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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  • Many days in the Junction

    This morning blogTO did a post on how to spend a day in the Junction neighborhood of Toronto.

    I love the Junction. I’m planning to move to the Junction. And we have a development project in the area called Junction House. So know that I am entirely biased when I talk about this neighborhood. 

    A couple of my favorite places from blogTO’s list include Mjolk (Scandinavian interior design), Gerhard Supply (menswear), Playa Cabana Cantina (tacos and tequila), and Indie Alehouse (brewpub). 

    One spot that wasn’t on the list is the Italian restaurant, Nodo. Big fan of this place. Great pastas. Great negronorum. Yes, the plural of negroni is allegedly negronorum.

    One of the big game changers for the Junction – besides the reintroduction of alcohol in 1997 – is the Union Pearson Express train.

    Many people only think of it as civilized airport travel. But it also provides an incredible inner city service. It shows you the potential of Regional Express Rail in this region. We need more of this.

    We’ll be providing an update on Junction House very soon and I’ll be sure to blog it. So stay tuned.

  • Architectural fashion cycles

    Witold Rybczynski wrote on his blog this week about historic preservation. He cites a number of reasons for why one might want to renovate, restore, and preserve an old building. But he also provides a reason for why one might not want to renovate, restore, and preserve an old building.

    “What seems to me a less compelling reason is the idea that a building should be preserved simply because it is representative of a previous period or architectural fashion. In architecture, as in many human endeavors, not all periods are equally admirable; there are ups and downs.”

    I thought this was an interesting comment because it reinforces the idea that this is a fairly subjective exercise. One of his reasons for preserving a building is that it might be particularly beautiful or represent some sort of human achievement. But beautiful to whom?

    Similarly, who determines which architectural period or fashion is an up or a down? Is brutalist architecture worth preserving or is it not yet old enough to have perceived value? Will it ever be widely admired? And is there really an architectural cycle?

    Many of us can probably agree that New York City’s original Penn Station by McKim, Mead and White was a tragic loss. But I am sure that many of us will also disagree on what are considered to be the most admirable periods of architectural fashion.

  • Anachronistic employment areas

    Today I was at the Land & Development Conference here in Toronto. I started live tweeting during the breakfast, but my vintage iPhone 6 couldn’t keep up, so I had to stop. Some insights throughout the day. But a lot of what you would expect. I suppose it’s more about the networking.

    I would, however, like to reiterate something that Ken Greenberg mentioned about Employment Areas/Lands in Toronto. For those of you who aren’t familiar, these lands are essentially intended to serve one, and only one, purpose: employment. And the process for introducing a mix of uses, including residential, is an onerous one to say the least.

    I appreciate why this is the case. But I agree with Greenberg in that this kind of single use zoning is antiquated. It does not reflect the realities of the market today. There are other mechanisms we can use to maintain and provide for employment, and ensure that we don’t end up with a city of all residential.

  • 1 out of 5 commuters in Manila relies on ride-hailing

    Earlier this year Uber sold its Southeast Asia business to Grab. At the time, it was estimated that Grab had 95% of the ride-hailing market in Southeast Asia. That’s why Uber decided to sell. Instead of continuing to bleed, they figured it would be better to instead merge businesses in exchange for a “sizeable stake in Grab.” This is similar to the deal that it struck in China with Didi.

    It’s clear evidence of cultural advantage. Though maybe you could argue it’s first mover advantage. Either way, many, including Wired, have argued that while Uber has dominated in the West, it has often struggled in the developing world. Different markets. When Grab launched you could pay with cash because so many users didn’t have a credit card.

    Here is another interesting insight from Bloomberg (see above): Nearly 1 out of every 5 commuters in Manila relies on a ride-hailing service because the public transit situation is allegedly so dire. Grab controls 90% of the market with 35,000 vehicles receiving somewhere around 600,000 requests a day.

    When Uber launched it was positioned as “Everyone’s private driver.” It was expensive. It was luxurious. And it was done because they knew they weren’t going to be able to compete on speed and/or price in the early days. But now ride-hailing services are tackling the very opposite end of the spectrum.

  • Percentage of residential properties dedicated to single-family housing in US cities

    The Seattle Times has an article up about “widespread single-family zoning” that will feel familiar to many here in Toronto who, I know, are having similar conversations about the amount of land dedicated to low-density housing.

    The article, by Mike Rosenberg, estimates that 49% of all developable land in Seattle is dedicated to single-family housing; that 8% is dedicated to multi-family housing; and that another 8% is dedicated to commercial and mixed-use buildings. The rest of the land is institutional, open space, vacant, and so on.

    Of all the residential lots in the city, the estimate is that 69% of them are occupied by single-family houses. This is compared to 1% in Manhattan. 

    I tried to reverse engineer the 69% based on the land use areas in the article, but the math didn’t quite add up. In any event, the argument here is, of course, that single-family homes are too expensive in Seattle and that the city needs more land available for multi-family housing.

    Housing supply is no doubt important, but looking at the above chart, having a low, or lower, percentage of residential land dedicated to single-family housing doesn’t seem to necessarily guarantee affordable housing.

  • Puerto Rican migration during and following Maria

    Teralytics recently looked at data from 500,000 smartphone users to determine how, when, and where Puerto Ricans moved between August 2017 and February 2018 during and following Hurricane Maria – generally considered to be the worst natural disaster on record for the area. 

    CityLab published the data here and along with the following maps:

    image

    It shows the locations and the top 10 counties that received Puerto Rican population during the above time period. Florida and the Northeast are at the top of list, which isn’t all that surprising. Privacy concerns aside, it is once again an example of the kind of granular data that we now have access to. Prior to this data being available, all we apparently had was estimates.

  • Pre-application community meeting in Hamilton

    At the end of last year, Slate hosted a “pre-design community meeting” for the redevelopment of Corktown Plaza in Hamilton. It was the first time we hosted a meeting like this.

    We learned things that evening and this May 24th we’ll be hosting our “pre-application community meeting.” See above for the full invite details. Lots of pre things.

    At last year’s meeting we had no design. It was about learning. At this month’s meeting we will be presenting a design proposal for the site. So hopefully some of you will be able to make it out.

    Regular scheduled programming will resume tomorrow on the blog.

  • IBI launches Smart City Sandbox

    This morning I was at 55 St. Clair Avenue West for IBI Group’s annual general meeting. And at this meeting their CEO, Scott Stewart, officially launched a new accelerator called the Smart City Sandbox. 

    Here is a description of what that is taken from a press release that was also published this morning:

    The Sandbox is a smart city-themed accelerator, focused on bringing innovative new products and systems to urban environments that improve the quality of life for residents. A technology hub that supports small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), as well as entrepreneurs and start-ups, the Smart City Sandbox will operate out of a designated space at IBI Group’s Toronto headquarters, be open to global applications, and officially open doors with its first smart city-themed cohort in September 2018.

    And here is a photo from this morning:

    Slate Asset Management is proud to be a founding partner of the Smart City Sandbox and we’re thrilled that it will live at Yonge + St. Clair in midtown Toronto. 

    Our role is to provide our domain expertise as asset managers and developers, and to offer participants in the program access to real-world building systems and data from our holdings in the area.

    For more info, go here.

    And if you were at (or listening to) the meeting this morning, I’m sure you noticed something that we talk a lot about on this blog. To thrive today, virtually every company now has to think and act like a technology company. IBI Group is doing precisely that.

  • Two sides of the same bitcoin

    Warren Buffet recently said in a Yahoo Finance interview that when you buy cryptocurrencies you’re not actually investing. Instead, you’re speculating – speculating that “somebody else will come along and pay more money tomorrow.” Investments need to generate a return. And nobody is at all clear on how to value these crypto-assets. This is noteworthy, of course, because it’s Buffet.

    But I thought Fred Wilson wrote a good rebuttal on his blog where he points out that, while, yes, a discounted cash flow model isn’t going to be very useful in helping you determine value in this instance, what we are actually seeing is, “the creation of a new internet, built upon protocols that allow for decentralized networks to form…” We’ve talked about this many times before on the blog.

    So where I stand on this debate is that I agree with both Warren and Fred. I don’t see crypto-assets as something I want to start putting a lot of money into right now because I don’t know how to calculate what the IRR may be. But at the same time, if crypto-assets are creating decentralized infrastructure that will one day power the “new internet”, I am positive this new internet will eventually create businesses that will fit into Warren’s definition of an investment. 

  • True North by Alain Carle Architecte

    I just recently discovered the work of Montréal-based firm, Alain Carle Architecte. If you aren’t familiar with their work, do yourself a favor and check it out here. They are apparently known for their secondary homes across the country.

    The project that caught my attention was their True North home in Cornwall, Ontario. Here are two photos by renowned architecture and design photographer Adrien Williams (also of Montréal).

    imageimage

    And here is a plan via Dezeen.

    image

    The concrete and black metal cladding against the snow is pure magic. I also love the way they employed black screens to create a gradient across the landscape and frame some of the outdoor spaces. You really see that in the plan.

    The shadows these screens cast on the concrete are also quite beautiful.