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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  • Japan Unlayered

    If you happen to find yourself in Vancouver between January 27th and February 28th, you may want to check out an exhibition being held at the Fairmont Pacific Rim called Japan Unlayered. 

    It is a celebration of Japanese architecture, design, and culture, curated by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma and developers Westbank and Peterson.

    The exhibition is in support of a new project in Vancouver by Kengo Kuma called 1550 Alberni. Pictured above. It will be his first in North America. 

    The architecture is a 43-storey (residential) tower formed by two “scoops” that carve out the building in response to its urban context. Some of those relationships start to become apparent when you see the building rendered into the skyline (below toward right).

    I’ll be in Vancouver next month and so I’m hoping to stop by.

  • The World in Ten Blocks

    “Toronto is probably the world’s most diverse city.”

    That is how a new interactive documentary called The World in Ten Blocks starts. Produced by Lost Time Media and hosted at theglobeandmail.com, the documentary examines a ten block stretch of Toronto’s Bloorcourt neighborhood and tells the story of a diverse set of small-business owners who have moved to this city from all around the world. People from Guyana, Mexico, Nicaragua, Saudi Arabia, as well as many other places.

    It’s amazing to be reminded just how diverse ten small blocks of this city can be; especially at a time when immigration has become such a polarizing topic around the world. I sometimes take it for granted just how diverse this city is. I forget and assume that this is just how cities are. But of course that is not always the case. Toronto is an exceptional city.

    Click here for The World in Ten Blocks.

  • Mass timber tower time lapse

    Over the past few years there’s been growing interest in using mass timber for high-rise buildings (now colloquially referred to as “plyscrapers”).

    One project that got a lot of attention last year is Brock Commons (student residence) at the University of British Columbia. It is an 18-storey hybrid mass timber tower.

    The first and second floor (slab) and the two cores are poured-in-place concrete. After that, the other 16 floors of the tower consist of 5-ply cross laminated timber (CLT) panels and glue laminated timber (glulam) columns running every 10 feet. The roof is steel and metal decking.

    Below is a great time lapse video of the building under construction once it had switched over to timber. The wood construction portion started on June 6, 2016 and finished on August 10, 2016. So 2 floors per week.

    The video is well-annotated so that you know what week of construction it is, how many wood installers are on-site, which structural members are going in (along with their dimensions), and so on. The CLT panels are only 169mm thick.

    Click here if you can’t see the video below.

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

  • People stay the same

    Andrew Chen recently delivered a keynote at StartCon in Australia called: What’s Next in Growth? You can find his entire talk, here, on his blog. 

    One of the themes of his talk is that, “technology changes, but people stay the same.” I like that. See above.

    But more specifically, his presentation focuses on 3 techniques for growing businesses and products: customer referrals, viral content, and bootstrapping marketplaces. All of it is interesting, but I’m particularly fascinated by the last one.

    Marketplaces are all around us. Uber is a marketplace that pairs drivers and riders. Bars are a marketplace that try to pair people together. Finding, trading, and transacting (whatever that might mean for the marketplace in question) seems so fundamental to humans. And cities really empower that.

    The challenge with marketplaces is that they’re hard to start. There’s always a chicken-and-egg problem and so one side of the marketplace usually needs to be “hacked” at the beginning.

    Uber is a perfect example of this. At the outset, it didn’t have enough liquidity in its marketplace to compete with incumbent taxis. That is, it took longer to get an Uber than to get a taxi. 

    So instead, the value proposition was not about speed (or cheapness); it was about luxury. Uber was “everyone’s private driver.” That made waiting acceptable. You were getting a different level of service. The first Uber I ever called in Toronto took 20 minutes to get to my place in midtown.

    But obviously as liquidity increased, Uber was able to move downmarket and capture more (most) of the taxi market. Marketplaces are powerful once they get going. Network effects.

    I say all of this because, as many of you know, I have spent a lot of time wondering about the future of real estate marketplaces. 

    At the same time, I also think that many of these seemingly tech-focused lessons could be applied to cities. Starting an online marketplace is difficult. So is building a new neighborhood from scratch. In the end, it’s always about people.

  • Deep thoughts on apartment layouts

    This morning while I was having a bowl of cereal and fruit, I came across this floor plan from 75 Portland Street, Toronto by CORE Architects:

    It’s a 2-storey unit with a den and double height living room on the main floor and 1 bedroom and 1 media lounge (that could act like a 2nd bedroom, but doesn’t have a window so it can’t be called that) on the second floor.

    This floor plan is a perfect example of what I was getting at with my post: The long and narrow of property affordability. 

    Rough rough, the overall dimensions look to be about 4.3m wide x 12m deep. It’s a fairly deep plan, which means you have to be careful how much “frontage” you give it. If the apartment gets too wide, then it could quickly become too big and potentially unaffordable.

    With the above dimensions, and if you didn’t go 2 storeys, you’d be forced to do an inset/recessed bedroom. The living room would get all of the windows. And if you made the apartment wider to accommodate that main floor bedroom, then you’d likely end up doing an inset/recessed 2nd bedroom, anyways, because of how big the unit had become. So there are trade-offs to consider.

    I’ve seen this layout first hand and I like it a lot. I think it’s an elegant solution to the challenge of deep floor plates. 

    But what do you think? It may not suit everyone’s needs, so I would be really curious to hear your thoughts in the comment section below or on Twitter.

  • The Canadian Dream (and 5 things that hurt upward mobility)

    image

    About 7.5% of American children born into the bottom quintile of the income distribution will eventually make it into the top one fifth. In the UK this number is about 9%. And in Canada and Denmark, the numbers are 13% and 13.5%, respectively. (The upper bound for these numbers is 20% since you can’t have more than 20% in the top 20% of the income distribution.)

    Because of stats such as these, Freakeconomics recently asked: Is the American Dream really dead? And if so, should it instead be called the Canadian Dream, seeing how it’s more readily obtained.

    Of course, it’s not necessarily as simple as 7.5% vs. 13%. Upward mobility exhibits a lot of regional variation. In the American southeast, the number is closer to 4%. Whereas in the San Francisco Bay Area, the number is up there with Canada and Denmark. However, this phenomenon is so location-specific that even kids growing up in San Francisco are twice as likely to get to the top 20% compared to kids growing up across the bridge in Oakland.

    There’s also a question of spread. Canada and Denmark have less income inequality, meaning you don’t have to travel as far to get to the top of the income distribution. 

    Still, the reality is that it is becoming harder for Americans to climb the socioeconomic ladder. The number of 30-year old Americans who today earn more than their parents is dropping compared to previous decades. So what needs to be done? What is causing this erosion of the American Dream?

    It turns out that city builders have an important role to play in solving this problem. Because where you live – and in particular where you grow up as a kid – matters.

    The Freakeconomics episode examines a study that was done by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence Katz, called: The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children. And their findings were exactly that. Place matters. The study reexamines the findings of a program that was administered in the mid 1990′s in the US called Moving to Opportunity (MTO). This program randomly offered families living in high-poverty neighborhoods the opportunity to move to neighborhoods with far less poverty. 

    Upon initial review, the program was seen as a failure. There were some positive health outcomes, but no meaningful changes in income. But when Chetty and company took another look at the data – now with more time and IRS data on their side – they discovered that the impact was in fact dramatic. Relocated families raised children that earned 30% more, were 27% more likely to go to college, and 30% less likely to be a single parent. The key, however, was that the children had to relocate when they were young (< 13 year olds). The older they got, the less benefit they received from moving, eventually reaching a plateau where there was basically no benefit at all.

    Here are the 5 things that ended up having significance in their findings:

    1. Residential segregation by income and race is bad. Mixed neighborhoods are good. The southeast is filled with segregated cities and that’s one of the reasons why they underperform in this exercise. San Francisco, on the other hand, was far more mixed in the 80′s and 90′s when the kids belonging to this study were growing up. One could debate whether that’s still the case. I guess we’ll find out in a few decades.
    2. Income inequality negatively impacts upward mobility. See The Great Gatsby Curve.
    3. Single parent households seem to have an impact on upward mobility. However, the data suggests that it’s not just about whether the child in question grew up with married parents. The percentage of single parent households in the neighborhood also matters. Because even children in dual parent households in a neighborhood with lots of single parent households, showed muted upward mobility.
    4. Social fabric. Connections to family and friends matter. It’s about having a support network. (Freakeconomics mentions a book called Bowling Alone that is now on my reading list.)
    5. Not surprisingly, the quality of public schools matters.

    All of the stats for this post were taken from this Freakeconomics Radio episode. For me, it is such an important reminder that the way we plan and build our cities can have meaningful and longstanding impacts on the kinds of children we raise.

  • Move fast and…

    I like this article – called Speed as a Habit – by Dave Girouard, CEO of the personal finance startup Upstart. It’s all about the importance of speed in business. Speed wins.

    “When you think about it, all business activity really comes down to two simple things: Making decisions and executing on decisions. Your success depends on your ability to develop speed as a habit in both.”

    What makes this topic so interesting is that, for a number of reasons, speed has a tendency to get sacrificed. It might be because the plan isn’t yet perfect or because there’s a belief that Y can’t happen until X is complete. 

    Perhaps it’s because the value of speed is harder to measure than the value of “perfection.”

    I particularly like the notion that you know you’re going fast enough when there’s a bit of discomfort and you’re feeling stretched, but not overstretched in an unsustainable way. Here’s another excerpt from Dave’s article:

    “While I was at Google, Larry Page was extremely good at forcing decisions so fast that people were worried the team was about to drive the car off a cliff. He’d push it as far as he could go without people crossing that line of discomfort. It was just his fundamental nature to ask, “Why not? Why can’t we do it faster than this?” and then wait to see if people started screaming. He really rallied everyone around this theory that fast decisions, unless they’re fatal, are always better.”

    A big part of this, I find, is momentum. An object at rest stays at rest. But an object in motion stays in motion. Remember this law? In this context, it is decisions that power motion and help to build and sustain momentum.

    Of course, the ideal outcome is both lightning fast and high quality decisions.

    The title of this post is homage to Facebook’s original corporate motto: “Move fast and break things.” This slogan was later adjusted to “Move fast with stable infrastructure”, which I think demonstrates our constant struggle between speed and quality.

  • What’s in a sign?

    The built environment is the environment that we create around ourselves. Signs are a part of that.

    Seth Godin recently posted this sign on his blog:

    It was seen at LaGuardia Airport.

    He then asked a few pertinent questions, dissecting the signs intent. Finally, he suggested the following reword:

    Hi. To keep this terminal clean, it’s closed to visitors from midnight until 4 a.m. every night. Ticketed passengers are always welcome.

    Which one do you prefer?

    Which one is clearer?

    Which one speaks to you with empathy?

    Dan Pink would call the reword: emotionally intelligent signage.

  • Sixth facade

    A new treehouse at the Treehotel in northern Sweden just opened up this week. (Their website wasn’t working at the time of writing this post.) 

    It was designed by the Oslo and New York-based Snøhetta. All 6 of the cabins at the Treehotel were designed by Scandinavian architects.

    The treehouse is clad in charred-timber (on trend right now) and is raised 10m (~3 storeys) up into the air to provide views out to the landscape. The underside of the treehouse, which is visible as you walk up its stairs, is finished with a black and white image of a forest. According to Dezeen, the architect calls it the sixth facade.

    Below is what that looks like. (Photo by Johan Jansson via designboom.)

    The net you (hopefully) see in the middle of the treehouse is so that you can sleep outside and stare up at the aurora borealis. The treehouse itself is 55 square meters (almost 600 square feet) and is designed to accommodate 5 guests. It has 2 bedrooms. I guess the 5th person has to sleep outside on the net terrace.

    Seeing this project has me excited to be back in the mountains next month.

  • Turning data exhaust into gold

    Last year, social media company Foursquare predicted that Chipotle would see a ~30% drop in its Q1 2016 sales. It knew this because the geo-location data from people using its app (check-ins and passive visits) was also down. They had figured out the relationship between foot traffic and sales. I think I wrote about this in the first half of last of year.

    Not surprisingly, lots of companies – including those on Wall Street – are now starting to pay attention to data sets such as these. Matt Turck wrote a great blog post about it this morning, called: The New Gold Rush? Wall Street Wants your Data. Here’s an excerpt:

    That a social media company could be building a data asset of immense value to Wall Street is part of an accelerating trend known as “alternative data”. As just about everything in our lives is getting sensed and captured by technology, financial services firms have been turning their attention to startups, with the hope of mining their data to extract the type of gold nuggets that will enable them to beat the market.

    The opportunity is open to a wide range of startups.  Many tech companies these days generate an interesting “data exhaust” as a by-product of their core activity.  If your company offers a payment solution, you may have interesting data on what people buy. A mobile app may accumulate geo-location data on where people shop or how often they go to the movies.  A connected health device may know who gets sick when and where.  A commerce company may have data on trends and consumer preferences. A SaaS provider may know what corporations purchase, or how many employees they hire, in which region. And so on and so forth.

    We may be calling this alternative data right now, but it is almost certainly just a matter of time before it simply becomes: the data. 

    I like the term “data exhaust” that Matt uses, because it feels like it accurately captures what is going on right now. The new economy is producing a lot of byproduct. If you clean it up and package it in the right way, then you might be creating additional value. But if you don’t, then it’s probably just exhaust.