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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  • Is Trump good for Canada?

    Richard Florida and Joshua Gans just published an article in Politico called: Trump Is Making Canada Great Again. The overarching argument is that as the US closes its borders, Canada benefits. The best and brightest from around the world are coming here.

    This fall, international student applications at the University of Toronto were up 70% compared to last year. And numerous companies in Toronto are reporting “steady, double-digit increases” in the number of job applications from Americans.

    This is exactly what I was getting at when I made the pithy prediction that Amazon is going to choose Toronto for HQ2. It’s about access to human capital (though I acknowledge the political reality of selecting a city outside of the US). 

    Perhaps here or here might work for a location.

    Here is an excerpt from the Politico article that starts to speak to the importance of foreign-born workers in the US:

    As of 2013, foreign-born workers in STEM fields—science, technology engineering and math—accounted for nearly a fifth of workers with bachelor’s degrees in the United States, 40 percent of those with master’s degrees and more than half of those with Ph.D.s. In the San Jose metro area, consisting largely of Silicon Valley, immigrants comprise more than 55 percent of adults who hold advanced degrees.

    Here is a chart showing the US and Canadian metros with the highest percentage of foreign-born residents:

    image

    And here is a chart showing which metro areas receive the most venture capital dollars (in millions of US dollars):

    image

    As to be expected, Toronto, Vancouver and Miami lead in terms of the percentage of foreign-born residents. Though, I would bet that Toronto’s foreign-born population is far more diverse than those of Vancouver and Miami.

    However, when you look at venture capital dollars invested, Toronto is nowhere near the top. Vancouver isn’t even on the list. And I suspect that some of you are surprised to see Miami sitting in between Chicago and Seattle (arguably a city that overperforms in tech relative to VC dollars invested). I was.

    Perhaps Trump will help with this by making Canada great again.

  • What e-commerce may do to our streetscapes

    Sidewalk Labs recently ran a thought experiment where they came up with 5 possible scenarios for the future of retail and, more specifically, what they may mean for our streetscapes. You can read all about them here, but my mind lumps them into 3 broad categories.

    First, there’s the temporary/pop-up/independent scenario. This one is all about flexibility and speed. It’s about web-first retailers who don’t have, need or want permanent stores and about empowering small scale business owners. This makes sense. The internet has decentralizing forces.

    The second one takes retail in the opposite direction. It’s about going all in on physical stores; upsizing them and making them even more over the top and Instagram-able. This one also seems intuitive given that we’re already seeing this trend with malls. Many/most are dying and the surviving ones are trying to go as high end as possible.

    The last scenario takes vacant and underutilized retail on the fringe and turns them into “digital dispensaries.” This one is entirely utilitarian and void of any streetscape/urban considerations. It’s about autonomous electric vehicles picking up your goods through drive-thrus and on-demand drones dispatching your toilet paper after you hit that Amazon Dash Button.

    This feels like a good list. I think you could argue that the writing is on the wall for all of these scenarios.

    Photo by Lance Anderson on Unsplash

  • Building relationships

    2003/2004 was roughly the time period when I started to become interested in development as a career. My good friend Rick Sole and I used to talk about it all the time in architecture school. How do we break into this space? There are no formal paths, like law for instance, and so we felt like we had to create our own opportunities.

    What I ended up doing was creating a list of every developer that I felt was doing cool and interesting work. I didn’t know enough about the industry at the time to assess other things and so that was really my only criteria. Do they care about design in their projects? I then started cold emailing and cold calling.

    Not everyone got back to me, but many did and some agreed to meet with me. This was at a time when I had zero experience and I was frankly not very valuable as a hire. So I am incredibly grateful to all of the people who said yes and took the time to speak and meet with me.

    As you go through your career, this curve eventually flips. You go from having no experience and begging people to meet with you to having experience (and other things you can offer people) and people now wanting to meet with you. Generally people want to meet when they think they can gain from you.

    But the best way to build a relationship is to start when you don’t need anything. I will never forget the people that met with me when I had nothing to offer them. And you can bet that I will always have all the time in the world for them.

    I’m not going to claim that I respond to every one of my cold emails. I definitely do not. But I respond to as many as I can and I try and pay it forward with some time. You could say it’s playing the long game, but it’s probably also the right thing to do.

    How do you approach relationship building?

  • Frais du toit

    This past summer, an IGA store in Montreal’s Saint-Laurent borough erected “the largest organic green roof garden in the country.” It is about 25,000 square feet and it has a soil depth of only 150mm. 

    They also claim that it’s the first supermarket in Canada to sell produce grown on the roof of the actual store. The brand: Frais du toit, or fresh from the roof. There’s even a livestream in the vegetable aisle showing you how the goods are doing overhead.

    I would be curious to know what their yields are like and what they are charging for the produce. But it’s certainly a praiseworthy initiative.

    Below is a quick video that will give you an idea of what the roof looks like. If you can’t see it, click here.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z69ScyHCfU&w=560&h=315]

  • The public life data protocol

    The Gehl Institute has just launched (in beta) something called the Public Life Data Protocol. It was developed by the Institute, as well as by Gehl (the practice), the Municipality of Copenhagen, the City of San Francisco, and Seattle’s Department of Transportation.

    The goal of the protocol is to improve the way in which we collect, share, and compare public space information. It is about improving public life in public spaces.

    To do this, they have proposed a series of metrics that measure everything from “posture within the space” to “objects brought into the space.” They also propose spatial metrics that help to analyze public life in relation to its physical context.

    Gehl is a real leader in this space. I commend them on opening up their methodology and working to create “a common language for people data.” Great data will only help us to build more human-centered cities.

    To download a full PDF of the protocol, click here. 

    Photo by Thaddaeus Lim on Unsplash

  • 280 characters

    Twitter is currently experimenting with longer tweets: 280 characters instead of its famous 140.

    One of the reasons they are doing this (besides the obvious goal of getting people to tweet more) is because different languages require a different number of characters in order to get the same message across.

    Here is a graph that Twitter published alongside their announcement:

    image

    I have never really given this any thought (perhaps because I don’t write or speak Japanese), but I find it interesting that Twitter’s arbitrary 140 character limit has been arguably impacting cultures differently. I wonder if there are subtle use case differences because of it.

    The other fascinating thing about this possible change is the backlash that is now mounting from users. People are freaking out, which I suppose some would argue is what most people do on Twitter anyways.

    But a similar thing is happening regarding Instagram after word got out that they were testing a new 4-photo grid (as opposed to the current 3-photo grid). 

    And let’s not forget that there was also a time when Instagram’s square cropped photos would have been considered sacrosanct. Most people have probably already forgotten about that.

    I mention all of this because, though it may seem small, this is actually a big change for Twitter. And change can be hard to accept, even if it doesn’t come in the form of an 8 storey condo building. It can also be hard to stand up when everyone is telling you that what you are doing is stupid.

    Maybe this is stupid, in which case the experiment will prove that out. Maybe it will reveal something positive that nobody could have predicted. Or maybe we’ll all just forget what life was like with only 140 characters.

  • The first North American night mayor

    With Mirik Milan (Night Mayor of Amsterdam) speaking at the upcoming NXT City Symposium here in Toronto, I figured it was time to revisit the topic of night mayors. If you’re new to this topic and/or the blog, you can get yourself up to speed here (scroll down).

    Firstly, this idea is clearly spreading and it just crossed the pond. Last month on August 24, 2017, New York City Council voted to create the “Office of Nightlife.” It’s a small start. The office will have an annual budget of $300,000. But that’s okay.

    As far as I know, NYC is now the first major North American city with government humans focused on leveraging the benefits of the nightlife industry.

    For the record, my post “Why Toronto needs a night mayor” was published in March 2016. It was obvious that the idea was already spreading throughout Europe and I was hoping that this city (Toronto) take notice and decide to lead within North America. New York City decided to do that instead.

    Secondly, CityLab published an article today called how to be a good night mayor. It is about what NYC can learn from the European cities who are already experimenting with this kind of office. Perhaps my favorite is the recommendation to “reflect your own city’s DNA.”

    Of course, having a night mayor is one thing. Making it highly effective is another. In that regard, it is still early days for North American night mayors, and night mayors in general. Who will truly lead?

    Photo by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash

  • Depression babies

    Recently I’ve been seeing a number of posts/articles talking about the dot-com bubble. It seems to be driven by talk of a pending crypto bubble. 

    Whatever the case may be, the recounts are interesting. In this one by venture capitalist Fred Wilson, he talks about how 90% of his net worth went to zero following the crash. And the only reason it wasn’t all of his net worth was because he was fortunate enough to sell some tech stocks in advance of the crash to buy “two significant pieces of real estate.” The two properties were 10% of his net worth before the crash and 100% of his net worth after the crash.

    Fred goes on to talk about how he had to learn about diversification the hard way. And this reminded me of a theory that many of you are probably familiar with called “depression babies”. This is the belief that large macroeconomic shocks – such as the Great Depression and the dot-com boom – create a lasting impact on people’s propensity to take financial risks.

    And indeed, there’s evidence to suggest that this is in fact the case. In this 2010 paper by Ulrike Malmendier and Stefan Nagel, they came to the following conclusion: “Our results show that risky asset returns experienced over the course of an individual’s life have a significant effect on the willingness to take financial risks.”

    I often think about this with respect to my own career. I started working in real estate before the 2008 financial crisis. I also happened to be living in the U.S. at the time – where it was far worse than in Canada. We got off easy. I remember seasoned real estate professionals telling me that it was going to take at least 20 years before the U.S. would build another commercial office building. It was that bad. And that was the sentiment at the time.

    Of course, that wasn’t the case. It didn’t take two decades to resume building. But I like to think that 2008 will remain permanently etched in my mind. It’s my reminder that crashes can and will happen. Don’t forget that. Stay disciplined. At the same time, it’s my reminder that these periodic crashes create opportunities. Because fear invariably makes us overshoot the mark.

  • Starchitecture is dead — how OMA thinks about preservation

    I somehow stumbled upon this transcript from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), covering a talk that architect Rem Koolhaas did at the school back in, I think, 2014. 

    The title: “Preservation is overtaking us.” It’s all about how his firm OMA thinks about and approaches preservation. 

    The overarching theme is that preservation, for them, has become a kind of refuge from the market forces – which they call the “The ¥€$ Regime” – that currently drive architecture and demand constant novelty. It is refuge from “starchitecture.”

    Here is an excerpt:

    At some point, I don’t know who was responsible, the word, “starchitect” was invented. And we all know what it is: a term of derision. And at some point, it becomes very hard to avoid. I would say that preservation is, for us, a type of refuge from this term. What we are hoping to do is propose a number of strategies in which we are working to undo, or escape, from this label.

    And here is a summary of “OMA’s Preservation Manifesto” taken from the GSAPP transcript:

    1. Starchitecture is dead
    2. New forms are no longer relevant
    3. Preservation is architecture’s saving retreat
    4. Preservation creates relevance without new forms
    5. Preservation is architecture’s formless substitution

    It’s a substantial read, but a fascinating one. In case you don’t get to it (understandable), I would like to leave you with this final excerpt:

    What we started to do was look at preservation in general and look a little bit at the history of preservation. Now, the first law of preservation ever defined was in 1790, just a few years after the French Revolution. That is already an interesting idea, that at the moment in France when the past was basically being prepared for the rubbish dump, the issue of preserving monuments was raised for the first time. Another equally important moment was in 1877, when, in Victorian England, in the most intense moment of civilization, there was the second preservation proposition. If you look at inventions that were taking place between these two moments—cement, the spinning frame, the stethoscope, anesthesia, photography, blueprints, etc.—you suddenly realize that preservation is not the enemy of modernity but actually one of its inventions. That makes perfect sense because clearly the whole idea of modernization raises, whether latently or overtly, the issue of what to keep.

    I like the notion that preservation is one of the inventions of modernity, rather than an enemy of it.

    Photo by Reginar on Unsplash

  • Houston, the global city

    Houston doesn’t often get a lot of love in urbanist circles.

    Though since Ed Glaeser published Triumph of the City and declared Houston’s unfettered sprawl the secret sauce for housing affordability, it is now frequently held up as the shining example of why housing supply matters.

    But this is a hotly debated topic. 

    Ed Glaeser would argue that increased supply is the key to housing affordability. But Richard Florida would likely be quick to point out that Houston is also one of the most unequal and segregated cities in America. It is not the model we should be following.

    But let’s be positive today on the blog.

    At the bottom of this post is a great talk by Stephen Klineberg called: Houston, The Global City. Klineberg is a Professor of Sociology at Rice University and the founder of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research.

    In this hour long talk, he outlines, among other things, the remarkable transformation of Houston from a one-industry town (oil) comprised predominantly of white people to a mixed economy where every major ethnicity is now a minority.

    He also argues that Houston is at the forefront of the demographic shifts happening all across the country and that, without this inflow of immigrants over the past couple of decades, Houston today would probably look a lot like a decaying rustbelt city.

    It’s a good watch.

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

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJdWYXIr_qE?rel=0&w=560&h=315]