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.

Subscribe

  • Is outer city the new inner city?

    What does the term “inner city” mean to you?

    It’s a loaded term. But probably more so for North Americans than Europeans. For a long time, calling a neighbourhood inner city, was simply a nice way of saying poor. They were the neighbourhoods that people of means left behind when they fled to the suburbs with their cars.

    But in today’s world it’s a stale term. So I think it’s about time that we officially retire it from our lexicon. All across North America inner city neighbourhoods – with their historic housing stocks and walkable main streets – have become some of the most desirable places to live. 

    Author Alan Ehrenhalt calls this The Great Inversion (title of his book):

    “What we are seeing is a reversal in which the words “inner city,” which a generation ago connoted poverty and slums, [are going to mean] the home of wealthier people and people who have a choice about where they live, and the suburbs are going to be the home of immigrants and poorer people. And Census figures show that that’s taking place.”

    For many of us this, this isn’t news. The trends are clear. Young Americans are driving less and there’s been a growing preference for more compact and walkable communities.

    But does this mean that outer city will become the new inner city?

  • A map of every building in the Netherlands according to age

    There are apparently 9,866,539 buildings in all of the Netherlands. And Waag.org has just plotted them all on a map and colour coded them based on the year of their construction (via Information Aesthetics).

    Here’s what Amsterdam looks like:

    As to be expected, you can see how the city grew out from its historic core. What would it make the map even better though, is if you could turn off “layers” and see each time period in isolation.

    If you’re interested in this sort of thing, here’s a similar map of Portland.

  • How I walked today

    A couple of months ago I picked up a FitBit Flex. For those of you unfamiliar with the wrist device, it’s similar to the Nike FuelBand.

    I bought one for really two reasons.

    The first is that I think it’s pretty clear at this point – with Google Glass and rumours of an Apple iWatch – that wearable computing will eventually be a massive market opportunity. Who knows, it could do to mobile what mobile did to PCs.

    The second reason is that I love data. I love measuring and tracking things. And it’s probably the main reason I use apps like Foursquare fairly regularly.

    To this end, here’s how I walked today:

    It’s pretty typical for a day of commuting: To the office in the morning; out and about at lunch; and then back at the end of the day.

    In terms of the value I get out of this, it’s more for novelty than anything else at this point. The FitBit app has a lot of features to track caloric intake and other things, but I only use it to track things it can do passively.

    That said, I like being able to quickly see how close I am to my daily step goal of 15,000. On most days I don’t hit it.

  • Labour Day thoughts…

    Today is Labour Day (or Labor Day for my American friends).

    Many of us simply think of it as the official end of summer, but it’s also the day we’re supposed to celebrate the labour union movement and the achievements of workers. Given this, and the fact that yesterday’s post was about Detroit, it seems like an appropriate time to talk about jobs.

    In many ways, the woes of Detroit are simply an extreme example of what’s happening in many advanced economies. The loss of manufacturing based jobs is creating a void that is not being filled – or is being filled differently – by new industries.

    The first piece to this is what I mentioned yesterday: education.

    Manufacturing jobs allowed unskilled workers to make good middle class salaries. But other than a few remaining instances – such as in Fort McMurray, where high school graduates can make six figures working in the Canadian oil sands and the average price of a home is pushing $800,000 – I think it’s pretty clear that the opportunities for unskilled workers is on the decline.

    Therefore (and this is old news), we clearly need to figure out ways to retrain existing workers and ensure that the next generation is equipped with the skills and knowledge to compete in this new world. The problem though – and this is the second piece – is that I’m not sure the new economy will require the same raw number of people.

    What I mean by this is that scaling up production of an automative plant is quite different than scaling up an internet platform like Twitter or Tumblr. You just don’t need as many people, which is why the returns to being smart have grown massively for those few. And this is part of the reason we’re seeing rising income inequality across the board.

    Now, I don’t know what the answer is, but I think we’ve already shown that the transition to a new economy isn’t going to be a smooth one. To that end, I’ll leave you with one last thought which came from a former professor of mine at Rotman, Walid Hejazi.

    His argument is that it’s actually unethical for governments to subsidize unproductive sectors of the economy, such as a manufacturing, in order to sustain jobs. The reason being that you then have high school students telling themselves that they don’t need to go to University because they can simply go work at the local plant and make decent money. But what they don’t realize is that there’s a very real expiry date to those opportunities and, when it comes, it’ll be much harder for them to be retrained.

    What are your thoughts?

    Here’s what venture capitalist Fred Wilson had to say today.

  • Why I’m planning a trip to Detroit

    I’m planning a trip to Detroit this month.

    Some of you might be wondering why on earth I would do that, but I’m actually super excited. Why? Because I’m fascinated by the city. Detroit is such a dramatic example of how the fortunes of a city can change. I think some people forget what places like New York City and South Beach were like in the 1980s.

    But more importantly, I’m interested in the future of Detroit and the opportunities that might lie ahead. In many ways, the city feels like a clean slate. It’s a city that’s trying to completely rebuild and reinvent itself. And there’s a lot of smart (and rich) people, like billionaire Dan Gilbert, putting their weight behind its renewal. Through his company Bedrock, he has quickly become one the largest private landlords in the city. I also have a good friend who’s working in Detroit on strategies for the Midtown area. He’ll be my “tour guide” during the trip.

    It’s easy to get wrapped up in media headlines and so I want to see what’s happening first hand on the ground. Detroit has a long history of entrepreneurialism and so the eternal optimist in me wants to believe that it can come back.

    One of its big challenges, however, is education. As Harvard economist Ed Glaeser put it in his book, the Triumph of the City, one of the greatest things about the Detroit of yesterday was its ability to create a lot of high paying jobs for people with little education. Now the city has to deal with that legacy and few jobs.

    I’ll have more to say after my trip but, in the interim, what are your thoughts on Detroit? Can it come back? Will it ever be the economic powerhouse that it once was?

  • I’d raise kids in an apartment

    One of the North American truisms that I often like to challenge is the belief that kids should be raised in a house.

    I’m interested in this topic, not because I’m planning for a kid, but because Toronto has gone through such a dramatic transformation over the past 15+ years to become a city where more and more people are living in multi-family dwellings (condos, apartments, and so on).

    However, there’s still the belief amongst many circles that condo living is merely a stepping stone on the way to a house. Since Millenials have effectively added a new life phase between University and marriage, condos have become the home of choice for many twenty and thirty somethings. But how long will they stick around? I see a lot of people in my network getting married and subsequently moving from a condo to a house.

    Why is this?

    Is it because of schools? Is it a cultural belief that families require a house and a backyard? As someone who grew up in the suburbs, I can tell you that I never played in the backyard. I played on the street with other kids. I used a shared public space rather than a private one.

    On a practical level, I think the condo-to-house tradition has a lot to do with the fact that condos are just more expensive on a per square foot basis than wood-framed houses. For the same price that you might pay for a small 2 bedroom condo in Toronto, you could still conceivably buy a 3 bedroom house in some inner city neighbourhood.

    But the supply of single family homes in the city is limited. We’re not adding anymore. So as the price of these homes continues to increase – at what is now a faster rate than high rise housing – we may eventually reach a point where there’s no longer a cost savings associated with low-rise housing. In fact, they’d just be a luxury for the well-heeled.

    In this scenario, I think we’d naturally see an increase in larger condo units – something the city has been trying to artificially encourage. And out of necessity, we’d see more and more families in condos. However, it’ll take a change in mindset. Are you ready for it? I’d like to think that I am.

  • Do cities talk back?

    I stumbled upon an interesting TED talk this morning by Columbia University professor and city theorist Saskia Sassen. And while she herself admits in the talk that she doesn’t have all the answers to the questions and ideas she’s proposing, she does raise a few intriguing concepts that I would like to share with you all.

    The first is the idea that cities talk back.

    I like this idea because I’ve long thought of cities as a kind of living breathing organism. The example she uses is that of a car – specifically an Audi. She talks about all the great engineering that goes into a car like this, but then how it all gets muted once it enters a busy city centre. The city is “talking back” and telling the car how it’s now going to behave.

    In her view, this idea of listening to what a city has to say is the first step towards what she’s calling “open source urbanism.” This is the idea that city dwellers can not only respond to and engage with cities, but also help make/shape them – just like how open source software works. This is a profoundly interesting concept that flips top-down city planning on its head. 

    Again, how exactly this might work is still to be determined, but I can already think of a few early examples; one of which is a DC-based startup called Popularise. Essentially it works by allowing local residents to weigh in on what they’d like to see built/developed in their community. It’s a way of decentralizing development input.

    And that’s really how I see the internet in general – as this massive decentralizing force. So the idea of an open source urbanism may not actually be that far off.

  • The suburbs aren’t dead; they’re just growing up

    At this point, it’s well established that more and more people are favouring downtown urban centres over suburbs. Eric Jaffe from Atlantic Cities, put it this way:

    “Population growth is on the rise in city centers (though total population still favors suburbs), Millennials seem less keen to drive than their parents were, urban home values are increasing faster than suburban ones. The list can and does go on.”

    As one Toronto columnist put it, generation Y is now keen to live in apartments the size of their childhood suburban bedrooms so that they can be closer to amenities.

    So what does this mean for the suburbs?

    Some believe that this means the suburbs are dead, or dying. But Leigh Gallagher, in her new book “The End of the Suburbs”, argues that it’s not the end of the suburbs. It’s simply the end of the suburbs, as we know them.

    That is, the suburbs, which functioned arguably quite while for a period of time, have now become a victim of their own success. They’ve become too big, to the point where they now isolate people away from their social networks and places of employment.

    Gallagher believes that the future will be “urban burbs.” Burbs that are more dense, walkable and transit friendly. And I would agree. But I would add that I don’t think all suburbs will make this transition successfully. Like with anything, there will be some that pull it off and some that fail.

    The car had a devastating impact on our cities and it’s not going to be easy to reverse what has been done. But we’ll need to figure it out.

  • Cost of a car

    Every time I bring my car in for service, I’m reminded of how expensive it is to maintain one. Between car payments, insurance, gas, parking in the city and service, owning a car eats into a lot of disposable income.

    So for cities where the residents don’t need a car to get around, there’s potentially a lot of additional income that can get placed in other sectors of the economy.

    Richard Florida, and others, have argued that we’ve historically been overspending on housing and transportation, and that it restricts capital from flowing into other, more productive, areas of the economy.

    I’d be curious to see a study that compares transportation spending versus other local economic measures. How would a driving city compare to a public transit or biking city?

  • Teaser: 505W19 | Dirt.

    The revitalization of New York’s High Line has served as a dramatic catalyst for the surrounding areas. Once a blight, developers are now building projects that abut and straddle the High Line in every which way, leveraging its desirability as a public amenity. The result is some pretty interesting urban conditions.

    Teaser: 505W19 | Dirt.