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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  • Are condos at a tipping point?

    I live in a condominium in the St. Lawrence Market neighborhood of Toronto. And recently, I’ve had a number of “empty nesters” ask me if they could come check out my condo and get a feel for what it’s like to live in a downtown neighborhood like the Market.

    And they’re asking because they’re contemplating something that has become quite common for folks whose kids have left the roost. They’re considering, for a number of reasons, selling their suburban home and right-sizing to a downtown condominium.

    Whether it’s because they want to free themselves of cutting grass and shoveling snow, they don’t like stairs anymore, they want to be able to lock the door and head to Florida for the winter, or they want an amenity rich urban lifestyle, the uptake on condos has been significant both in Toronto and other cities around the world.

    Indeed, the condo market has become great at serving “both ends” of the market: first time buyers/young professionals and empty nesters. But what I wonder is if we might be at a tipping point with respect to the middle segment of the market: families.

    The average new construction low-rise home in the Greater Toronto Area is roughly $650,000 right now. But this would be more for houses in the center of the city. There, you’re probably looking at anywhere from $650,000 to $1 million for a “typical” 3 bedroom Toronto house.

    By comparison, a new condominium might average somewhere between $550 and $600 per square foot in the city. So for a 3 bedroom condo at, say, 1,300 square feet, you’d be looking at somewhere between $715,000 and $780,000. Add in parking and you’re somewhere between the mid $700,000’s and just over $800,000.

    In all cases, we’re talking a lot of money. But the point I’m trying to make is that condominiums and houses are becoming cost competitive. There are obviously differences between both housing types, but if your goal is a 3 bedroom place to raise a family, that utility could be met in both cases.

    There may still be psychological/societal barriers to raising kids in a condo, but I wonder if we might be close to a tipping point now that the economics are starting to line up. What do you all think?

  • What cities could learn from Medellin

    I’ve been talking with my good friend Alex Feldman for a few months now about him doing a guest post on Architect This City. Alex and I went to Penn together and he’s now VP at a real estate advisory firm called U3 Advisors. The firm is based in Philadelphia, but they do work in many other cities including Detroit. I hope you enjoy his post. Happy Monday everyone.

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    Guest post by Alex Feldman

    Two weeks ago, I had the privilege of traveling to Medellin, Colombia to attend the World Urban Forum – a non-legislative UN Habitat led gathering that is widely regarded as the premier conference on Cities. Over 10,000 people attended the bi-annual gathering, which felt like a cross between a World’s Fair, a Trade-Show, and a political summit. While the conference proved to be a melting pot of topics, ideas, and people, I came away from my 3 days in Colombia more captivated by the city itself.

    For those of you familiar with Medellin, you may be aware of its infamous past as the center of Pablo Escobar’s drug cartel. The city was once considered one of the most dangerous in the world with 6,300 homicides in 1991. Escobar was killed in 1993 and the city has been dramatically transformed over the last 20 years. Today, Medellin is much safer, very clean, and incredibly friendly (as someone who speaks very little Spanish, I met complete strangers who went out of their way to help me get around the city).

    Medellin’s resilience has not gone unnoticed and the city has been recognized as one of the most innovative in the world. Part of Medellin’s transformation has been its focus on inclusion and equitable development. I spent Sunday traveling on the city’s modern Metro system to visit Santo Domingo – a hillside neighborhood that was once the center of Escobar’s drug cartel. The steep topography of the neighborhood makes it difficult for cars or buses to reach the low-income residents – and requires a long walk up-hill for anyone returning from a long day of work or school in the central city. As part of Medellin’s Social Urbanism platform, a public-private partnership constructed Line K of the Medellin Metro – a 1.8km gondola or Metrocable that provides seamless connections to the city’s Metro.

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    I rode the Metrocable to the top of the hill – the Santo Domingo stop. I was worried that the ride up the hill would feel like a tourist attraction, with hundreds of visitors staring down at the low-income neighborhoods below. Instead, the Metrocable proved to be both a useful public transport system and a point of pride for local residents – offering some of the best views in the city from the compact, glass enclosed cars. 

    At Santo Domingo, I wandered through a vibrant street fair to the Biblioteca Espana – a modern library designed by Colombian Architect Giancarlo Mazzanti that represents another aspect of urbanismo social: placing the city’s “most beautiful buildings” in the city’s poorest areas – a declaration of former Mayor Segio Fajardo. Despite the fact that the building’s exterior is temporarily covered in scaffolding due to leaks, it represents a significant investment in a neighborhood that was once the most dangerous in the city.

    On the ride back down the mountain, I couldn’t help but reflect on how a city could be transformed in such a short period of time. The lessons of Medellin’s urban makeover are relevant to many cities (including my hometown of Philadelphia which despite a recent transformation still suffers from a poor global reputation). Visionary leadership, innovative transportation models, and progressive urbanism have re-made Medellin’s reputation. In turn, this has benefited Medellin’s citizens both in quality of life and local pride. When citizens begin to love their city again, the ripple effect can be exponential. More cities should take-note of this Latin American comeback kid.

  • Are the suburbs really cheaper?

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    Smart Growth America released a report this month called Measuring Sprawl 2014. It’s an update to a report they did back in 2002 and it’s worth a read if you’re into urban planning. You can download it here. 

    The report looks at 221 metro areas in the US and develops a “sprawl index ranking.” The higher the number, the more compact the metro area. Not surprisingly, New York tops the list with San Francisco coming in second. But more interesting are the correlations they discovered. As you go up their sprawl index ranking (that is, as the cities become more compact), they found the following:

    • People have greater economic opportunity in compact and connected metro areas.
    • People spend less of their household income on the combined cost of housing and transportation in these areas.
    • People have a greater number of transportation options available to them.
    • And people in compact, connected metro areas tend to be safer, healthier and live longer than their peers in more sprawling metro areas.

    If you’re a follower of smart growth, then some of these will sound familiar. But they’re worth repeating and I’d like to focus on the second one for a minute (not to undermine the importance of living longer). Conventional wisdom dictates that as you sprawl out from the center of a city, the cost of housing drops. And indeed, that’s what they found. There’s a correlation between density and housing costs, and more compact cities generally have more expensive housing.

    However, they also found that the percentage of income spent on transportation is much less in compact metros:

    Each 10 percent increase in an index score was associated with a 3.5 percent decrease in transportation costs relative to income. For instance, households in the San Francisco, CA area (index score: 194.3) spend an average of 12.4 percent of their income on transportation. Households in the Tampa, FL metro area (index score: 98.5) spend an average of 21.5 percent of their income on transportation.

    But here’s where it gets interesting: they found that transportation costs dropped faster than housing costs increased as metro areas became more compact. Meaning if you consider both housing costs and transportation costs in aggregate, it’s actually cheaper to live in more compact areas. From what I can tell, they’re also only considering direct transportation costs and not indirect costs such as the time people waste sitting in traffic. 

    Either way, it’s something to consider the next time you’re thinking about where to live and how much you should be willing to spend on housing. That cheaper suburban home may not be as cheap as it seems.

    Photo by Aythami Perez on 500px

  • Should we go backward to go forward?

    Robert A.M Stern–who is a fairly traditional architect (stylistically) and Dean of the Yale School of Architecture–recently coauthored a book called “Paradise Planned: The Garden Suburb and the Modern City.” It’s over 1,000 pages. I haven’t read it yet and I likely won’t, but I did just read this op-ed piece in the New York Times by Allison Arieff and I wanted to comment.

    In the book, the authors argue that the solution to our suburban problems is to return to a “tragically interrupted, 150-year-old tradition” known within urban planning and architectural circles as the Garden City movement. Here’s how Arieff describes it:

    The garden suburb is — because it still exists in many places — a planned, self-contained village located usually outside a major city. Ideally, it features a variety of housing types, though by variety, we’re talking single-family homes and a few low-rise multifamily buildings.

    In contrast to the suburbs we’ve come to be most familiar with, these featured homes are situated in a comfortably dense, highly walkable environment designed around a public center or square.

    But in addition to being more dense and walkable, the big difference for me is that the garden city (to use the original terminology) was initially intended to be self sufficient economically–rather than just serve as a bedroom community for the central city.

    It was all incredibly rational. As one garden city reached its population and employment projections, the next garden city node would be created and connected to the network via road and rail. And by using land relatively intensely, it meant that more of the countryside could be preserved as undeveloped land.

    But while I would agree that the suburbs aren’t going to go away (I’ve said this before) and that we should be making them more dense and walkable, the book (well, the article) got me wondering to what extent the Garden City model applies from an economic standpoint. Should we be trying to create poly-centric cities with tidy little self-sufficient pockets of employment? Or should everything primarily feed a central city?

    The irony of the decentralized information economy is that it appears to be encouraging centralization across and within cities. But even before the rise of the internet and other technologies, there have always been real economic benefits to firms clustering in cities. Known as agglomeration economies, it’s one of the reasons cities even exist in the first place.

    Certainly, there’s a lot we can learn from the way we used to build and plan our cities and towns (they were designed around people as opposed to cars). But something doesn’t sit right with me in terms of the way the Garden City movement thinks about cities, economically. It seems idealistic.

  • Natural resources drive employment growth in Canadian cities

    I was reading Wendy Waters’ All About Cities blog this morning and I came across the following charts showing employment growth across Canadian cities. The first chart shows total employment growth over the last year and the second chart shows employment growth over the past 10 years.

    What is immediately obvious from these charts is that Calgary and Edmonton–both resource driven economies–have and are leading Canada in terms of employment growth.

    Toronto isn’t that far behind though, particularly if you exclude manufacturing from the equation (see second chart). The decline of manufacturing in the Greater Toronto Area really represents a structural change in the economy.

    I wanted to post these charts because, for all the talk about the rise of the information and digital age, Canada’s economy is still very much based on natural resources. We extract and sell. And we have one of the largest proven oil reserves in the world.

    Now, I’m not opposed to this business model, but there’s lots of evidence out there to suggest that resource dependency ultimately hurts innovation and productivity–which makes sense. If we didn’t have resources, we’d be forced to figure out other ways to make money.

    So while it’s great to see our cities growing, let’s not take it for granted. 

  • The suburbs, they are a changing

    Earlier today, a good friend of mine shared this New York Times article on my Facebook wall. It talks about how some suburbs are taking action to try and curb the exodus of young people to cities. They’re doing things like making themselves more walkable and building bike lanes. I thought it was an interesting article.

    Of course, it’s not just young people moving from the suburbs to the city. It’s also a case of young people living in the city and never leaving for the suburbs–which they have traditionally done. 

    I’ve talked about this topic a lot here on ATC, but I wanted to share this article because I think it’s one thing to talk about how city centers are on the rise and it’s another thing to talk about how suburbs are starting to take notice and take action to curb their (potential) decline.

    I say potential because some would argue that the suburbs aren’t necessarily on the decline–we just have a scenario where young people are delaying that period of their life, either for economic reasons or for personal/lifestyle reasons.

    I, however, would disagree. I think the growing preference for cities is a real societal shift. That doesn’t mean I think the suburbs are going to die though. There will likely always be a segment of the market that prefers that housing type (or some variation of). I just think the suburbs aren’t going to be what they once were to previous generations.

  • Berczy Park and the importance of public art in cities

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    Earlier this week a friend of mine was live tweeting a public consultation meeting for the revitalization of Berczy Park in the St. Lawrence Market neighborhood of Toronto. And since I live in the neighborhood, it’s a project that I’ve been following particularly closely–although anything related to the built environmental generally fascinates me.

    As soon as I saw the pictures he was tweeting out, I was immediately excited. And after reviewing the full design package (which you can download here), I must say that I think it’s going to be a brilliant change for the neighborhood. 

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    On an entirely superficial level, I like the paving motif they’ve chosen; even if it does appear to be be a copy from somewhere else (see above photo). I don’t think one should underestimate how small details, like paving, can have a huge impact on how one feels in a space, whether inside or out. It all counts.

    But beyond just cosmetic changes, there are a couple of significant design changes being proposed.

    First, a larger kid-friendly green space is being proposed on the west side of the park. And what was interesting to see was how the community overwhelmingly expressed a need for this play area. I’d like to believe that this speaks to the growing acceptance of raising kids downtown. There are certainly lots of families in the St. Lawrence.

    Second, the south portion of the park is being “opened up” with a much larger hardscape area. The result will be a bigger promenade along Front Street, as well as, what I hope, will become an “urban stage” for people to hang out, breakdance, busk or try and sell me things I don’t need.

    But equally exciting is the fact that along with the revitalization of Berczy Park will come a public art competition. It’s already in the works, but there aren’t any pretty images to share, just yet. Regardless, I think the topic of public art is an interesting discussion.

    In a lot of cities around the world, there are mechanisms in place to encourage or mandate public art. Commonly, it comes in the form of a “Percent for Art” program, which means that, in the case of a new construction project, 1% of the construction costs would or should go to public art.

    But the fact that we, at least in some cities, have programs to mandate it, should immediately signal to you that public art is not something universally believed in. And certainly it’s one of those things where it’s hard to measure the return-on-investment. 

    But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t or can’t exist.

    In fact, I would argue that in today’s information and digital age it’s only going to become more important. We are living in a world of too much information and too little time. We’re living in a noisy world and, whether you’re a corporation or a city, the only way to stand out is to be remarkable. You need to bring delight to people.

    Because when you do, you get noticed (and probably shared on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Snapchat, Vine, 500px, Flickr and maybe even Google+). As one example, how many of you recognize the public art piece below? It’s in Vancouver and I’ve seen it pop up a number of times in my social news feeds. It’s something that brings delight to people. 

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    But at the same time, it’s something that speaks to and creates a sense of place. What could be more Vancouver than a giant blue raindrop along the waterfront? And that’s really one of the ironies of today’s digital world. Despite the fact that, no matter where we are, we’re all hyper connected through technology, more and more of us are gravitating back towards cities. We want to live close to other people and we want to feel a sense of place.

    When done properly, public art can help cities achieve that. Whether it’s the famous LOVE sculpture or Richard Serra’s controversial Tilted Arc, public art can make you stop and take notice of your environment. It can give you that sense of familiarity or it can take you by surprise. Either way, it gives you a sense of place.

  • Who’s paying for transit expansion in Toronto?

    Recently blogTO did a piece outlining the sources of funding for Toronto’s six active transit projects: the Spadina subway extension, the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, the Georgetown South GO line improvements, the Union Pearson Express, the Sheppard East LRT and the Finch West LRT. It broke down as follows:

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    You can find all the specific numbers here, but what is obvious is that the province is paying for most of this city’s transit expansion. Unfortunately though, it’s being done on an ad hoc basis. Toronto first asks for money and then the province decides whether or not it wants to give it.

    This is problematic for a few reasons.

    First, it’s an inconsistent funding stream. We all recognize the need for better transit and infrastructure in the city, but the big question is always: Who’s going to pay for it? So far, as we can see, it’s been the province. But that’s not always a sure thing. And it can often become political. If we’re going to get serious about building transit, Toronto needs a consistent funding source that would allow us to start building and not stop.

    Second, how come, as one of the major economic engines in this country, we aren’t in a position to pay for our own infrastructure? It’s because our governance structure does not properly reflect the economic realities of today’s world: 

    Most local governments are formed by a charter or act granted by the province or territory. Local governments are not mentioned in the Canadian Constitution other than to say they are responsibility of the provinces. Consequently, municipalities can be created, amalgamated, or disbanded at the whim of the provincial government which controls them. They are also limited in the amount of interaction they have with the federal government because this would infringe upon an area of provincial jurisdiction. Since each province is responsible for creating local governments in its own territory, the names, functions, and powers of local bodies vary widely across the country. Local governments generally have limited powers, namely creating local by-laws and taxation (property tax).

    And yet cities, not provinces, are our biggest economic drivers. We have it backwards. And so I think it’s critical that we look long and hard at ways in which we can better equip our cities with the tools and resources to compete globally. Transit funding is just one example.

  • How inclusive are your public spaces?

    I subscribe to a blog called Cities for People. It’s the blog of Gehl Architects out of Copenhagen and their focus–both the blog and the firm—is on how the built environment affects people’s quality of life. They call themselves Urban Quality Consultants.

    This morning, they wrote a post on gender mainstreaming in public spaces, which, I’m told, is top of mind in cities such as Copenhagen and Vienna.

    The key insight was that, for a variety of reasons, men and boys seemed to be engaging with public spaces more than women and girls. For example, they found that boys were generally more assertive than girls and so, if there was a toss up between who was going to use a space, the boys would usually win out. As a result, there’s been a lot of debate around creating more inclusive public spaces, both from a design standpoint and a policy standpoint.

    Interestingly enough, this is a debate that doesn’t seem to be happening here in Toronto. And I wonder if it’s because we don’t have the same problems (or I’m just oblivious) or if it’s because we don’t care enough about public spaces to do gender mapping exercises.

  • Every street can’t be everything to everyone

    Yesterday I spoke about why Toronto shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss streetcars and light rail. Today, I’d like to talk about some of the hard decisions we need to face if we really want to get our city moving.

    Toronto is a city of neighborhoods and small main streets–at least in the areas where our streetcars live. Streets such as King and Queen are only 4 lanes. And the problem we’re facing is that we’re trying to accommodate every single use case on them: cars, on-street parking, cyclists and streetcars. But in doing so, we’ve made the experience terrible for everybody. Streetcars move at a snail’s pace, drivers are frustrated by the lumbering streetcars, cyclists fear for their life driving by parked cars (doors can swing open at any time), and so on.

    And with the rise of downtown shoulder neighborhoods such as Liberty Village, King West, the Distillery District and the soon to be complete West Don Lands, the strain on our east-west corridors is only going to get worse–much worse, in fact. Already the King streetcar is the busiest streetcar route in the city, moving almost 60,000 people per day. That’s more than the (under utilized) Sheppard subway line.

    What I hope is clear to the ATC community though, is that the answer isn’t uniformly the car. We can’t have every single resident from Parkdale to Leslieville hopping into their car and driving downtown to their office at Yonge & King. It ain’t going to work. And so we’re going to need to make some difficult decisions about how we’re going to get our city moving on the backbone of transit.

    Sure the downtown relief subway line (screw the politics I’m attaching it to downtown) would be the ideal solution to connecting our emerging shoulder neighborhoods, but that’s not going to happen overnight. And so how do we improve the efficiency of what we already have? First, we need to accept the fact that every street isn’t going to be everything to everyone at all times. We need to choose who we want to optimize for.

    So here’s an idea that’s been floated many times before but never acted upon: let’s get rid of cars on King St and Queen St in the core during rush hour.

    This would give our streetcars the room to efficiently move people across downtown, minimizing the dreaded “bunching up” that occurs as a result of traffic congestion. It would make transit a reliable choice and there are ways to pilot it. But let’s be clear: this is not about being anti-car. It’s about optimizing uses and getting people moving. Cars would continue to get priority on Richmond St and Adelaide St, and transit riders (as well cyclists) would get priority on King and Queen.

    Of course, the Rob Ford viewpoint would say that we should be optimizing all streets for cars and getting the streetcars completely out of the way. But if that’s the approach we want to take, then we’re building the wrong kind of city. We shouldn’t be focused on intensifying and creating new inner city neighborhoods, because that only tips the scale in favor of transit. Instead, we should be focused on decentralization.

    But that’s what not we’re doing. We’re intensifying our city to the point that we’re now faced with a number of difficult–yet enviable–decisions about how we’re going to live and how we’re going to move around in the future. We’re a city in transition.

    Our mission here should be to figure out how to move people around the city as efficiently possible. Let’s put politics aside and recognize that time is one of our most precious resources. And when we put people in lumbering streetcars and debilitating traffic jams, we’re completely squandering that resource. It hurts productivity and it hurts our overall prosperity as a global city.

    There’s a place for subways, streetcars, buses, bikes and cars in our city. So let’s just get on with making them all work.