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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  • Things that are quintessential

    One of the things I think is important for cities to have are things that are quintessential. I’m talking about a quintessential behaviour, a quintessential experience, a quintessential accent, a quintessential architectural style, or whatever. I’m talking about the things that make people say: “Oh, that’s so New York.”

    What I’m essentially talking about is brand equity for cities. For better or for worse, when somebody associates something with a particular city, you could argue that that city effectively owns a trademark. (Definition of trademark: “…a recognizable sign, design or expression which identifies products or services of a particular source from those of others.”) In this case, the source is a simply a city.

    Sometimes these trademarks are an informal understanding amongst people in the know, but in other cases they can become quite legitimate. Take for example Chicago’s distinct architectural style known simply–at least within architectural circles–as the “Chicago School.” This is a style that Chicago clearly owns. And if another city were to adopt it, people might say: “Hey, that building reminds me of Chicago.”

    All of this is important because, just like companies, cities are increasingly in the position of having to compete for “customers” in a mobile and interconnected world. And if you ask some marketers, they’ll tell you (perhaps self-servingly) that brand is the most valuable asset a company has. But if you believe this to be at least somewhat true, then statements like, “Oh, that’s so (insert city name here)”, are actually pretty powerful.

    Is there anything about your city that you could say is unequivocally yours?

  • The best city blogs around the world

    This morning I’m super excited to announce that Architect This City has just been listed by the Guardian Cities UK as one of ’The best city blogs around the world.’

    There are some great and well known blogs on the list, including The Happy City by Charles Montgomery (Vancouver) and Humans of New York by Brandon Stanton–which went on to become a #1 NYT bestselling book. So it feels good for my fledgling ATC blog to be included.

    A big thanks to the editor of the Urban Times for encouraging the folks over at the Guardian to include it and thanks to everyone who reads ATC. Happy Monday.

  • Culture in our society and economy

    Last week I was reading the blog of James S. Russell, who used to be the architecture critic for Bloomberg News. He’s no longer the architecture critic, because Bloomberg got rid of his column:

    My column, along with almost all cultural coverage, was eliminated at Bloomberg late last year in favor of a yet-to-be completed revamping that focuses on luxury and lifestyle. 

    Obviously, the decision saddens me personally, but it’s also a regrettably powerful signal that culture doesn’t matter in our society and economy.

    As someone who spent a great deal of time studying art, architecture and design, his post really resonated with me. This is a depressing thought. It may be hard to measure the ROI of the arts, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a return.

    Ironically, Bloomberg–the former mayor of New York–understood this:

    As Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, the company’s founder, championed arts as valuable to the vibrancy of the city and as a powerful force for economic development. The city has seen unprecedented growth in arts facilities, thanks both to his administration’s efforts and his personal philanthropy. His post-mayoral activities are intended to nurture cities as fields of wealth creation by helping them become cauldrons of innovation, which he recognizes is entwined with vibrant cultural and lifestyle trends.

    That sounds about right.

  • Mies

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    If you’re into architecture, specifically epic modernism, then I would encourage you to pick up this new monograph on Mies van der Rohe–simply called Mies. It was written by the late Detlef Mertins, who was the Chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania from 2002 to 2007, but is originally from Toronto.

    Detlef was one of the most brilliant, but also nicest, people I’ve ever met and unquestionably the leading scholar on all things Mies. He passed away in the midst of working on this publication, but it was completed by his partner Keller Easterling–another powerful architecture mind–and a few other contributors.

    For those of you unfamiliar with the work of Mies, here’s a brief description from the book publisher:

    Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is one of the twentieth century’s most influential architects. His most well-known projects include the Barcelona Pavilion in Spain (1929); the Seagram Building in New York (1954-56); the Farnsworth House (1945-50), 860 and 880 Lakeshore Drive (1945-51) and the IIT Campus (1939-58), all in and around Chicago, and the New National Gallery in Berlin (1962-68). These are only a few of Mies’s pavilions, houses, skyscrapers and campuses, which all epitomized a radically new structural and spatial clarity. 

    For readers in Toronto, Mies’s biggest contribution is the Toronto Dominion Centre, which is a beautiful example of the International Style. The complex was designated under the Ontario Heritage Act in 2003. But in addition to it being great architecture, its construction in the late 60s really coincided with Toronto’s rise as a modern metropolis. Here’s a photo of the first tower from blogTO.

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    The TD Centre introduced not only a new architectural language into Toronto’s urban fabric, it also introduced a new and bolder way of how we thought of ourselves as a city. Remember this was a moment in time where Toronto was just about to overtake Montreal as the most populous city in Canada.

    We were reimagining our city with Mies.

  • Why food trucks won’t destroy Toronto’s restaurant scene

    Yesterday City Council voted 34 to 3 in favor of allowing more food trucks on the streets of Toronto (125 of them to be exact).

    Food trucks will be allowed to roam and park in pay-and-display spots on city streets as well as in private lots. However, the total number of trucks can’t exceed 125; they’re not allowed to park for more than 3 hours in one spot; and they can’t park within 50 metres of a restaurant.

    Most supporters of food trucks in this city are calling it a baby step forward. A lot of the reforms that they had been advocating for were not achieved with this vote. Frankly, I find it surprising how long this discussion has been going on for and how we’re still at the point of baby steps.

    But perhaps even more surprising, is the fact that I agree with Rob Ford on this issue:

    Mayor Rob Ford advocated for less regulation, arguing that people who make a date to go to a restaurant don’t change their mind and buy a hot dog when they pass a cart. “I think putting all this red tape around people, that’s not very friendly,” he said. “This is free enterprise. This is capitalism. Let them sell what they want and let the customer decide.”

    The concern from the other side is that food carts are going to threaten Toronto’s restaurant industry and turn our streets into the wild west of food service–hence the 50m rule. But I actually think the opposite could end up proving to be true. I think food trucks could end up empowering entrepreneurs.

    When I used to live in Philadelphia, which is a city with a thriving food truck scene (people publish food truck guides), I practically lived off the things. For breakfast I would go to this couple who barely spoke English and they would make me an egg and cheese sandwich for $2.50. And for lunch, I would go to the guy some people called the “nice little Mexican boy” for a burrito. It was somewhere around $5. And his food truck was so small that I had to duck while ordering food so I didn’t hit my head.

    At first I actually found it odd to be consuming egg sandwiches and burritos from trucks that would pack up and leave at the end of the day. I kept thinking I was going to get sick. But I warmed to the idea and learned to love them. As does everybody else.

    In fact, we loved our food trucks so much that when Renzo Piano–the Italian Pritzker Prize-winning architect–came to Penn to talk about how he had been retained to redesign the School of Design’s building, somebody stood up and asked: “How are you going to accommodate the food trucks in your design?” Renzo responded perfectly and said something along the lines of: “I’m Italian. Don’t worry, I will provide for the food.”

    But my point of all this is to say that instead of looking at food trucks as a threat to our restaurant industry, we should be looking at them as a way to empower more entrepreneurs to take the risk on starting something for themselves–many of which could end up being new Canadians. The “nice little Mexican boy” also barely spoke English and looked young enough to be in high school. But he was a business owner.

    Starting a restaurant is a risky proposition. You need to lease space, you need to buy equipment, and so on. And everybody knows the failure rate is high. But what if you could test that killer recipe of yours on a few hundred people at lunch in front of First Canadian Place? That sounds like a much easier proposition to me.

    So what I hope happens is that people in Toronto start to see food trucks, not as a threat to our restaurant scene, but as an opportunity to get more entrepreneurs into it and make our city even more vibrant. Because if we do that, I’m positive we’ll end up with an even better restaurant scene than what we have today in our great city.

  • What will selling your home look like in 5 years?

    Earlier today it was announced that Keith Rabois–a venture capitalist with Khosla Ventures and the former COO of Square–is working on a startup that hopes to make selling your home as easy as a few clicks. The codename for the project is Homerun.

    “For most people, homes are their biggest asset and it’s completely illiquid,” Rabois said. “This is a really expensive transaction for many people. What we’re going to provide is instant certainty, liquidity and convenience for normal people to sell their homes.”

    Rabois hasn’t shared many details, other than a pretty basic flow:

    “I’m not going to describe the exact flow, but the general point is you’ll tell us what your address is and confirm your identity, then we’ll allow you to sell your home,” he said. “Obviously there’s a variety of ways you could verify your identity that we didn’t have in 2003, when I originally thought of this idea. Like Facebook Connect.”

    This, of course, isn’t a new idea. Many companies have tried to improve the process of buying and selling homes by going online. But it’s a space that hasn’t seen a lot of innovation. I’m particularly interested because I work in real estate and it’s always struck me as a lumbering archaic industry.

    So when a name like Keith Rabois announces that they’re working on solving a problem in this space, I get excited about what might come about.

  • Can the creation of urban destinations transform or hinder a city’s development?

    I was recently asked by a Canadian architecture website called sixty7 Architecture Road to respond to the following: Can the creation of urban destinations transform or hinder a city’s development? It was for a regular Q+A series they do on their website. Here is my response (I was specifically asked about Dundas Square):

    The best line I’ve ever heard about public spaces and urban destinations was from Bruce Kuwabara of KPMB Architects. He said that the outside of buildings need to be thought of as the inside walls of the public realm. And I think that’s a really great way of framing this discussion. We often think of buildings inwardly and as self contained objects, but by virtue of their existence we’re creating and framing many other spaces.

    With that in mind, I absolutely believe that beautiful and well designed urban destinations–whether public or private–can transform a city and its development patterns. A perfect, but perhaps overused, example of this is the High Line in New York. Not only has it become a destination (“Have you been to the High Line yet?”), it has become an unbelievable city building catalyst. All of a sudden development is happening in, on and around the High Line, where as before developers would have tried to completely ignore it. And so today, the High Line, as an urban destination, is almost being continually reinvented by new development.

    To talk specifically about Toronto, I think that downtown needed a “public” space like Dundas Square. The design could have been less unidirectional (towards the Eaton Centre) and the building to the north is repulsive, but it provided a forum along Toronto’s main street in the heart of downtown. I also believe that good urban destinations give areas a sense of identity, which is why I’m somewhat bothered by the loss of the square at Yonge & Eglinton. Sure it was bad, but we could have made it better. It is the heart of midtown in my mind.

    So not only do urban destinations have the ability to transform, I would argue that they are essential to any great global city. Whether it’s the High Line in New York, the Spanish Steps in Rome, the old Love Park in Philadelphia, or Trafalgar Square in London, these spaces are integral to those city’s brands and identities. What do ours say about Toronto?

    For the full Q+A, click here.

  • Core counties > outlying counties

    Recent US Census Bureau data has once again confirmed that there’s a growing preference for living in urban cores. More specifically:

    It finds that population growth has been shifting to the core counties of the USA’s 381 metro areas, especially since the economic recovery began gaining steam in 2010. Basically, the USA’s urban core is getting denser, while far-flung suburbs watch their growth dwindle.

    To put numbers to these statements, core counties in the US grew approximately 2.7% and outlying counties grew approximately 1.9% from 2010-2013. Most of the growth came from net migration, as opposed to higher birth rates.

    The two big factors at play–which will be obvious to readers of this blog–appear to be both a desire to live in amenity rich and walkable communities and a continuing trend towards marrying and having kids later in life, which can often be the trigger for moving to the suburbs.

    But the big question is whether or not this trend is here to stay or if it’s an ephemeral fad caused by a bunch of over-educated and under-employed Millennials refusing to grow up. I would argue that it’s not a fad.

    If there’s a clear consumer preference for urban neighborhoods, then I don’t think people are just going to pick up and leave overnight. As long as there’s adequate housing within the means of growing families, I think they’re going to stay in or go to the areas in which they truly want to live.

    There are also many other macroeconomic trends reinforcing this shift. Just yesterday, Richard Florida wrote an article in Atlantic Cities talking about how venture capital investment is shifting away from the suburbs, towards city centers and walkable communities. These companies (receiving investment) are the next generation of employers and they’re starting in core areas.

    I’ll take that as a leading indicator.

  • What do venture capitalists have to do with cities?

    This morning I woke up to a tweet from somebody asking me why–despite my obvious love of cities and real estate–do I seem more influenced by venture capitalists on my blog. He wondered if it was because of a lack of public/online real estate thought leaders.

    I responded by saying yes; that’s part of the reason. I honestly can’t think of one real estate developer that hosts a personal and regular blog. (If you know of any, please pass them along.) Whereas I can’t think of a major VC who doesn’t blog.

    Sure there are other real estate professionals who blog, but a lot of those sites just feel like giant lead generation tools and those aren’t enjoyable to read. I’m trying not to create that kind of blog. The trust of readers is more important to me than trying to promote my businesses.

    But the other reason I often cite venture capitalists and “tech” centric topics is because I believe in cross pollinating industries. I don’t believe the world operates neatly under silos and neither should our minds and businesses. I’ve also argued many times before that with software eating the world, nobody should be ignoring technology.

    At the same time, the consumer web feels to me like this profound social force changing the way people live and interact with each, which, if you think about it, is what cities have always been about. And so I see all kinds of interesting overlaps.

    Of course, I also look to planners, designers and other urbanists for inspiration. But I don’t like to do so exclusively. Industries, like anything else, can quickly become insular–whether tech or urban planning. My interest–and the focus of this blog–is cities. And I will continue to incorporate ideas and viewpoints from any discipline that I think touches them.

  • What makes midrise development difficult?

    A reader recently suggested that I do a post explaining why we aren’t seeing more midrise buildings going up in Toronto. Specifically, why are midrise buildings considered to be “too risky” for developers and what could be done to improve the situation? So today I’d like to focus on that topic.

    But first, let me say that I think Toronto is already in the midst of its midrise development era. The push for intensification first brought about towers, but we’ve come to realize that the tower isn’t necessarily going to serve everybody’s needs.

    Here’s what John Bentley Mays recently wrote in the Globe and Mail regarding midrise developments:

    With Duke, SQ, Nest and similar structures, we may be seeing the start of a promising design trend in Toronto’s multifamily housing market.

    And given that our Chief Planner, Jennifer Keesmaat, has been a vocal supporter of midrise, I think there’s no question that we’ll only see more and more of this type of development. Nonetheless, there are challenges. Here are a few that come to mind.

    1. Fragmented sites

    Because midrise developments typically target established main streets with smaller lot sizes, developers often have to contend with fragmented ownership in order to assemble a site. So instead of talking to one owner (say the owner of a large parking lot downtown), a developer may have to contend with a dozen owners who all need to get on board for the development to happen.

    2. Scale is too small

    Developers have a lot of fixed costs that don’t materially change whether you’re putting up a 50 storey tower or an 8 storey midrise building. Some costs are certainly variable, but there are overall economies to scale to having more units in which to distribute costs over.

    3. Community opposition

    The whole point of midrise intensification is to increase the housing supply in established neighborhoods. But along with this comes greater risk for community opposition. You may have a neighbor who’s been living for 30 years adjacent to where you want to build. And when you come along and try and build a 10 storey midrise building, they can get grouchy.

    4. Strict guidelines 

    To try and counteract community opposition (and promote good urbanism), the city has developed a number of design guidelines for midrise buildings. And while they’re well intentioned, they can be onerous for developers and designers. For example, the requirement to terrace down towards adjacent residential neighborhoods produces a lot of inefficiencies (though it does create spectacular terraces). Oftentimes you’ll end up with more unit types than you would in a large tower.

    All this said, I’m a big believer in the midrise building typology. At TAS, I’m involved in two such projects–DUKE and Kingston&Co. Both are exciting projects and both, I think, are at the forefront of a new development era for Toronto. Vancouver pioneered the podium + point tower typology. Toronto is about to do the same with midrise buildings.