being celebrated in the way that they should be. Let’s be bolder. Let’s build greatness.

  • Ray: Architecturally-inspired homes at the intersection of art, culture, and community

    Back in 2008, Dasha Zhukova and Roman Abramovich hired starchitect Rem Koolhaas and founded a new contemporary art museum in Moscow called the Garage Museum. Supposedly this was the first philanthropic institution in Russia dedicated solely to contemporary art. (Here’s a short video in case you’re curious what it looks like.) After it opened, the founders apparently had a realization about the way people like to consume art. Yes, people like to look at art and ponder deep things. But it turns out that people also like just being around art and other art-like things. People started coming to the Garage Museum not only to view the various exhibitions, but also to just hang out.

    This insight is now being used to inform a new real estate development company, also by Dasha, called Ray. The mission of the company is to create “architecturally-inspired homes at the intersection of art, culture, and community.” Their first two projects are in Harlem and Fishtown, Philadelphia, but apparently they have something cooking in Miami as well. What Ray hopes to do is integrate art and culture in a more meaningful way through cultural programming, exhibitions in their buildings, artist studio spaces, and other creative ideas.

    There’s also an affordable housing angle. According to the WSJ, Ray’s Harlem project is a joint venture with L+M Development Partners. I don’t know any of the specifics of this deal, but I know L+M, because one of their founding partners, Ron Moelis, was a professor of mine in graduate school. L+M is focused on affordable and mixed-income housing and uses tools like the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) to make these sorts of projects financially feasible. They aren’t, otherwise. I learned all about them in school and I always found it to be a great way to get the private sector building affordable housing.

    “Art and culture, community, and accessible pricing.”

  • From office to residential in London

    It was recently announced that the City of London — the historic town center and primary CBD of the region — is aiming to create at least 1,500 new residential units in the Square Mile by 2030. Part of its strategy is to convert disused office buildings into residential. Currently, the City has about 7,850 residences, which is a drop in the bucket and whole lot smaller than its 19th century population of 125,000.

    Tony Travers, director of LSE London, is quoted in FT saying that the City is really facing “twin challenges.” You’ve got Brexit, which caused prime office cap rate rates to stagnate in the UK, and you’ve now got the whole work from home thing. Nobody really knows how this latter piece will fully shake out when it’s all said and done, but we shouldn’t forget the power of agglomeration economies. It’s what powers cities.

    Calgary is another example of a city that is looking to encourage change. Last month a $1-billion plan was approved to help convert office buildings into housing. (Shout out to Steven Paynter of Gensler who is quoted in the article talking about what makes for a suitable office conversion project.)

    What’s interesting about these announcements is that oftentimes cities cling to their non-residential spaces out of fear that once that supply gets converted it will never come back. That is certainly the case here in Toronto with its office replacement policies, although many years ago when downtown living wasn’t nearly as cool, there was a similar push to encourage more residential development in the core. Looks like that idea worked.

    We know that office space isn’t going away. Zoom is an awful substitute for in-person interactions. People need to congregate (and tend to like doing it). Urban agglomeration economies drive innovation. Bigger cities with higher population densities tend to create more wealth for their inhabitants. So perhaps the takeaway from these announcements should be that, yeah, office space is vital, but it’s okay to do a little rebalancing once in a while.

  • Houses with large yards and where you have to drive to places

    The National Association of Realtors in the US has a “Community and Transportation Preference Survey” that it conducts usually every two years. Last year (2020), wasn’t supposed to be a survey year, but given the pandemic, they decided to run it in June and see if people’s preferences had changed at all during that time.

    Last June feels like eons ago to me and I bet that if you asked people how they were feeling today it may be slightly different. Nonetheless, the survey asked 2,000 adults from the fifty-largest metro areas a bunch of questions about where and how they live and where and how they might want to live in the future.

    The topline results can be found over here. But for a bit of context, 58% of respondents were people who lived in a single-family detached house; 26% of respondents were people who lived in a building with two or more apartments and condos; and the rest of the respondents were split across townhouses, rowhouses, mobile homes, trailers, and other. (I’m kind of curious about the 2% who answered with other.)

    One of the questions that I thought might be interesting to this audience is this one here about housing preferences going forward:

    The question asks the respondents to imagine that they are moving into another home. It then asks about priorities and, more specifically, about their preferred trade-off between amenities and walkability versus a large detached house with a big yard.

    Overall the split in preferences has remained close to 50/50 over the last three surveys. But there appears to be a small uptick toward large homes and less amenities. I wouldn’t be surprised if the pandemic contributed to this thinking last summer. But who knows if this will persist. At the same time, actions speak louder than words.

    My response to the above question would be less space, greater walkability, and more amenities. I have no desire to live in a low-rise grade-related house, especially one that is disconnected from the city. I like urbanity. What about you?