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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  • New York is the only US city with an urban core growing faster than the suburbs

    The latest data from the American Community Survey (2012 to 2016) has placed the suburban and exurban share of the US population (53 major metropolitan areas) at 85.5%. Back in 2000 this number was thought to be around 83.5%.

    Since 2010, automobile oriented suburbs and exurbs have also accounted for 90.5% of population growth. The US – and Canada would be no different – is by and large a suburban nation. And the data suggests this isn’t about to change.

    The one exception is the New York metro area. From 2012 to 2016, 74% of its growth happened in the urban core. No other major metropolitan area in the US comes close to this sort of urbanity. Below is a chart from New Geography that shows you how NYC compares.

    All of the data for this post was also taken from New Geography.

  • Break the internet

    Today I am joining a collective online protest – called Break the Internet – in support of net neutrality in the United States. I’m not American and I don’t live in the US, and so Congress and the FCC don’t care to hear from me. But I can help spread the word. More than half of the people who email subscribe to this blog are based in the US. You can take action.

    Fortunately for us in Canada, the CRTC firmly supports net neutrality. Internet service providers (ISP’s) can offer different packages based on speed and monthly data, but they cannot do this based on content. This is a great thing that many would argue is pro-innovation. But let’s be honest: If the internet environment changes in the US, it would likely have widespread impacts.

    For more on net neutrality, here is a Wikipedia series.

  • So the tech works. What’s next?

    Below is a keynote talk by Benedict Evans about what’s going on in tech today and what may happen in the next ten years. It covers: the growth of mobile; S-curves; Google / Apple / Facebook / Amazon (who knew Amazon had so many employees?); machine learning; autonomous vehicles/impact to cities; mixed reality; crypto-currencies; and so on.

    For those of you interested in crypto-currencies – and that appears to be everyone these days – it’s interesting to hear how Evans describes their current position at the beginning of the curve: “The tech works, but what’s the use case?” This is not to say the potential isn’t huge. It is. Automated trust. Distributed and programmable money. But the future is still unclear.

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

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

  • 50th year anniversary of Playtime

    This month is the 50th year anniversary of the Jacques Tati film, Playtime. Initially released in December 1967, Playtime is a French comedy that is often considered to be director Tati’s most notable work. Apparently it was commercially unsuccessful at the time of its release. But it has since become recognized, at least by some, as one of the greatest films ever made.

    The film is a satire of modern society. And so it’s also a funny critique on modern architecture and the prevailing ideologies at the time. Watch the trailer below and you’ll very clearly see this relationship: a Frenchman lost in a new, modern Paris. I remember watching one of his earlier movies – Mon Oncle – in one of my undergraduate architecture classes.

    If you can’t see the trailer below, click here:

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrYB8hgyq4s&w=560&h=315]

  • We’re hosting a pre-design community meeting in Hamilton

    This fall Slate acquired a retail center in Hamilton called Corktown Plaza. It is the block bounded by John Street South, Young Street, Catharine Street South, and Forest Avenue. It is just south of the Hamilton GO Centre in downtown.

    It is currently a much used single storey retail plaza with a large surface parking lot facing John Street South. It’s still early days, but the long-term plan is to redevelop it into a mixed-use retail and residential complex.

    Before putting pen to paper, the team is hosting a “pre-design community meeting” this Tuesday, December 12, 2017 at 7pm at the Church of Ascension down the street. Address is 64 Forest Avenue (accessible entrance at 258 John Street South).

    Here is the invite (embedded tweet):

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    The purpose of the meeting is to gather feedback from the community before beginning design. We want to know what’s working today, what’s not working today, and what would be ideal for the future. 

    CORE Architects and GSP Group (planning) will be in attendance along with the Slate team. The format will be brief presentations followed by interactive breakout sessions. There will be trace paper on hand so that we can all put pen to paper.

    If you live and/or work in the area or are simply interested in the future of Hamilton, please feel free to join us on Tuesday evening. If you can, send a quick email to rsvp@kga-inc.com letting us know you’ll be coming. But just showing up is also perfectly fine.

  • South Korea buys 20% of its groceries online

    The World Economic Forum recently posted the below chart showing that 1/5 of all grocery purchases in South Korea are done online. The calculation is e-commerce revenue as a percentage of total fast moving consumer goods revenue in the country.

    image

    The explanation they give for this high percentage is that South Korea has some of the fastest and most ubiquitous internet access in the world. 

    But as soon as I read this I thought to myself: This can’t be the only reason. When was the last time you really wanted to order groceries online but your internet connection was too slow? 

    Also, if you look at all online shopping (not just FMCG), South Korea no longer shows up as such an outlier. So what’s happening with grocery?

    Without actually knowing the market, I would imagine that there are companies in South Korea who have simply figured out how to offer a great online grocery shopping experience.

    South Korea is also one of the denser countries in the world at about 513 people per km2. That would help with distribution. 

    But then again, the Netherlands is also quite dense (414 people per km2). Why are they only at 2.6%? (For comparison, the US is about 33 people per km2.)

    If any of you are familiar with the South Korea market I would love to hear from you in the comments. If they really are at 20%, I am surprised more people aren’t talking about this.

  • Land use restrictions and upward mobility

    Throughout US history, economic growth has typically spurred an “enormous reallocation of population.” Here is a graph from a recent New York Times article called: What Happened to the American Boomtown?

    The argument, here, is that restrictions on development have made it so that the most prosperous cities are actually the slowest growing cities in terms of population. Here is a chart, from the same article, comparing population growth to average annual pay:

    And here is an excerpt:

    But these productive places aren’t growing as fast now as economists believe they should — and as they would if they didn’t impose so many obstacles on new development. Since the 1970s, land use restrictions have multiplied in coastal metros, making it harder to build in, say, San Jose, Calif., than in Phoenix. And the politics of development have become tense, too. In the Boston suburbs, the Bay Area, Brooklyn and Washington, people who already live there have balked at new housing for people who don’t.

    We often talk about the impact of land use restrictions on supply and overall housing affordability. But here is an argument that it could also be impacting upward mobility.

  • What cars can tell you about a neighborhood

    This is an interesting study from a team of AI researchers at Stanford. What they did was use car images taken directly from Google Street View (so images of cars parked on-street) to predict income levels, racial makeup, educational attainment, and voting patterns at the zip code and precinct level.

    Admittedly, it’s not a perfect survey, but when they compared their findings to actual or previously collected data (such as from the American Community Survey), it turns out that their study was actually remarkably accurate. Google Street View allowed them to survey 22 million cars, or about 8% of all cars in the US.

    Here are some of the things they found:

    –  Toyota and Honda vehicles are strongly associated with Asian neighborhoods.

    – Buick, Oldsmobile, and Chrysler vehicles are strongly associated with black neighborhoods.

    – Pickup trucks, Volkswagens and Aston Martins are strongly associated with white neighborhoods.

    Interestingly enough, the ratio of pickup trucks to sedans, alone, is a pretty reliable indicator of voting patterns. If a neighborhood has more pickup trucks than sedans, there’s an 82% chance it voted Republican in the last election.

    Perhaps this isn’t all that surprising given that car purchases are highly symbolic. But given that the American Community Survey costs $250 million a year to administer, this study is a good preview of what cheaper and more realtime data collection might look like.

  • Bright reddish-orange triangulated LED-lit fins

    superkül (architects) recently added a new project to their website, namely the renovation and addition to Proper TV’s headquarters at Bloor and Dovercourt here in Toronto.

    The original single-storey building dates back to the middle of the 20th century and used to house a Canada Post Office and distribution facility.

    But why send letters when you can instead send emails and instant message that are immediately tracked for the purposes of later bombarding you with ads for things you may want to buy? 

    The post office closed in 2013.

    The main facade along Dovercourt was constructed of limestone and that remains today. Here is photo of the building looking north on Dovercourt from Bloor:

    Notice how the road (Dovercourt) curves and the building becomes almost a view terminus.

    Here is the east elevation:

    And here is a close-up of the bright reddish-orange powdered coated triangulated fins that adorn the second floor:

    Apparently the fins are also lit up at night with programmable LEDs. I don’t have a picture of that to show you, but I am sure they look very cool. I’ll have to do a drive-by one night.

    All images from superkül.

  • The geography of innovation and equality of opportunity

    The Equality of Opportunity Project has a recent paper out called: Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The importance of Exposure to Innovation. Vox also has a summary of the findings, here.

    The overall goal of the project is to “use big data to identify new pathways to upward mobility.” And in this particular study, they discover that in America there are many “lost Einsteins” – people who have the ability, but not the opportunity.

    Not surprisingly, socioeconomic class, race, and gender play a significant role. Children from high-income families are 10x more likely to become inventors (measured in patents) as compared to children from low-income families.

    Geography, place, and environment also matter. Where and how a child grows up has a significant impact on future outcomes. If a child grows up in a city/network that exposes them to other inventors, it increases the likelihood that they too will invent. 

    Where a child grows up also has an impact on the types of inventions, even if the child move cities as an adult. For example, the study found that if a child grows up in Silicon Valley but moves to Boston as an adult, it is still more likely to author patents related to computers because that’s what it was exposed to as a child.

    These associations also impact in a gender-specific way. Women are more likely to invent in a particular technology if they grow up surrounded by similar female inventors. The presence of male inventors has no impact. This makes a powerful case for better gender diversity and strong role models.

    If you would like to read the full paper, click here.