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.

The housing typologies of American cities

Yesterday the Washington Post published a great chart showing the housing types of the 40 largest cities, by population, in the US. The list is ordered from lowest to highest according to the percentage of single-family houses in the city (green bar).

Here’s the chart:

Not surprisingly, many of the cities at the top of this list (meaning they have the lowest percentage of single-family houses) are in the older east coast cities.

It’s also interesting to see just how much the rowhouse dominates the urban landscape in Philadelphia and Baltimore. In Philadelphia, almost 60% of the housing stock is an attached rowhouse.

Housing is the backdrop for such a big portion of our lives. And when you live in a particular kind of home, it impacts your life whether or not you realize it. The dense rowhouses of Philadelphia and the single-family houses of Oklahoma City are the result of two very different kinds of urban landscapes.

In Toronto, that backdrop is in the midst of a dramatic change. More and more of us are now living in high-rise condos. That hasn’t always been the case, of course. It’s a recent shift. But it looks like it’ll be a big part of our future.

2015.09.22
Mega-cities vs. networked cities

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

Ed Glaeser, Giacomo Ponzetto, and Yimei Zou recently published a new academic paper called, Urban Networks: Spreading the Flow of Goods, People and Ideas.

The paper looks at whether it’s more advantageous to build huge and consolidated mega-cities or build connected networks of smaller urban centers (perhaps connected by high speed rail). As countries like China rapidly urbanize, this is something that many people are thinking about.

In China, there is a lively urban planning debate
about whether to facilitate the increased expansion of the vast agglomerations of Beijing and
Shanghai or whether to focus on creating networks of cities that are smaller, albeit still much
larger than almost all of the cities of Western Europe. The current government policy favors
networks, in the hope that connected smaller cities may be free of the extreme downsides of
mass agglomeration, such as extreme congestion, pollution and high housing costs.

Like most things, there are real trade-offs.

In the paper, they assume that larger cities lead to more urban amenities, which in turn serves as an important magnet for skilled workers. However, for unskilled workers who may not care/benefit from the same urban amenities, it is possible for them to dislike the bigger cities. In this case, the benefits do not outweigh the negatives of urban expansion and an urban divide is created (rich/poor).

One of the potential negatives is housing.

The attraction of denser, not larger, mega-cities is determined also by the elasticity of
housing supply. When it is easy to add extra homes on a narrow plot of land, as in Texas,
then density becomes more attractive. European urban networks may well be the right
answer because history and regulation makes it so hard to build in Europe’s older cities.
Even though China has usually been quite friendly towards skyscrapers, the sheer scale of
the Chinese population may still make the case for urban networks.

If you’re interested in this topic, there’s a section (#2) in the paper on the history of urban networks that you might like.

2015.09.21
Vancouver never plays itself

There’s something powerful about seeing/hearing cities being depicted in film, TV, and other kinds of pop culture. It creates familiarity and does a lot to drive the brand of that place.

But how often are you just seeing one city disguised to look like another? Actually quite often.

Here’s an interesting video that talks about how the 3rd largest film production city in North America never actually plays itself.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojm74VGsZBU?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

I know that there are real economic benefits to being a cheap place to film movies, but I would love to see Canadian cities play themselves. There are also big benefits to that.

Thanks to Scott Bonjukian at The Urbanist for sharing the above video this morning.

2015.09.20
From map books to Google Maps

When I was a kid I remember my parents having something called a “Perly’s” in their car. It was basically a map book and it was the best thing around.

You would start by looking at a big grid of the city and then you’d find the specific area you were looking for and then flip to that page. If you were on the road a lot for work, a Perly’s was a mandatory addition to your car.

Things have obviously come a long way since then. It could take you a long time to find the street you were looking for in a Perly’s. I remember doing that from the passenger seat. Now our phones do that for us and if the connection makes us wait for more than few seconds, we get irritated.

But we’ve also moved beyond just static maps.

The other morning I was driving out to the suburbs and I saw this road sign telling me that – given current traffic conditions – it was going to take me 15 minutes to get to HWY 427.

Have you ever wondered how they come up with those time estimates?

There are a few ways to do it. But here in Toronto along the Gardiner Expressway and Lake Shore Boulevard it’s done using your mobile phone. Phones have unique network identifiers called MAC addresses. And when they try and connect via Bluetooth or Wifi they actually send out their MAC address.

So what happens as you’re driving along is that your phone’s MAC address is being picked up at various locations. And since the distance between these various reception points is known, it’s pretty easy to determine how fast you’re traveling. That’s how they come up with those time/traffic estimates.

This data is anonymous but, in theory, the city also knows if people are speeding when the traffic is light.

This same technology is being used by many retailers and shopping malls to track how people move through their spaces. It’s used to see, among other things, which merchandising strategies are working and what synergies one might be creating (or not creating) with the tenant mix.

But getting back to traffic, there are obviously ways to collect traffic data without any additional physical infrastructure.

As I was about to leave the suburbs and head back downtown, my phone somehow knew I was about to do that (perhaps because I was stopped at a Starbucks near the highway) and so it decided to tell me this:

It wasn’t the best notification to receive on my phone, but I was impressed nonetheless. This traffic data is collected using GPS data transmitted from mobile phones using Google Maps, Apple Maps, and so on. Clearly we’ve come a long way since the days of manually leafing through a thick Perly’s.

At the same time, it feels like we are still pretty far away from solving the problem of urban congestion. Every big city in the world is grappling with this issue.

Part of the problem, I think, is the belief that there’s some sort of silver bullet – more highways, a magic smartphone app, and so on – that will enable everyone to be able to drive around in their own car by themselves. I don’t believe that’s possible in big cities. And the sooner we get away from that toxic thinking, the quicker we’ll solve this problem.

2015.09.19
Is venture-based real estate development coming to the Bay Area?

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

Chamath
Palihapitiya is a Sri Lanka born, Canada educated, venture capitalist in
Silicon Valley, who made a boatload of money as one of the early employees of
Facebook. He now runs a VC firm called Social +
Capital and owns part of the Golden State Warriors.

The other
night he was interviewed at a StrictlyVC event in San Francisco and I think
that many of his comments would also be of real interest to the Architect This City
community. He’s super passionate in interviews and always fun to listen to.

Below is what
he had to say about the San Francisco startup scene. It really speaks volumes
about what people will put up with in order to live in an awesome place/city that they love. All of his responses below are from this
TechCrunch article.

“The city has to be doing more, around
transportation, around housing… You have to get rid of the nimbyism and you
need to quadruple, if not quintuple, the amount of housing. You need to tell
that engineer from the University of Michigan that he can live here on a salary
of $80,000.

[In the meantime], we look at our startups, and
the minute that they start to spend more than 15 percent of their burn – good
money that we give them – on rent, a huge red flag goes up. When they, on a
per-head-count basis, are spending so much, we start looking at the
productivity of the technical team. And if it’s good but not great and they’re
spending this insane amount of money [versus] a different team in Redwood City,
we start to ask ourselves: “Are you so convinced that success is going to
happen in this city at 1.5x the cost?”

Because for every dollar that someone in
Mountain View or Redwood City is raising, you [in San Francisco] have to raise
one-and-a-half to two times that just to get to the same point. So you’re cutting
your half life in half. To prove that you can take an Uber from some fuckin’
shitty bar to another shitty bar? Like, I don’t understand.”

And here he
talks about the possibility of his venture firm also getting into the real
estate development business. I couldn’t resist blogging about this.

“We made a big
decision with our last fund to build an organization that looks really
different than a venture firm, and that organization is going to be this
hybrid, bastard stepchild of Berkshire Hathaway and Blackstone and BlackRock.

What I mean by this is
that we want to have a large permanent capital base and we want to make really
long, discontinuous bets on companies and sectors and trends.

And one of the things
we talked about was having a real estate fund …[because] we owe it to our
companies to alleviate some of these problems when no one else is going to. If
we went and built one million square feet somewhere of mixed use, where you
work and live, and we rethink what it means to have a modular living environment
for a millennial cohort that wants to work at companies and doesn’t necessarily
have kids, we can do that in a way and give that back to our CEOs as a benefit
of working with us.

And you can probably
make the economics work. Because we only really care about the equity of the
company anyways. And the equity in the real estate will take care of itself if
you take the 30-year view. So we’re at the point now where we’re like, wow, we
should raise a few billion dollars and get into the real estate business and
solve this problem systematically for our companies. And maybe in that, it
becomes a blueprint for how others should do it. We’re just basically going to
act as our own city-state and decide how to do it ourselves.”

It’s
interesting to think about what the economics might look like if your primary goal is
simply to provide space to your portfolio companies (entrepreneurs) so that
they get more (financial) runway and, therefore, have a greater chance of success. I’d love to see that pro forma.

2015.09.18
NXT City Night 2015
I just got
my tickets for NXT City Night,
happening Thursday, September 24, 2015 at 6:30pm here in downtown Toronto.

If you’re
not familiar with NXT City Prize, it’s an annual urban design competition where
young Canadians (35 years of age or younger) submit ideas to improve the built
environment. The top submissions win a total of $9,000 in prize money and the winning idea
gets paired up with the City of Toronto work on actually implementing it. That’s
the best part.

The 2015
finalists have already been announced, here, but the top submissions
will be announced at NXT City Night. The Chief Planner of Toronto, Jennifer
Keesmaat, will be there, along with the
competition’s very impressive jury.

I think it’s
important to keep in mind that a lot of what makes cities great often happens
through citizen-led grassroots movements.

The
High Line in New York – which today attracts over 5 million visitors a year
and is believed to be responsible for over $2.2 billion in new economic
activity – was really the work of 2 friends who thought that preserving and
repurposing the High Line was a cool idea. Which is why in 1999 they founded a
non-profit called Friends of the High line. Amazing things happen when people and
passion get involved.

So I would
encourage you to grab a ticket and join me at NXT City Night next week. Tickets are
$25, but if you use the coupon code ATHISCITY,
you’ll get $5 off your ticket 🙂

The event is
also taking place in a spectacular old warehouse building at 56 Maud Street
(formerly St. Andrew’s Market Hall). That alone is reason enough to come. I’ve been inside before. Get your Instagram ready. But
if that’s not enough, there’s also:
- Open bar including Steam Whistle beer and Pillitteri Estate wine
- Catering from Oyster Boy, Kanpai Snack Bar, Thoroughbred and many more
- Art installations by Wayward Collective
- Beats by Jesse Futerman and A Digital Needle
- Local wares from GetFresh, Shopify, Spacing Store and Swipe
I hope to see
you there. Make sure to tweet at me
if you’ll be there so we can connect in person.
2015.09.17
In worship of the single-family residential zone

Daniel Hertz of City Observatory recently published an interesting post talking about what makes American zoning unique compared to the rest of the world. It is based on the conclusions of a book published earlier this year called Zoned in the USA.

Here are 2 snippets that I liked from his post:

Hirt’s major claim is that what really sets American zoning apart is its orientation, explicit or implicit, to putting the single-family residential zone at the top of the hierarchy of urban land uses. Not only are single-family zones listed first in many zoning codes, but they make up significant pluralities, or even majorities, of total land area in most American cities. Interestingly, Hirt points out that this wasn’t necessarily true when zoning was first introduced: New York’s famous first zoning law didn’t even have a single-family zone at all.

As Hirt points out, Americans appear to be unique in believing that there is something so special about single-family homes that they must be protected from all other kinds of buildings and uses—even other homes, if those homes happen to share a wall. The recent revolt in Seattle over a proposal to soften that city’s single-family districts, in other words, would not be possible anywhere else in the world, not least because very few people live in single-family districts to begin with.

I don’t know if Canada is covered in the book, but we clearly share many similarities with that of the US.

I would say more, but at this point in the day I should probably rest my eyes and stop looking at a computer screen. Hopefully we can continue this discussion in the comment section below.

2015.09.16
How to save 8 minutes on Toronto’s highways

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

Three months ago when Toronto City Council voted
not to remove the Gardiner Expressway
East (which in
my view was a mistake), it did so with a commitment to look at tolling
options for both the Gardiner Expressway and the Don Valley Parkway (which in
my view is a positive thing).

Last week a preliminary report was released
discussing some of those tolling options. If reading dry city reports is your thing,
you can do that here.

The Coles Notes version (CliffNotes for you
Americans) is that a $3 flat toll on both the Gardiner and the DVP – the same
cost as riding transit in this city – would be expected to reduce vehicles on the highways by 9% and 12%, as well reduce end-to-end travel times by 3 minutes and 5
minutes, respectively. There’s obviously a lot more in the report, but these
figures stood out for me.

Given how monumental the
3 minute delay was in the Gardiner East debates, it will be interesting to
see whether people treat a 3 minute time savings in a similar way. I suspect
they won’t. The cost will be the larger issue.

I’ve been a
vocal supporter of tolls and road pricing on this blog. One of the main reasons
for that is because I view the demand for highways as being largely inelastic
and therefore a potentially great source of transit funding.

The discouraging part of the above report is
that its primary goal is to explore tolls for the purpose of “offsetting
capital, operating, and maintenance costs.” The primary goal is not to come up
with sustainable sources of transit funding.

Having these costs paid for by user-fees as
opposed to general taxes is still a good thing in my view. But an even better thing
would be to help fund mobility solutions that we know will be far more
effective at getting people around this region as millions more people move here
in the coming decades.

The other discouraging part of the report is
that near the end it explains that while the City of Toronto Act of 2006 allows
for toll highways, they cannot be implemented without the Province passing
regulation.

It’s a reminder that our governance structures do
not reflect the current urban reality of this country.

2015.09.15
The crisis of success

I’m back and it feels great. I missed blogging the past 2 days. Though, there was something nice about not touching a computer all weekend.

This morning I got up extra early and listened to a brief conversation between Aaron M. Renn of The Urbanophile and urbanist Richard Florida. The topic is New York’s “Great Reset”, and the impetus was a recent report (of the same name) that was put out by New York University.

The conversation starts by talking about the resilience of New York City and its ability to accept and then reinvent itself in the wake of “creative destruction.” Destruction such as the financial crisis of 2008/2009.

But they then go on to talk about the challenges that New York, as well as many other cities, are now facing. Challenges brought about, not by failure, but by their tremendous success. Challenges such as income inequality and the dwindling middle class.

The overarching premise is that we are still in the early stages of a new urban and creative economy. And that there’s lots of work to be done in order to figure out how to make it an inclusive one.

There’s even mention of former Toronto mayor, Rob Ford.

You can listen to the talk below. If you can’t see the embedded play button, click here.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/221338706″ params=”color=ff5500″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

2015.09.14
Resting my eyes

Today I’m getting laser eye surgery. (If you’re reading this via email subscription, it already happened!)

This is something I’ve been thinking about doing for many many years. My original plan was to get it done after I finished my MBA. But that time came and went, and so it was about time I took action.

I’ve always been a bit nervous about doing it, which is why I’ve been procrastinating. I’m an early adopter when it comes to most things in life, but not when it comes to this. Not when it comes to my eyes.

The major impetus for getting it done is sports. I love lifting weights. I love cycling. I love snowboarding. And I love swimming. All of these things are easier to do when you don’t have to fuss around with contacts. I’m quite nearsighted.

In any case, I’m going to be taking the weekend off from blogging. I have never done that in the over 2 years that I’ve been writing Architect This City, but this time is different. I need to give my eyes a rest. Doctors orders.

For this reason, yesterday’s post on affordable housing was a bit longer than usual. And if you’re looking for more to read, you can also check out this list of most popular posts.

Regular scheduled programming will resume on Monday, which means that if you’re a daily email subscriber, you won’t receive another email from me until Tuesday morning at 6am Toronto time.

I hope you have a great weekend. See you on Monday 🙂

2015.09.11