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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  • Constructing the tallest building in San Francisco

    Alexis C. Madrigal recently published a piece about the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco called: The Tower at the Heart of the Tech Boom. At 61 floors and 1,070 feet, it is now the tallest building in San Francisco and the second tallest building west of the Mississippi River after the Wilshire Grand Center in Los Angeles.

    Hines and Boston Properties are the developers of the building. Pelli Clarke Pelli is the architect. And Salesforce is the anchor tenant. In April 2014, it was announced that they had leased 714,000 sf on floors 1, 3-30, and 61. (Get that top floor.) So almost half of the building.

    Perhaps not surprisingly, Madrigal calls the Salesforce Tower the “the most visible monument to the industry [tech] in the region and the country.” It is a demonstration of the power and reach of Silicon Valley. San Francisco has a new symbol. The TransAmerica Pyramid now feels inadequate.

    Though interesting, this is actually not what I want to talk about today. I’d like to talk about what it took to build such a tall building in a seismically active city like San Francisco. Unfortunately, this feels timely given that the sinking Millennium Tower is getting so much attention right now.

    The structural engineer for the Salesforce tower is Seattle-based Magnusson Klemencic Associates (MKA). They are a world-renowned structural and civil engineering firm that have been around since the 1920s. Other projects they are currently working on include the third tallest building in Chicago.

    The tower’s seismic force-resisting system is made up of reinforced concrete shear walls that surround the central elevator and exit stair core. These walls are 24 to 48 inches thick. Here is a plan taken from a STRUCTURE Magazine post written by Ron Klemencic of MKA:

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    The tower’s foundations have been well documented, or at least frequently mentioned, because of how deep they had to go down. The site has poor soil conditions (fill, sand, San Francisco “old bay clay”, and weak bedrock), and so given the weight of the tower the only option was to go down to bedrock – approximately 250 feet below grade.

    The foundation system they ended up going with uses something called Load-Bearing Elements (LBEs). The typical LBE measures 5′ x 10.5′. The entire foundation system uses 42 LBEs and a mat foundation that varies in thickness from 14′ around the core to 5′ around the perimeter. (See image below.) The LBEs were brought down to rock. And in some cases, they went down more than 310 feet below grade.

    image

    As a condition of buying the site, the Transbay Joint Powers Authority required proof that any future tall building would not negatively impact the surrounding structures – including the adjacent Transbay Transit Center – and that it would perform under a Maximum Considered Earthquake (MCE) event.

    So while the tower itself may be a symbol for the new world, its structural system also achieves many firsts in terms of how to build a supertall in a seismically active region.

    Please keep in mind that I am not a structural engineer. I just pretend to be an architect sometimes. If you’re interested in more of the details, check out the post by Ron Klemencic. All of the above information was taken from there.

  • Uber Express POOL is kind of like public transit

    Uber is currently testing a feature in a few neighborhoods in Boston and San Francisco called Uber Express POOL. 

    Like the regular version of Uber POOL, this is a shared ride. But with Express POOL the app now automatically generates “smart spots” that are easy to drive to and close to the origin and destination of multiple passengers.

    So instead of a direct pick-up and drop-off, you now need to walk a few blocks to one of these dynamically created “smart spots.” In exchange for the added inconvenience, you get 25% off your fare.

    What’s immediately fascinating about this feature is that it further blurs the line between Uber and public transit. These “smart spots” are effectively low-volume and ephemeral transit stops that pop-up based on demand and then disappear.

    It makes the notion of a fixed stop and transit schedule, particularly in low usage areas, seem inefficient. Now imagine if we created some sort of visual marker on the street every time a “smart spot” was emerging based on demand.

    It is clear that Uber is trying to price these rides so that they are competitive with conventional public transit. And there’s no reason that this technology couldn’t also be applied to larger vehicles, such as buses.

    I find this fascinating. And it’s a perfect example of what we talked about in yesterday’s post. This is software and networks being layered on top of the built environment.

  • Planning dinner, smart cities, and privacy

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    This evening I attended the 27th Annual Toronto Planning Dinner. It’s an annual dinner for people in planning and development, put on by the University of Waterloo Planning Alumni of Toronto. Thank you Wood Bull LLP for the invite.

    The keynote speaker was Dr. Anthony Townsend. He is the author of SMART CITIES: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. I haven’t read it (yet), but his talk offered a preview of it and I think it would be of interest to all of you.

    It deals with many of the topics that we discuss on this blog, one of which is the interrelationship between our physical environment and the networks and software layers that we are now building on top of it.

    These layers have the potential to augment and enhance our cities (maybe make them smarter), but they also have the potential to do us harm. One important issue that Townsend brought up is that of privacy.

    Cities used to enable anonymity. 

    When essayist and art critic Charles Baudelaire wrote about “modernity” in 19th century industrializing Paris, it referred to an ephemeral and fleeting kind of urban environment. Pass someone on the street and you may never see them again. That must have felt sad at the time.

    Today we live in a fish bowl. 

    Networks connect us, check us in, ping us when we are nearby people we know, and help us find people to meet and date. And we already have devices, like Alexa, that spy on us in our homes so that companies can serve us targeted ads. (This is deplorable by the way.)

    Will the city of the future endeavour to do the same as we equip it with more “smarts”?

    I guess that’s why Townsend believes that privacy will define a big part of 21st century urbanism. There’s no doubt that it will be very important.

  • Self-parking cars

    I recently tested out BMW’s self-parking feature. I think it’s called parking assistant. But that doesn’t feel quite right, because it didn’t really assist. It actually did everything.

    As soon as you slow down and start driving past parked vehicles, the car automatically starts scanning and measuring the length and depth of available spots. You see this happening in realtime on the car’s display in plan view.

    Once it finds a suitable spot, all you have to do is basically stop and press a button. No need to steer. No need to accelerate or break. No need to turn your head. It all happens automatically.

    After the car had parked, I immediately got out to see what kind of skills it had. It was inches away from the curb on both tires and 100% parallel to the curb. 

    I have to admit that I did feel a tad uncomfortable letting the car do everything. I am so used to turning around and being in control. I don’t even have a backup camera in my car.

    But this feature is probably (I’m guessing) already more capable than many human drivers when it comes to parallel parking.

    For those of you in the know when it comes to cars, this may be old news. But I was super impressed. And it was a good reminder of what’s coming down the pike.

  • Toward more family condos

    The Ryerson City Building Institute and Urbanation recently published a terrific report called: Bedrooms in the Sky. Is Toronto Building the Right Condo Supply? 

    Here is a quick synopsis: The 35-44 year old age bracket in this city will see significant growth over the next decade; single family homes are really expensive; and we’re not building enough family-friendly condo units.

    When Urbanation looked at the data for all condo units currently under construction they found that the unit mixes still skewed toward 1-bedroom units, but that the number of 3-bedroom units is starting to trend upward. That feels right.

    The report also talks about the affordability gap between condos and houses. The average condo in the Greater Toronto Area costs about $511,000, while the average detached house costs $1,134,000.

    However, this isn’t exactly an accurate comparison because the average condo is smaller in size than the average house. I think a better metric is to look at price per square foot.

    Also, houses give you the flexibility of a secondary suite. Right now that usually means a basement apartment, but pretty soon it’ll likely include a laneway suite. That creates an additional income stream and helps with overall affordability.

    In any event, up until maybe recently, houses generally looked cheaper on a per square foot basis. And my view – which I have written about extensively on this blog – was that as soon as houses become “more expensive”, we’ll see an uptick in larger family-oriented condos.

    A few weeks ago I went to an open house in a desirable area of Toronto. It was for a 1,300 sf semi-detached house with good bones, but in need of a full gut. Basement was low, only suitable for humans around 5′ tall. It sold for $1 million.

    Let’s say that house needs $300,000 to bring it up to the level of a new condo. If that doesn’t include some sort of extension, now you’re in for $1.3 million or about $1,000 per square foot. You can still find a condo for less than that.

    Which is one of the reasons why I think we’re now starting to see an uptick in larger/family units. (We are trying to do it at Junction House.) 

    But like all things in real estate, these things move slowly. The condos under construction today were designed years ago. Changes take time to work themselves through the system.

  • Winner-take-all cities

    Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and Karen M. King have a new working paper out called Winner-Take-All Cities.

    It is about the phenomenon of “winner-take-all urbanism” and how a select number of alpha cities seem to overrepresent when it comes to talent, economic activity, innovation, and wealth creation.

    In this study they look at economic output, innovation (venture capital-backed startups), and billionaire wealth in each city. They then compare these factors to the distribution of the population.

    Here are the Alpha cities they looked at:

    In some cases the above concentrations were multiples of what the city’s population would lead you to predict. Their conclusion: “We find clear evidence of a winner-take-all urbanism
    across the global economy and the world’s cities.”

  • Five great surges of capital and technology, 1771-2017

    Carlota Perez is a professor that specializes in the social and economic impact of technological change. In 2002, she published an influential book called Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages.

    One of her arguments is that economic growth since the Industrial Revolution has occurred through a series of cycles and surges, ultimately culminating in a fifth great surge centered around information and telecommunications. This is our current economic environment.

    Perez was recently interviewed by strategy + business and they published this diagram (if it’s too small, click through to the article):

    The five surges of capital and technology since 1771 are:

    1. Industrial Revolution
    2. Steam and Railways
    3. Steel, Electricity, and Heavy Engineering
    4. Oil, Automobiles, and Mass Production 
    5. Information and Telecommunications

    Number 4 – oil, automobiles, and mass production – is what produced widespread suburbanization, a middle class filled with homeowners, and new forms of retail employment. And I am sure that most of you would agree that it’s not quite over yet.

    According to Perez, each cycle has two phases: an installation phase and a deployment phase. This latter phase is a “golden age.” But in between these two phases is a turning point that is typically characterized by some sort of crisis and recession. 

    Her belief is that we are in this turning point right now. You see it with Brexit. The demagogues being elected. And more. If you buy this, the key question naturally becomes: How do we cross this chasm and enter our next golden age?

    What’s also important to keep in mind about this theory is that it means that what we are seeing today, socio-economically, is not in fact new. We’ve been through this before. I’ll end with this quote from the interview with Perez:

    In the 1920s, wealth distribution looked the same as it does today. The top 1 percent received 25 percent of society’s total income. By the 1950s it was down to 10 percent. Every installation period brings inequality until the state comes back actively to reverse it and relieve social unrest.

    So what’s happening today may be temporary and it may be history repeating itself. If you’re interested in this topic, you can read the full interview here.

  • Bowling Lane House, Calgary

    I just finished going through the work of Studio North. My friend Peter introduced me to them through this Globe article. 

    They are a Calgary-based design-build practice that have completed a number of laneway houses, as well as bigger projects such as this 34 unit townhouse project in Canmore, Alberta.

    What (not surprisingly) caught my attention was their focus on laneway/accessory dwellings. Pictured above is their Bowling Lane House in Crescent Heights, Calgary. 

    It’s a 700 sf one-bedroom house that sits behind a 1920′s heritage house. Here is an axonometric of that relationship (the existing house was made transparent):

    Here is an elevation from the main street. Look at how neatly it tucks behind the existing house. All you really notice is the garage of Bowling Lane House.

    Here is how Bowling Lane House fits into its laneway.

    And here are two images of the double height space that they managed to create within this 700 sf house.

    Notwithstanding that this is a wider lot than what you might typically find in Toronto, it is precisely the kind of housing – both in terms of design quality and scale – that I was trying to create with Mackay Laneway House. It’s also where I was planning to move.

    Kudos to the Studio North team for driving this initiative in Calgary. You can check out the rest of their projects here. They have a number of other laneway houses within their portfolio. And all of them are beautiful.

    All images from Studio North.

  • Junction House Community Meeting

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    Okay, last Toronto-centric post for the week. We are back to regular scheduled programming tomorrow.

    Later this month, Councillor Gord Perks will be hosting a community meeting for Junction House (see conceptual rendering above).

    You can find all of the details, here, on the Globizen blog. But pop it into your calendars: Tuesday, November 21, 2017 from 7 to 9pm.

    Even if you can’t attend, definitely weigh in on the rooftop public art component over in the comments on the Globizen blog.

    I hope to see you all there. It’s always nice when happy people come out.

  • Bringing laneway suites to Toronto

    This morning I presented and sat on a panel at BILD called “bringing laneway suites to Toronto.” The other participants were Councillor Mary-Margaret McMahon, George Pantazis (Planner at the City of Toronto), Mike Collins-Williams (Director, Policy at OHBA), and Andrew Sorbara (co-founder of Lanescape).

    Here is a photo that Mike took of me while I was talking about my failed laneway house:

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    For those of you wondering if/when this will happen in Toronto, here are the key takeaways from this morning: The city is already drafting laneway suite policies specific to Toronto & East York (not the other parts of the city) and they are due to report back to council in Q2-2018. Nothing is 100% certain at this stage, but there’s lots of optimism. 

    Councillor McMahon delivered this morning’s opening remarks and I was impressed by her deep commitment to laneway suites. I was also impressed by her stance on NIMBYISM, saying that education is important and that we can’t let NIMBYs stop what makes sense for the greater city.

    She gave the example of the 6 storey condominium in her ward that faced fierce community opposition a number of years back. If you can’t put a midrise building on a main street in this city, where can you put it?