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 real reason people oppose new development

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    A good friend of mine just sent me this fascinating research paper called: Opposition to Development or Opposition to Developers? Survey Evidence from Los Angeles County on Attitudes towards New Housing. It is a study out of UCLA that was published earlier this year by Paavo Monkkonen and Michael Manville.

    For the paper, they conducted a survey-framing experiment with over 1,300 people in Los Angeles County to test how strongly they felt about a number of common anti-housing sentiments; arguments such as traffic congestion, neighborhood character, and strain on local services. 

    However, they also introduced another argument: large developer profits. And interestingly enough, they discovered that respondents were 20 percentage points more likely to oppose a new hypothetical housing development when the survey was framed around the developer making a lot of money.

    Here is a table from the paper showing the various frames, as well as the percentage of people who supported, had no opinion, and who opposed. Note that under the “developer” frame, the opposition number is 48%.

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    So their “takeaway for practice” is as follows: “Housing opposition is often framed as a form of risk aversion. Our findings, however, suggest that at least some opposition to housing might be motivated not by residents’ fears of their own losses, but resentment of others’ gains.”

    Photo by Cameron Stow on Unsplash

  • Five year anniversary

    Today is the five year anniversary of this daily blog. That’s over 1800 posts. 

    It’s almost hard to believe that it has been that long. It seems like just yesterday I was on year 2 or 3. But at the same time, it’s almost hard for me to remember a time when I didn’t blog every day. I guess we’re calling it a habit at this point.

    One of the most common questions I get regarding this blog is: “Do you pre-write posts?” The answer is never. Okay, almost never. Sometimes I’ll pre-write a post if I know I’m going to be on a plane for 12 hours and I won’t make the timezone cutoff. But generally as a rule I don’t.

    Part of the reason I don’t is because it breaks the habit. This is something I do every day. And I like that routine. I also want the posts to be timely and I want to be able to write about things that may be on my mind that day.

    Momentum is a powerful thing. And when you’ve been doing something for a number of years, and especially something as public as this daily blog, there’s a powerful incentive to keep doing it. That’s how streaks work.

    However, in the world of development, five years is perhaps not that long. It’s maybe one project. Streaks take a lot longer to establish.

    This summer One Delisle by Studio Gang went public and you’re now starting to see (bright neon) teasers for Junction House. Both of these projects are many years in the making. The Junction House story started in early 2016.

    So I reckon that this blog needs at least another five years so that there’s enough time for the really juicy stories to surface. I’ll endeavor to do exactly that. 

    Thanks for reading and making this community what it is. See you tomorrow.

  • Supreme Court dismisses TREB appeal

    Last Thursday the Supreme Court of Canada announced it would not hear an appeal from the Toronto Real Estate Board regarding a 2016 Competition Bureau decision aimed at giving consumers greater online access to information, such as historical (home) sale prices.

    I am not at all surprised by the Supreme Court’s decision and I have said pretty much all I want to say on this topic – over here. But since I believe this is a positive outcome for real estate consumers, I wanted to mention it on the blog because it appears to be a final decision.

    Some sites, such as Zoocasa, have already started publishing sold prices. Good.

  • The Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889

    One of our partners sent me a terrific article last week by Sam Anderson on the founding of Oklahoma City. 

    I have said this before on the blog, but I am deeply fascinated by the origins of cities because, oftentimes, the story isn’t all that lucid. Why right here? As Anderson points out in his article, usually cities “creep into existence.” 

    But not Oklahoma City:

    Oklahoma City was born in an event called, with extreme dramatic understatement, the Land Run. The Land Run should be called something like “Chaos Explosion Apocalypse Town” or “Reckoning of the DoomSettlers: Clusterfuck on the Prairie.” It should be one of the major events in American history. Dramatizations of it should be projected onto IMAX screens with 3-D explosions, in endless loops, forever. Every time you walk into a mall, you should be accosted by fuzzy-headed Land Run characters shouting, “What is America?!” “What does America even mean?!” Because the Land Run was, even by the standards of this very weird nation, absurd. It was a very bad idea, executed very badly. It would be hard to think of a worse way to start a city. Harper’s Weekly, which had a reporter on the ground, called it “one of the most bizarre and chaotic episodes of town founding in world history.” A century later, the scholar John William Reps reviewed the evidence and concurred. The founding of Oklahoma City, he wrote, was “the most disorderly episode of urban settlement this country, and perhaps the world, has ever witnessed.”

    To learn how Oklahoma City went from a population of 0 to 10,000 in about half a day, check out the full article.

    Photo by Gerson Repreza on Unsplash

  • Street-level intelligence and analytics

    I discovered a company yesterday called CARMERA, which just raised a $20 million Series B funding round. They call themselves a “real-time, street-level intelligence platform” and their flagship product, called Autonomous Map, provides HD maps and real-time navigation data to autonomous vehicles. That’s the way AVs work. They need maps like CARMERA’s to function. Here is an overview of what is supposedly the largest AV taxi service in the world. It is a partnership between CARMERA and Voyage.

    One of the interesting things about this product is that it is cleverly powered through another one of their products: a free fleet monitoring tool for commercial operators. So fleet managers use this service to keep track of their actual human drivers and, at the same time, CARMERA uses the vehicles to collect the data it needs for its Autonomous Map. They call it “pro-sourcing” the data (a play on crowdsourcing).

    It is perhaps a good example of “single user utility.” The product you’re making often has to be valuable to a single user before scale is reached. In this case, Autonomous Map would be a hard sell without a critical mass of pro-sourced data. It solves the perennial chicken-and-egg problem when creating new marketplaces.

    Finally, I think many of you will be interested to know that CARMERA has also announced a partnership with the New York City Department of Transportation. As part of this, the company will be handing over the data they have on pedestrian density analytics and real-time construction detection events. Part of their mission is to “automate cities” and better street analytics will certainly help to open up a new world of city building possibilities.

    Photo by Yeshi Kangrang on Unsplash

  • Photogenic neon in the Junction

    We just finished putting up some additional signage at the future sales office for Junction House. Clean and minimal, but fun. I am pretty pumped with the way everything turned out. Creative and photos by Vanderbrand. Instagram story mashup and failed neon photo by me.

    This week I learned that properly photographing neon takes a bit of work. The neon “Junction House” sign is actually all white when you see it in person. Apparently it has something to do with the frequency. 

    I’m going to go back one evening with my tripod and Fuji and see if I can do better.

  • Detroit. Move here. Move the world.

    As part of the Amazon HQ2 bid process, a number of cities produced videos. I only discovered them today and so maybe some of you also missed them when they were released last fall. There are videos from Detroit, Boston, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Dallas-Fort Worth, Las Vegas, Louisville, Atlanta, and maybe others that I am still missing. 

    Some of the videos are bad. (I’ll let you make your own judgement calls.) I like the idea behind Atlanta’s video, which is the journey of someone named Georgia physically delivering their bid to Seattle. And Philadelphia’s video made me feel really nostalgic about my time there. Those were some great years. 

    But my favorite video is Detroit’s video. It feels authentic. The footage is outstanding. And it feels powerful. Though it is probably too long. It was a good reminder that I’m overdue for a visit. So here is Detroit’s video. If you can’t see it below, click over to YouTube.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO4J_PC1b5M&w=560&h=315]

  • The Future of Hamilton

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    As many of you know, we have a development project in Hamilton, Ontario – more specifically in the Corktown neighborhood. We filed our development application earlier this summer.

    Because of this I was invited to participate in a Bisnow event on The Future of Hamilton. It takes place the morning of Wednesday, September 12, 2018 in The Alley by Core Urban. I walked this space last summer while it was under construction and so I’m excited to see it finished.

    For those of you who aren’t familiar with Core Urban, they are doing some really great work in Hamilton and have established themselves as a responsible city builder with a focus on adaptive reuse projects.

    Steve Kulakowsky, who is co-owner of Core Urban, will be speaking at the event along with the mayor, some guy who has pretentiously included his middle name, and many other smart people. To see the full list of speakers and to buy a ticket, click here.

    Photo of Hamilton by Vivek Trivedi on Unsplash

  • Economies of scale in the car and housing industries

    Over the weekend I watched this interview discussion between Elon Musk and Marques Brownlee. If it doesn’t show up below, you can find the video here.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MevKTPN4ozw&w=560&h=315]

    Elon figures that if Tesla works really hard they could probably come out with a USD 25,000 car in about three years. The key to that affordability is twofold: (1) design & technology improvements and (2) scale. 

    So part of the answer is just time. As design and engineering iterations continue to take place, the components will become better and cheaper, just as they have for things like cell phones. Elon estimates that we’re in the 30th iteration of the cell phone today.

    But the second factor is simply volume. And that got me thinking about housing production and the similar importance of scale and density. We do a lot to limit volume, despite saying we want more affordable housing.

  • Planning staff reports

    A bunch of people have asked me lately about what they should do if they want to get smarter on land use planning and on the entitlement process for development projects. It was specific to Toronto, but I don’t think my answer is specific to only this city.

    I took a few planning classes in graduate school when I was in the US. But I was more focused on architecture and real estate, and so I did not leave school an expert by any means.

    I learned about the failures of euclidian zoning and about things like the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, which always seemed like a sensible supply-side tool to get the private sector to invest in affordable housing.

    But what I have found most useful is to just read planning staff reports. These are the responses to actual development proposals and they show you how staff interpret the policies that are in place and how staff apply them to real buildings.

    I may be in the minority in that I actually find these reports interesting. But regardless, they are a great crash course in planning and development approvals and they can help you manage your entitlement risk.