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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  • The city is the brand

    Oslo Barcode I by Michel Krämer on 500px.com

    https://500px.com/embed.js

    I was reading the internet this morning and I stumbled upon an interesting urban blogger from Oslo named Erling Fossen. Most of his writing is in Norwegian, but he does have a section called “City Notes” that is in English.

    I enjoyed this paragraph titled, "The city is brand.” It is taken from a post called, “7 lessons from Oslo Urban Arena.”

    As cities compete to attract talents, companies and investment, many cities have branded themselves as either the most creative city in the world, the smartest or the most liveable. In many occasions cities develop slogans to go with the message. But as brand expert Martin Boisen said: No one has ever moved to a city due to a logo. Action speaks louder than logos. Branding cities can actually be helpful. The world is a stage, and your city has a role to play. The first message is to avoid being a copy cat and focus on your own uniqueness. It is also just as important to involve a larger community to make branding work. It takes a village to brand a place. Equally important is to have strong leadership communicating the message. Strong leaders can rock the boat.

    I’ve written about city branding quite a bit here and this has always been my message. An excellent city brand must stem from some form of reality. If you want to be the most creative or the greenest city in the world, then you have to live and breathe that philosophy.

    I also feel strongly about not copying other cities. You might think that having (insert thing here), which was pioneered in (insert city here), will make you world-class. But that’s a pretty banal way of going about things.

    Instead, to reiterate Fossen, focus on your own uniqueness. Then market the hell out of it.

  • Insecure cities

    Miami city by night by beatrice preve on 500px.com

    https://500px.com/embed.js

    I am back in Toronto and ready to resume my normal routines. I am definitely a creature of habit.

    But boy is Miami an incredible city.

    The interesting thing that I noticed about Miami though is that – despite its reputation as a global capital of glam – it still shares the same kinds of insecurities that many other cities experience.

    I was reading the December 2015 / January 2016 issue of Surface this past weekend and there was an interview with billionaire real estate developer Jorge Pérez. He’s the CEO of The Related Companies and worth somewhere over $3 billion. In the interview he said that his biggest focus these days is on “Miami becoming a world-class city.”

    I love that. Cities need strong proponents. And he is doing a lot. To give one example, he donated $40 million (half in cash and half in art) to create the new Pérez Art Museum Miami.

    But for the Torontonians reading this post, how many times have you also heard the words world-class? At this point it makes me cringe when I hear someone say it. Usually it accompanies a sentence such as: “If we do (insert thing here), we will then be world-class.”

    I also attended a talk at Design Miami, where some of the panelists were going on about how Miami’s restaurant scene was pretty pitiful about 10 years ago, but how that’s not the case today. Now, it is finally becoming remarkable.

    That struck home for me because I’ve said similar things about Toronto: “10 years ago Toronto was like that, but now we are like this.” Makes me think that I’ll be saying the same thing about Toronto 10 years from today.

    So it seems like many, or perhaps most, cities have an insecure side to them. And that can be a powerful motivator for driving growth and change. Cities, like people, need that fire in the belly.

    But at the same time, there’s something nice about being grateful for what you have. And Miami certainly has a lot going for it. See you soon, Miami.

  • What sea level rise is doing to the urban landscape of cities

    Resiliency is an important topic in urbanist circles these days.

    New York is working on a 10 mile “Dryline” to protect itself from future storms similar to Hurricane Sandy. And Miami Beach – one of the most vulnerable cities in the U.S. to sea level rise – is frantically building pump stations and raising its seawalls, streets, and sidewalks.

    Here’s what the city’s public works director had to say via a Curbed article published about a week ago:

    Miami Beach is planning to spend upwards of $500 million over the next five years on the pump stations and street-raising projects. “We are quite certain we are going to buy ourselves another 30 years, and we are hoping we are going to buy ourselves another 50 years,” Carpenter said.

    According to Wired, sea levels off the coast of South Beach have risen by 3.7 inches since 1996. But over the last 5 years the high tide levels have had an average increase of about 1.27 inches per year!

    This matters a great deal because of what South Beach would look like if sea levels increased by 2 feet (via the Miami Herald):

    It’s for this reason that Miami Beach has been working to alter its street elevations and install pumps – as many as 80 of them over the next 5 years – that quickly drain stormwater into Biscayne Bay. (The drains are equipped with backflow preventers so that the water leaves but doesn’t come back into the island.)

    Here’s an example of a raised street and sidewalk (via the Miami Herald):

    And here’s an example of a pump station (via Curbed):

    All of this strikes me as necessary work for Miami Beach. But I also think it’s important to keep in mind that all of this is patch work – regardless of how necessary it is right now. 

    The bigger question is: what are we doing to stop sea level rise? That’s the only way we’re going to get to true, urban, resiliency.

  • A few photos from Art Basel

    It’s raining here in Miami Beach this morning. But the city is still buzzing with Art Basel and everything else that is going on right now.

    It’s been interesting to learn about some of the measures that Miami Beach is taking to deal with flood risk. The city is highly vulnerable to rising sea levels.

    A post on that topic is in the works, but I don’t have time for it this morning. So instead, I’d like to share some of my photos. Many of them are already on my Instagram.

    I particularly liked the work of South Korean artist Chul Hyun Ahn. He works primarily with light and the perception of depth.

  • Vancouver approves first laneway apartments in the West End

    It’s no secret that Vancouver is way out in front of Toronto and many other cities when it comes to laneway housing. 

    Good luck trying to get a laneway house approved in Toronto. They’re only allowed under rare circumstances where there is already an existing house in the lane and/or you’re willing to fight it all the way to the province.

    But in Vancouver, it’s a different story. And they’ve even taken it a step further according to this recent Globe and Mail article by Frances Bula. The city recently approved small scale laneway apartments in the West End:

    “The city, which created the possibility for laneway apartments when it approved a new West End plan last year, has approved the first four buildings with 47 units in total. Three are in this particular alley between Nelson and Comox on either side of Cardero, around the corner from Cardero Bottega and Firehall No. 6. Others are in the pipeline. Many more are expected.

    They’re the first of a new kind of infill that planners hope will produce 1,000 new small homes in this popular downtown neighbourhood.”

    Here’s a rendering from the article to give you an idea of what these laneway apartments might look like:

    Readers of this blog have argued that Toronto doesn’t need laneway housing. There’s enough room for intensification elsewhere. 

    But what is clear to me is that Toronto is continuing to build less and less ground-related housing. There’s little to no room for that. And what is left of our low-rise stock is becoming increasingly unaffordable.

    So if we believe that social diversity is important for building a great city – which I do – then I think it behooves us to figure out how to not only increase the supply of new housing, but also increase its diversity. This is something Andrés Duany argued for in yesterday’s video post.

    The biggest hurdle is community opposition. But below is how one of the neighbours in Vancouver responded to the proposed laneway apartments. He gets it.

    “Dean Malone, who lives across the street from one of Mr. Sangha’s three projects, took the trouble to go to city hall to support it because the laneway apartments provide a way of creating new housing that isn’t a tower and isn’t a luxury development.”

    What this also does is allow the private sector to do more before the public sector needs to step in with affordable housing subsidies. I believe that laneway housing will help, but not solve, the affordable housing problem happening in most of our cities. 

    But every little bit helps. And this is one solution that many cities are simply ignoring.

  • Big box stores are the new noxious-use

    As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on New Urbanism, I thought I would post an interesting video discussion between Andrés Duany and Ben Stevens. 

    Duany is the father of New Urbanism and Stevens runs a great blog called The Skyline Forum where he interviews notable city builders, developers, architects, planners, and so on. If you can’t see the video below, click here.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfZZ61C4YOY?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

    Once again it’s a great reminder that so much of what we do and build in our cities is dictated by parking requirements. One of the ways Duany differentiates New Urbanism from “old urbanism” is that the new explicitly provides for the car. 

    Regrettably, I think we do that almost everywhere nowadays. But I take his point that New Urbanism happens almost as an intervention in areas where there are few or no other mobility options besides the car.

    I also thought it was interesting that Duany refers to big box stores as the new noxious-use in cities, rather than industry. He describes the parking, not the stores themselves, as creating a “flume of unwalkability.”

    It always seems to come down to parking.

  • Fabricating a new urbanism

    image

    Last night I was in CityPlace, West Palm Beach. Completed in 2000, CityPlace is a quintessential example of New Urbanism. (For those of you from Toronto, this is a different kind of a CityPlace.)

    In case you’re unfamiliar with this movement, here’s a snippet from The Charter of New Urbanism (via Wikipedia):

    “We advocate the restructuring of public policy and development practices to support the following principles: neighborhoods should be diverse in use and population; communities should be designed for the pedestrian and transit as well as the car; cities and towns should be shaped by physically defined and universally accessible public spaces and community institutions; urban places should be framed by architecture and landscape design that celebrate local history, climate, ecology, and building practice.”

    At a high level, New Urbanism makes a lot of sense. American cities were sprawling uncontrollably and so advocates had decided that something had to change. The Congress for New Urbanism was founded in 1993.

    But the New Urbanism movement has had its share of critics. Here’s how Witold Rybczynski – professor at the University of Pennsylvania – talked about it on his blog:

    “What are the important ideas that have affected American cities in the last 20 years? The development of waterfronts. The renaissance in constructing urban parks. The move of genXers and retirees into downtowns. High-rise urban living and Vancouverism. The popularity of urban bicycling and bike-rental programs. Ditto for Zipcars. Urban farmers markets and community gardens. Urban charter schools. The dramatic expansion in attendance of urban cultural institutions, especially art museums. Urban tourism. Downtown trophy buildings. The emergence of influential big-city mayors. Have any of these been the result of the new urbanism movement?”

    Frankly, I have never been a big follower of New Urbanism. It has always felt artificial to me. But I recognize the immense challenge in transforming car-oriented cities and communities into walkable ones. It’s one of the greatest challenges in city building. You’re asking people to change their habits.

    If any of you are experts on New Urbanism (because I am certainly not), I would love to hear from you in the comment section below.

  • Rethinking downtowns to improve urban mobility

    Jarrett Walker of Human Transit recently published an interesting post talking about downtowns. His argument is that we shouldn’t be planning our transit networks around the traditional notion of a single-centered city.

    Here’s a snippet:

    So growing a single downtown isn’t the key to becoming a great transit city. Quite the opposite, it’s best to have a pattern of many centers, all generating high demand, and supporting balanced two-way flows between them that let us move more people on less infrastructure.  This is the great advantage of Paris or Los Angeles or the Dutch Randstad over Chicago or Manhattan.

    Now, there are many cases where a singular economic center still dominates an urban region. See downtown Toronto. And many will argue that the current economic environment is creating more, rather than less, concentrated urban spikiness.

    But at the same time it is quite clear that many of our cities have shifted away from a monocentric model to a polycentric one. 

    I mean, just look at all employment nodes that have developed across the Toronto region. The idea that everyone comes downtown in the morning and then leaves in the evening has become an anachronism for many. Early in my career I spent 4 years commuting from downtown to the suburbs.

    So what is happening is that our cities need to start performing more like point-to-point networks. This isn’t a new thought. But it’s a lot harder to execute on compared to what many cities have been used to. 

    You need a critical density of both residents and employers and the right kind of connectivity to create a true “mobility hub.” In Toronto, you could argue that we really only have one of those and it’s centered around Union Station.

    But I think that will change for many cities. And when we do get it right, we will be doing a lot to improve the crippling traffic congestion that so many of our cities are suffering from.

  • The biggest international buyers of American homes

    A reader recently sent me a New York Times article talking about Chinese buyers flooding into the US residential real estate market. This is something that I’ve written about before, but I liked the “graphic” section called The Roots of China’s Real Estate Rush.

    Here are two of the graphs:

    imageimage

    The second chart shows you just how much more significant Chinese buyers are compared to the next biggest foreign customer of American homes: Canadians. And with the Canadian dollar where it is, it is no surprise that we are trending downwards. That doesn’t seem to be the case with the Chinese.

  • The Monocle Travel Guide Series — Miami

    I’m off this week to South Florida to check out Art Basel (among other things). This week isn’t a great week to be leaving the city since it’s the Toronto Real Estate Forum and lots of people are coming to the city for that. But I’ve wanted to go to Art Basel for over a decade, so it was about time I did that.

    I also decided to pick up the new Monocle Travel Guide to Miami. This is the 8th city that they’ve covered and, as you might know from reading this blog, I’m a big fan of Monocle. (I’m still waiting for the Toronto edition, guys.)

    As part of this guide launch – which was timed to coincide with Art Basel Miami Beach – they also released a short video that is worth watching.

    When most people think of Miami they probably think of sun and flash. And that is certainly part of the DNA of the city. But Miami has also grown into a global city with important and extensive connections to Latin America. It’s also an incredible place for those who love art, architecture, and design. If you watch the Monocle video, I’m sure you’ll feel that. 

    Miami is absolutely one of my favorite cities.