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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  • Cities without ground

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    The “ground plane” is an important reference in architecture. The ground is typically where people walk. The ground is where our fabricated buildings meet the earth. And the ground is where our experience of the urban environment–however good or bad it may be–truly takes shape. Often times I feel that we, city dwellers, spend far too much time worrying about the height of buildings and not enough time worry about the ground floor.

    But what if there were no clearly defined ground plane? This morning I stumbled upon an interesting book called, Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook. The authors call it “a manifesto for a new theory of urban form.” And the argument is that Hong Kong has developed a unique series of public/private spaces that allow it to function as a fully three-dimensional city. 

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    Through underground tunnels, above ground walkways, escalators, and other connective infrastructure, Hong Kong is reinventing the way we typically think about cities–both from a user experience and a real estate standpoint. Here’s an excerpt from the Guardian architecture and design blog:

    The phenomenon began in the 1960s, when the Hongkong Land company, one of the main developers in the region, built an elevated walkway to connect a luxury hotel to the second storey of an adjacent shopping mall. An insignificant move, perhaps, but it in fact had the effect of changing the rentable values within the building: suddenly the mall’s second floor units could be rented out for more than those at ground level. It entirely recalibrated the vertical logic of real estate value.

    Now, you could argue that Hong Kong is a unique place. And it is. Other, less dense cities, have found above and below grade walkways to be a destroyer of urban vibrancy. But in Hong Kong it works and, as many other cities around the world focus their energies on urban intensification, we may find that Hong Kong is indeed a new model for urban form.

  • New ideas need old buildings

    In reading a recent Financial Times article called, Are creative people the key to city regeneration?, I was reminded of a famous line from the late urbanist Jane Jacobs: “New ideas need old buildings.” What she meant by that is the following:

    Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them…. for really new ideas of any kind—no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be—there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

    And what she was effectively getting at is that we live in a world obsessed with historical data and precedence. To use the words of business thinker Roger Martin: “The enemy of innovation is the phrase ‘prove it.’” Because, if it’s never been done before, how can you prove it? You can certainly imagine it. But you can’t prove it.

    If you’re in the business of building buildings, convincing your lender to give you the money to build something that’s never been done before, is an almost impossible sell. That’s not the way it works. Which is why Jane Jacobs famously said that “new ideas need old buildings.”

    We’ve seen this story play out in countless cities around the world. The creatives move into an scuzzy neighborhood, make it cool and then investment follows. The neighborhood has been proven. But for this cycle to continue, we need a continuous stock of derelict buildings and undesirable neighborhoods, or at least areas that offer the same kind of affordability and flexibility to creative entrepreneurs.

    Often these circumstances have been the result of failure. The proven ideas that got the buildings built in the first place became no longer relevant. And so the buildings were left to expire. But in many global cities, these kinds of areas are an endangered specifies. However, it’s in our best interest to make sure that we don’t lose our creativity alongside them.

  • Vancouver boomers are sitting on $163 billion of mortage-free property

    Continuing with our discussion of Vancouver, I was reading today that baby boomers in the metro area (those aged 55 and older) are estimated to be holding over $163 billion of clear title property. That is, homes without any mortgage. This figure comes from Rennie Marketing Systems out of Vancouver.

    What’s interesting about this number is that it signals both a lot of equity that could be used for downsizing, rightsizing and lateral moves into a condo, and a source of capital for millennials to buy their first home. In fact, according to a survey that Rennie Marketing also conducted, somewhere around 40% of first time buyers in Vancouver are getting deposit help from their parents and/or grandparents.

    But the question that comes to my mind is: Are there going to be enough middle aged people willing and able to buy $163 billion worth of real estate? Because one person’s sale is another person’s buy.

  • New startup wants to solve urban congestion through data and lotteries

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    If you’re a regular reader of Architect This City, you’ll know that I’m a supporter of congestion and road pricing. Any valuable good or service, such as a road, that’s offered for all intents and purposes as free, will never be able to keep up with demand. You need to price it.

    However, the political risk associated with implementing something like this has made it such that few cities around the world have done it. London and Singapore are the two most common examples.

    The more populist solution is to simply build more roads and highways, even though study after study shows that this doesn’t work. If it did, we would have already solved the problem of traffic congestion. And we most certainly haven’t.

    Which is why I’m excited about a new startup that recently launched called Urban Engines. Their solution is twofold. It’s based on incentives and on treating people and cars in cities as sensors that feed back data into their network. Here’s a brief video. If you can’t see it below, click here.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaCp5Tl-uAc]

    The data piece is almost a no-brainer (provided they can get the data). The more data we can collect about the way people and cars move in a city, the more they’ll be able to optimize and manage the flows. The possibilities are endless.

    But what I found really interesting is their incentives based approach. Typical road pricing methods are, one could argue, a punitive approach. As traffic increases so does the price of the road. (I like to look at it as efficient pricing.)

    With Urban Engines, their approach is the opposite: it’s to reward people–through money and lotteries–for driving during off peak times. It’s smart because selling a reward program to cities will be a lot easier than selling a new charge.

    Overall, this a great example of how startups are stepping up to solve some of our most important societal problems. For more information on Urban Engines, check out their website and this writeup on CityLab.

  • The future of Vancouver’s West End

    Spacing Vancouver recently published an interesting look at Vancouver’s West End neighborhood. And it led me into a deep dive of the neighborhood’s recently adopted Community Plan (November 2013). So today I’d like to talk a bit about the neighborhood and also their plans for managing growth over the next 30 years.

    Officially established in 1969, the West End spent the next 3 decades as the most densely populated area of Vancouver. But starting in the 2000s with the development of high-rise condo towers in neighbouring areas such as Downtown South to the southeast and Triangle West and Coal Harbour to the northeast, the West End lost this position. Today it’s the 4th most densely populated neighborhood in the city.

    The bulk of the housing (77%) is in the form of apartments with 5 or more storeys. And 81% of residents are renters. This is well above the city average of 52% and is likely a reflection of the neighborhood’s younger demographic (25-29 years old is the largest segment) and its position as a landing ground for new Vancouverites.

    But as a large central area with exceptional access to natural amenities, I would imagine that development pressures are and will continue to be significant. To plan for this growth, the city wants to intensify the central areas of the neighborhood with low-rise and mid-rise form and the periphery with high-rise towers. And already this is happening with developments such as the 62-storey Shangri-La Hotel.

    Here’s an image depicting their 30 year vision:

    But what stands out for me in the Plan is Vancouver’s continued commitment to laneway intensification. The Plan refers to it as “Laneway 2.0” and they specifically mention the opportunity to redevelop the West End’s wide laneways with “ground oriented infill housing.” Below is an example of how this could be done on a small residential lot, but the Plan also includes images for how the same might be accomplished on underutilized apartment building sites.

    Laneway housing is a topic I’ve written about extensively on ATC. Toronto is absolutely behind on this. And as I’ve argued before, we need to be looking at urban intensification across all scales, from low-rise to high-rise, if we want to create inclusive and vibrant cities. With the West End Community Plan, Vancouver seems to be doing just that.

  • The changing nature of how and where we work

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    Yesterday I came across a post called, The Workplace of the Future, by venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz. In it, he references a book called, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, and talks about the changing nature of how and where we work.

    What’s immediately interesting to think about is how recent the modern workplace really is:

    The information worker is a relatively new concept. Peter Drucker coined the term in the 50s. By then companies had already developed new ways of housing information workers. The very first information workers were accountants hunched over “Bob Crachit” desks in the back rooms of factories. Booming railroad companies demanded more organization and created offices within the new skyscrapers along the Chicago skyline. With these new offices came stacks of paper and folios, and cabinets in which to file them. Then, the Mad Men wrought an era of typewriters and mahogany corner offices. Next, Bell Labs invented the suburban office park, moving offices from the city as part of post-war suburbanization and in the 70s, Herman Miller crafted the now-ubiquitous cubicle, which was called the “Action Office” when it launched. Oh, the irony.

    It’s also interesting to think about how quickly things seem to be changing. Up until quite recently, everybody seemed to be singing the virtues of the open office plan. However, today, more and more companies are shying away from that kind of space planning:

    In 2011, the organizational psychologist Matthew Davis reviewed more than a hundred studies about office environments. He found that, though open offices often fostered a symbolic sense of organizational mission, making employees feel like part of a more laid-back, innovative enterprise, they were damaging to the workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction. Compared with standard offices, employees experienced more uncontrolled interactions, higher levels of stress, and lower levels of concentration and motivation. When David Craig surveyed some thirty-eight thousand workers, he found that interruptions by colleagues were detrimental to productivity, and that the more senior the employee, the worse she fared.

    Today, the most radical changes are appearing in startup offices around the world and are being driven by a desire to have spaces that embody their unique corporate cultures. This means everything from cool brick-and-beam architecture to bike racks in the office to flexible rooms and spaces that encourage mobility throughout the day. And to further reinforce these cultures, companies are creating positions like Chief Culture Officer and Chief Vibe Officer.

    But as I’ve said before on ATC, the other big shift is simply location and the return to cities. More and more startups, for example, are choosing San Francisco over Silicon Valley and it’s because the city is where young people want to live. It’s increasingly where the talent is. This has already brought about many changes in workplace design, but it likely bring about many more. 

    Image: Airbnb’s San Francisco Office

  • Growing food in the urban environment

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    Today at the office we took a time out during lunch to plant vegetables on the rooftop of our building. Using 100 EarthBoxes, we planted everything from lettuce to hot peppers. It was a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to fresh salads throughout the summer.

    I only recently learned about EarthBoxes through a colleague at work, who has a significant amount of experience in the world of urban agriculture. The way the boxes work is that they have an aeration screen at the bottom that serves to create a reservoir for water. You then fill it with water regularly and, through capillary action, the soil is kept properly watered with minimal maintenance. They’re explicitly designed for growing on balconies, terraces and rooftops.

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    I was so impressed by the boxes today that I came home and bought 3 margarita lime green EarthBoxes for my own terrace. They’re only $30 if you buy 3 at a time. I think urban farming is something that we’re going to need to do more of in the future and so I wanted to give it a try myself. It’s healthy and environmentally sustainable, and I’m sure everything will taste great.

    I plan to start with lettuces, kale, cucumbers and hot peppers in my terrace garden.

  • The why of ATC

    The journey of Architect This City has been an organic one. When I first started blogging regularly in September 2013, I had no plan in mind other than that I wanted to write about cities. I had just come off working full-time on my startup, Dirt, where I had gotten into the habit of writing and I enjoyed it immensely. So I wanted to continue.

    Cities seemed like the perfect umbrella to capture all of my passions: architecture, design, planning, real estate, and even technology. And so I rebranded brandondonnelly.com—which I had already been using as a microblog—and slapped the title “Cities” on it. (That personal microblog has since become brandondonnelly.me.)

    Then, after a few months of blogging, I was having drinks with a good friend of mine and telling her about my new daily discipline. She immediately asked me what it was called and, when I replied by saying that I didn’t really have a name for it, she insisted that I create one immediately. Since she’s one of the brightest people I know, I gave it some serious thought. A few days later, Architect This City was born.

    I liked the idea of having a distinct brand, because then it meant it could grow beyond just a personal blog. It could become a real community of people passionate and committed to building better cities. And that ultimately became the goal as I got deeper and deeper into writing.

    Since that time last year, I’ve had friends guest blog on ATC. It has gone on to become syndicated on Mobility Lab and Urban Times. And it has been featured by the Guardian in the UK has one of the big city blogs in the world. But even more exciting are the moments when somebody tells me, either face-to-face or through a quick message, that they’re really enjoying ATC and that they read it daily. That’s what keeps me going.

    Lately though, I’ve been thinking about what’s next. What’s the purpose of ATC? What’s the why? I thought about writing a manifesto of sorts, but that just seemed unnecessarily onerous. So I sat down, primarily on the subway, with Evernote, and I wrote a purpose statement for ATC:

    To promote the building of beautiful and environmentally sustainable cities that offer strong economic opportunities and a high quality of life.

    That’s really what I believe cities should do. They should be enjoyable and beautiful places to live life and they should empower people to get richer. At the same time, we need to be aware that as more and more of the world’s 7 billion people move into cities, the need for environmentally sustainable solutions is only going to increase.

    So those are the kinds of discussions I hope we can have on ATC. Regular scheduled programming will continue as usual, but hopefully now the why is clearer. If you have any feedback on the above statement, I would love to hear from you in the comment section below.

  • Should I have just become an architect?

    I say “just”, not to belittle the profession in any way, but rather because that was my original plan–to become an architect. That’s what I was studying to become and I was loving the ride.

    But along the way, as I’ve mentioned before, I became somewhat disillusioned with the profession and I became a real estate developer. It’s not that I didn’t and don’t love architecture. I still do. It’s that I felt the profession had been marginalized. Architects were no longer the “master builders.”

    But I’m often asked by people if I miss architecture and design. And to be perfectly honest, I do sometimes. Every now and then I’ll read something about architecture or I’ll come across an interesting design and think to myself: “Should I have just become an architect?” This morning was one of those moments. I opened up my phone while still in bed and, for whatever reason, I just wanted to look at cool architecture in my inbox.

    But I never regret the deliberate decision I made. Developers are very much entrepreneurs and I believe wholeheartedly in the power of entrepreneurship to disrupt, improve, and move the world forward. I just love architecture. And that will never change.

    Image: REX

  • Streetcar Developments buys heritage strip club

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    The big news in Toronto real estate today is that Streetcar Developments has picked up the Broadview Hotel at the northwest corner of Queen Street East and Broadview Avenue in the city’s east end. The building is best known for housing Jilly’s–the finest in adult entertainment.

    I don’t know what it sold for, but the twittersphere seems to think it went for somewhere between $4 and $6 million. My guess is that it’s on the higher end of that range.

    The deal is interesting because there have been rumors circulating for years about its future. At one point there were rumblings that it was going to become a Drake Hotel on the east side–which does seem like a natural fit, and would be exciting for the Riverside area.

    And while we still don’t know what it’s going to be, Streetcar–which is a condo and loft developer–has said the plan isn’t to turn it into residential condos:

    “Although rooted in loft development, Streetcar does not see this building as a residential condominium project. We are in the early stages of planning, but our focus is to revive this building to a landmark everyone in the area can be proud of.”

    That’s interesting. They also don’t deny that it could remain a hotel.

    I don’t want to automatically assume that something along the lines of the Drake Hotel (a hotel, bar, restaurant and cultural community center) is the right recipe for this building, but I do think there’s an opportunity for it to become a significant anchor–even more so than Jilly’s–on the east side of downtown.

    Earlier this week I wrote about the rise of the east end. Maybe this will end up as the establishment that really gives West Queen West a run for its money. But in order to do so, I think Streetcar will need to find the right cultural entrepreneur to partner with. You can’t fake being effortlessly cool.

    Either way, I’m thrilled that this building–built in 1893–will be preserved. If there were any plans to demolish it, I would chain myself to a stripper pole in protest. The Broadview Hotel is a real gem with loads of potential.