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.
Knight Frank just published the 2024 edition of its annual wealth report and, it turns out, that 2023 was a reasonably good year for rich people. Below are some of the charts that I found interesting as I flipped through the report.
The first is their Prime International Residential Index, which tracks the pricing of the most desirable and expensive properties in the following 100 locations. Generally, they define this as the top 5% of each market.
Moving on, this is how much square meterage that US$1 million will buy you in select city and second-home locations.
These are the cities that saw the greatest cross-border investment flows into commercial real estate.
This is their prime property price forecast for 2024.
This is what it looks like for prime rents.
And finally, this is how much net wealth you need in order to join “the 1% club” in select countries/territories.
To download a full copy of Knight Frank’s 2024 Wealth Report, click here.
Boy, population densities can be so misleading. The typical approach is to just take the number of people and divide it by a given area. This then gives you something like X number of “people per square kilometer.” The problem with this approach is that there are countless factors that can skew your result.
Hong Kong, for instance, is really dense. But as a city, it also has a lot of green space, mountains, and other undeveloped areas. Only about a quarter of Hong Kong’s land is developed. So when you divide total people by its administrative boundary area, it is going to appear less dense than it really is.
One alternative approach is to use a method known as population-weighted density. The way this works is that you take the average densities of smaller more granular subareas and then weight them by the population of each subarea. It is a little more complicated to calculate, but the overall intent is to try and capture a density figure that more accurately reflects what the average person experiences on the ground.
And this is exactly the method that Jonathan Nolan decided to use in his new website CityDensity.com. What his site allows you to do is compare population-weighted densities across various cities, and then see how it tapers off as you move outward from their city centers.
Once again, it is hard to beat Paris’ supremely dense mid-rise built form:
A few people sent me this excellent article by Noah Smith today. In it, he talks about the institutionalization of the real estate industry and some of the challenges with developing smaller-scaled projects. I mean, just look at how the industry has concentrated itself:
These figures are fascinating but they are not surprising. Most developers have a minimum project size and, over time, it tends to grow. Market factors dictate this. The irony is that smaller projects are often great for cities. Think about how often urbanists like to criticize large-format retail vs. fine-grained retail.
If it doesn’t already exist, someone should create a YouTube channel covering the smallest development projects from around the world. I would watch that.
Following yesterday’s post on small-scale apartments, a number of people commented on the 6m front yard setback that was shown on the city’s drawings and that I mentioned in my post. Well, it turns out that I wasn’t entirely correct about the 6m. What is proposed in the draft zoning by-law is the following:
The modelling has illustrated building setbacks that are appropriate for townhouse developments and small-scale apartment buildings on major streets in a Neighbourhoods context. Based on the review, Urban Design staff recommend that the front yard setback be implemented through use of the average of the existing neighbouring setbacks, or a minimum of 3 meters, whichever is greater. This approach maintains consistency with the existing character of the Neighbourhoods supports protection of existing mature trees.
As you might expect, the approach with these small-scale apartments is to be mindful of the existing low-rise context. But as many of you rightly pointed out when you saw the 6m, the existing context may not be appropriate or ideal for the planned context, especially if there’s retail at grade.
This is just one of the many details that we’ll need to be careful with as this initiative moves forward.
This week we speak about the problem of not enough density next to transit stations. More specifically, we spoke about Toronto’s low-rise residential neighborhoods, which are colored yellow in the city’s Official Plan. Well, as many of you know, the city is, in fact, working to “expand housing options” in these neighhorhoods through their EHON program. One component of the program covers laneway and garden suites, another covers multiplexes (up to fourplexes), and another hopes to allow 6-story apartment buildings on all major streets.
Here are the city’s major streets:
And here’s what these “small-scale apartments” might look like:
The setbacks are intended to be 6m in the front (to be consistent with existing neighborhood setbacks); 1.8m on the sides (so there’s rear access and so that these elevations only get fenestration for secondary rooms); and 7.5m in the back (which is consistent with the current mid-rise guidelines). Now, directionally, and without referring to any of the specific details, this is good. Toronto’s major streets are, in most cases, painfully underdeveloped; the existing built form feels generally entirely out of place. But the important question remains: Will developers actually build these at scale?
Bloor Street and Danforth Avenue, for example, already allow mid-rise buildings that, for the most part, are bigger than what is being proposed here as part of the EHON program. But again, they remain underdeveloped. And there’s a subway running underneath these streets! So why will it be any different on our other major streets? One key difference is that these small-scale apartments are expected to be fully as-of-right. Meaning, no rezoning process and no community meetings. This will save a lot of time and money.
Still, this is almost certainly going to require some iterative finessing to get it right. I think you’ll see developers looking to do little to no parking, no basements, no dedicated loading areas (certainly no type “G” spaces), slab-on-grade construction, and standardized and repeatable designs. And even then, this may not be enough. Rental replacement policies are yet another major barrier to consider. It’s going to have to be all about speed and efficiency, which is why it will likely also create a greater push to rethink some building code items, such as the requirement for two means of egress.
At the end of the day, I want something like this to happen. It would increase housing supply, and make Toronto far more vibrant and far more conducive to non-driving forms of mobility. It’s, no doubt, a really positive thing. But for this to become a reality, it needs to work at scale. Meaning, the development pro formas need to work at scale, and with sufficient margin that developers won’t just automatically look to other opportunities. If the development community can make money building this housing typology, they will look for every opportunity to build it. But if they can’t make money, they won’t. It’s as simple as that.
My colleague shared this project with me while we were researching water features for one of our projects. It is called the miroir d’eau (water mirror) and it’s located in Bordeaux, France.
Supposedly, it is the largest of its kind in the world, or at least that was the case when it was completed back in 2006.
As a design concept, it couldn’t be simpler. It consists of a 2cm deep layer of water that is meant to reflect its surroundings. In addition, there are small jets that periodically mist water, and so it also serves as an active splash pad in the summer months.
Sometimes, or maybe oftentimes, the best ideas are the simplest ones. And in this case, it feels like they really nailed it. The water mirror lets the surrounding architecture do the talking.
The above video is in French, but even if you don’t understand what they’re saying, it will give you some good visuals of the water mirror. It should also convince you that it has helped to create a highly successful public space.
Art and culture are powerful tools for city building. Pictured here is a laneway in downtown Detroit that is known as “The Belt.” It is called this because of its location in the city’s former garment district, but today, it has been redefined as a cultural alley. In it, and deep within unmarked basements, you’ll find venues like Deluxx Fluxx, which call themselves a nightclub art house. (You’re going to want to click through to their website and get a feel for the place.)
This alley isn’t brand new. It was conceptualized by the art gallery Library Street Collective a few years after it was founded in 2012. But I think it remains an excellent example of at least two things. One, Detroit is cool. It really has been going through a cultural renaissance. (You should also know that Detroit is the birthplace of techno.) And two, The Belt remains a perfect example of what is possible with our underutilized urban spaces.
Virtually every city has alleys exactly like this one. But too few are doing something as cool with them.
Reece Martin is a foremost public transit critic based in Toronto. His YouTube channel, RM Transit, has over 284k subscribers and some 50 millions views. If you’re interested in public transit around the world, he is a great person to follow.
He also writes a blog. And today, he published a post talking about the “5 places in Toronto that should have more density.” This, as we have talked about many times before, is essential. The way you get the most out of transit is to pair it with the right surrounding land uses. And here in Toronto, we have many instances of “not enough density next to transit.”
For instance, the first place on his list is Bloor-Dundas West:
The site already has streetcar serving on two routes, the subway, GO, and UP Express (which will be connected with the subway in the next few years — construction is underway), and lots more transit could show up in the future, from an extension of one of the streetcar routes to the Junction (with a transferway please), to the Ontario Line that will be primed for a second phase in this direction if development justifies it, to the potential for future Milton line train service. The site is arguably already the second-best served for transit in the country after Union, and could be made much better in short order.
Hang on this last sentence for a second: the second-best transit node in the country. That’s an incredible asset! Now consider the area’s land use plan (red is mixed use and yellow is low-rise neighborhood in Toronto’s Official Plan):
Other than the mixed-use triangle wedged between Dundas West and the rail corridor, the area looks pretty similar to much of Bloor Street in this city: mixed-use along the major streets and low-rise neighborhoods everywhere else.
We know why this is the case; it is about maintaining the status quo. But it is a suboptimal way in which to try and create transit-oriented communities. We need more density, and we need to start thinking radially instead of linearly. So here’s what a 500m walking radius looks like around Bloor-Dundas West and its two closest subway station neighbors:
The important thing to pay attention to in this diagram is all of the yellow that falls within each radius. This is land that ought to be zoned mixed-use, but that we have instead decided to make low-rise and single-use. If our objective is to create more walkable, sustainable, and vibrant transit-oriented communities, this is not the way.
This morning I toured 1151 Queen East (here in Toronto). It is a new 47-suite apartment building that is being developed by Hullmark and that was designed by Superkül (the same architects as Junction House). It’s not quite finished yet, but it is looking terrific. The interiors feel, to me, like Berlin meets classic Miami Beach (if you can picture whatever this means). So a big congrats to the entire team. I’m sure it will be well-loved once people start moving in this year.
At the same time, it’s hard not to see small and beautiful infill projects like this and wonder, “why do we make it so difficult to build this kind of new housing? This is a 6-storey rental building that, according to Urban Toronto, was first proposed in 2018. It then had to go through the typical rezoning process, which, in this case, seems to have taken two years. Now we’re in 2024. Uh, why?
We should be looking at this kind of infill housing and saying, “Yes! You should go ahead and build this right now. Let us help you with that.” Instead, we erect barriers, which only force developers toward ever larger projects. If you’re going to spend two years in rezoning, no matter the scale of the development, why not build 470 homes instead of 47? And this has only been exacerbated with higher interest rates, because now time costs you that much more.
I say all of this because this is an objectively great infill project. Our city would be a better place with a lot more of these.
It is fairly well documented that communicating to transit riders how long they need to wait for the next train helps them feel like they’re actually waiting less. The problem, it would seem, is the unknown.
This is akin to the pre-Uber days when you’d call for a taxi and then have no idea when it would actually show up. That used to feel like forever.
But what about if you communicate a schedule to riders and then it turns out to be a total lie? Well this is probably worse, because eventually, people will catch on to this. Also, you’ve just maximized the unknown.
Here is an interesting example of community activism. In 2021, Fabio Göttlicher — a software engineer in Chicago — started noticing that service levels on Chicago’s Transit Authority (CTA) seemed to be declining.
I wrote a program that runs 24 hours a day that keeps tracking the live trains as they come into stations.
And then he discovered this:
What I found, when I first started in December 2021, was that the CTA was running only about 55 to 60 percent of the trains their schedule said they should be running. I started publishing the data in local Facebook groups for transit enthusiasts, on Reddit and other social media. That’s how Commuters Take Action started.
It’s hard to think of a more frustrating scenario for transit riders.
