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.

Subscribe

  • Why the office market will eventually rise again

    Real estate development is cyclical. Supply adjusts slowly to demand, and so it’s common for developers to get ahead of their skis and build too much space. This is what happened in the 1980s when American developers built more office space than in all previous years of the republic’s history (yes, it’s true), and then nationwide vacancy rates went from 4.6% to 16.9%. And it’s what happened following the dot-com crash when office vacancy in Silicon Valley went from almost 0% to over 20%.

    Today, things feel kind of similar.

    According to Cushman & Wakefield, nearly 37% of the office space in downtown Seattle is now vacant. Since 2020, it is estimated that these office properties have in aggregate lost about $15 billion, or almost half, of their value. This has people repeating the regular refrain that “this time is different” and that “the office market may never come back.” And indeed, the commonly held belief is that this time isn’t just cyclical, it’s also structural. How and where we work has changed.

    But unless you believe that offices as a spatial construct will fully cease to exist at some indeterminate point in the future, then the reality is that the demand curve has simply shifted. We may not need office space in quite the same way, but we will still need some office space. This means that, at some point, we will find a new supply-and-demand equilibrium and, at some point, developers will get back to building, and overbuilding, office buildings. It’s just impossible to determine when that might be.

    Cover photo by Zhifei Zhou

  • I’ve moved on chain

    Hi friends, this will be my last post on WordPress. I’ve moved my daily writing and my domain (brandondonnelly.com) over to Paragraph. Here’s why.

  • Louis Vuitton’s Big Duck

    When I first saw this picture of Louis Vuitton’s flagship store in Manhattan I thought it was AI. That is where we are right now. When something looks wild, I just automatically assume it’s fake. But alas, it’s not fake. Louis Vuitton is renovating their flagship store at the corner of 57th Street and 5th Avenue and so, naturally, they decided to completely cover it with luggage facade wraps.

    These wraps make the entire building look like six grey trunks stacked on top of each other and are a nod to a 19th century luggage design from the company. They even used real metal details throughout. Apparently the heaviest luggage handle weighs something like 5,000 pounds.

    This is wild and remarkable in so many ways. The scale of it is remarkable. This is a 15 storey building concealed entirely by luggage trunks. It also speaks to the scale and dominance of New York as a city. Not every city can absorb a pile of giant luggage trunks and not bat an eye. But in New York, it’s just another noteworthy thing within its relentless urban grid.

    I also can’t help but think of the work of architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. In 1972, they published a book called Learning from Las Vegas. And in it, they defined two types of contrasting buildings: decorated sheds and ducks. Decorated sheds are, as the name suggests, nondescript buildings. Think big box stores. These buildings get their specificity from signage and other ornament because, without this, they’d just be nondescript sheds.

    Duck buildings are, on the other hand, buildings that take on a symbolic form. In other words, their shape and construction tell you what they’re all about. The term duck comes from an actual building that looks like a duck, namely The Big Duck on Long Island. This is a building that was built in the 1930s to help promote the owner’s duck farming business and is now on the US National Register of Historic Places.

    The Big Duck is and was an actual building, whereas Louis Vuitton’s trunks are just temporary construction wrap. So they’re not exactly the same thing. Still, the similarities are there. Both were erected to promote their respectiveness businesses. And both tell you, through their form, what’s meant to happen inside. So in this sense, Louis Vuitton has just created its own Big Duck.

    Photo by Brad Dickson via Dezeen

  • What happens when Uber doesn’t have to pay its drivers?

    This is an interesting video by Phil Andrews of Maxinomics talking about the economics of Uber and what it could stand to gain from autonomous vehicles.

    As part of this, he touches on the exclusive partnership that was announced between Uber and Waymo back in September. That was a big deal.

    I find this topic fascinating because it’s hard to imagine it not reshaping the landscape of our cities. And it continues to get more real by the day.

  • Paris may have the busiest bike route in the world

    In my opinion, we need far better urban data if we’re actually going to make evidence-based decisions. Thankfully, there are lots of great companies that are focused on this space. One of them is Eco-Counter, which makes devices to count pedestrians and cyclists, among other things. This is an important job, because as Peter Drucker used to say, “you can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

    Let’s look at their bike counters. According to their global map, they have 464 of them installed around the world. Montreal has 58 of them, which we’ve spoken about before, and is an impressive install base. And Toronto looks to have only one, which is located on Bloor Street on the north side of High Park.

    The busiest route/counter in Montreal is at St-Denis Street and Rue des Carriéres. So far this year — up to November 17, 2024 — this counter has seen an average of just under 5,000 trips per day and a year-to-date total of 1,600,468 trips. Both of these metrics are notably up compared to 2023 when I last looked at the data.

    The busiest route in Eco-Counter’s entire network is on Boulevard de Sébastopol in Paris (an important main roadway, not a side street). It has seen an average of 13,667 trips per day and a year-to-date total of 4,386,996 trips. Not surprisingly, the Paris counter exhibits less seasonality. People still cycle in the winter in Montreal, but it’s less than in the warmer months.

    Finally, our lone Toronto counter adjacent to High Park has seen an average of 1,186 trips per day and a year-to-date total of 380,813 trips. Not quite Paris or Montreal (the latter of which has a colder climate), but I would argue that this really isn’t an indicative location for Toronto given how underdeveloped the area is. Plus, you need to see each route as part of a network.

    If you look at Montreal’s top 5 bike counters, all of them have a year-to-date total that exceeds 1 million trips. This is important information if you’re trying to make mobility decisions and these are significant figures. Imagine if these millions of people got off their bikes and instead decided to take transit or drive a car. That would change things.

    Photo by Celine Ylmz on Unsplash

  • Cité Radieuse, Duplex Type E

    Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseille is, as I have mentioned before, one of the most important and influential multi-family buildings of the 20th century. As an architecture student, this is one of those buildings that you get indoctrinated with, so I was excited to visit it for the first time with Neat B in 2022 on what was our second visit to Marseille. We’re big fans of the city. Here is the post I wrote following that visit.

    Today, let’s look at one of the actual suites, which is currently listed for sale through Architecture de Collection. But first, a reminder: The complex was originally constructed between 1948-1952 and was meant to serve as a new housing model for post-war France. In 2016, the building was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site and, today, you’ll sometimes find things like a Chanel fashion show taking place on its rooftop.

    The suite that is for sale is Type E, which is about 100 m2. It has 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. A balcony. And a view of the Mediterranean. It is listed for 650 000 €, which works out 6,500 € per square meter. For Toronto readers, this is right now the equivalent of C$965,485 or about C$897 per square foot. The monthly copropriété charge is about 300 € and the annual property taxes are about 2000 €.

    Does this seem reasonable or expensive to you?

    For more info, click here.

    Photo by Louis Charron on Unsplash

  • Venice to Venice

    Crypto Citizens are a collection of 10,000 NFTs that were minted between 2021 and 2024, starting first in Venice, California and ending in Venice, Italy. Each of their 10 locations has a sub-collection of 1,000 pieces and I am the owner of CryptoParisian #112, because, well, Paris was the next best city for me after they egregiously skipped over Toronto.

    This is one of the most ambitious projects in the NFT art community and, now that they’ve completed their world tour, they’ve just released a documentary called Venice to Venice. It is currently being screened in private venues around the world, but eventually there will be a world premiere at a film festival. This is when I presume they will land in Toronto!

    If you’d like to watch the trailer and/or mint it, click here.

    Photo: Seth Goldstein

  • Manhattan’s congestion charge is back, maybe

    I first wrote about Manhattan’s proposed congestion charge back in 2018. Naturally, some people supported it and some people opposed it. Four years later, it was reported that the charge was still being considered for the area of the island south of 60th Street, and that it could generate an additional $1 billion in revenue for the city’s transportation authority. But then in June of this year, right before the charge was set to come into effect on June 30, 2024, New York Governor Kathy Hochul said “nah, let’s pause this indefinitely.” And at that point, it felt mostly dead.

    Nope: A revised tolling plan has just been announced — the charge has been reduced from $15 to $9 — and Hochul is now trying to jam it through before Trump takes office in January. Trump opposes the charge and has branded it the “most regressive tax known to womankind”, so there’s a real deadline here. This could get interesting. Do you think it will actually happen, some 6 years later? (In reality, the timeline is far longer. Congestion pricing also looked promising during the Bloomberg era, but then similarly died. And I’m sure there were even earlier proposals.)

  • Environmental Defence publishes new mid-rise building manual

    Ontario’s goal is to build 1.5 million new homes by 2031. It is widely understood that we need a lot more housing. But it’s a bit of a curious thing, because we do actually have homes available right now. There are developers with standing condominium inventory; landlords with vacant apartments; and many other options. So what is it that we need exactly? A more precise description would be that we need a diverse mixture of more attainable housing.

    For this to happen, we’re going to need to make some structural changes to the way we deliver new homes. The above image is taken from a recent report by Environmental Defence and Robert Eisenberg (in collaboration with LGA Architectural Partners and SvN Architects + Planners). The report is called the Mid-Rise Manual and it’s a comprehensive look at we can and should be doing to unlock more of this housing type.

    What I love about this image (and the report) is that it speaks to a very different kind of city than the one we have grown accustomed to in North America. Instead of towers in a sea of low-rise houses, it shows a diversity of building types — in a way where you could also imagine a diversity of individual home types. This is unequivocally where cities like Toronto and others are headed. It’s just a question of how soon we follow the manual.

    Click here to download a copy of the report. (There’s also a summary report of key takeaways if you’re looking for something quick to read.)

  • Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

    So Stripe, the payment-processing company, also has a book publishing division. It’s called Stripe Press, and its objective is to publish ideas that support overall business progress. Their latest book is called Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation, and I must say that the website is pretty neat.

    Here’s what the actual book is about though:

    From the Moon landing to the dawning of the atomic age, the decades prior to the 1970s were characterized by the routine invention of transformative technologies at breakneck speed. By comparison, ours is an age of stagnation; of slowing median wage growth, rising inequality, and decelerated scientific discovery. In Boom, Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber take an inductive approach to this problem. They track some of the most significant breakthroughs of the past 100 years—from the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program to Moore’s law and Bitcoin—and reverse-engineer how transformative progress arises from the same dynamics that govern financial bubbles, bringing together small groups with a unified vision, vast funding, and surprisingly poor accountability. Bubbles, they conclude, aren’t all bad—in fact, they create the ideal conditions for transformative innovation. Integrating insights from economics, philosophy, and history, Boom provides a blueprint for accelerating innovation and a path to unleash a new era of global prosperity.

    If you’re interested, it comes out on November 19, 2024.