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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Tag: athiscity

  • When the crowd builds a city

    I’ve been following and checking out Kickstarter pretty much since the beginning. But it wasn’t until last night that I backed my first project. 

    After doing that, I immediately started thinking about urban projects that might be able to also get crowdfunded using Kickstarter. How could it be used for city building? A Kickstarter project, after all, just has to be something with a defined scope and a clear end goal.

    Not surprisingly, this has already been happening for many years now.

    A great example is +Pool in New York, which is an initiative to build a publicly accessible floating pool that also filters river water. The project launched in June 2011 and by July 2011 they had raised $41,648 USD to build and test different filtration techniques.

    image

    Today, the project is still moving ahead and they are now offering up the opportunity to buy and have your name engraved on tiles within the pool. If I lived in New York, I would be all over this.

    But what’s powerful here is the ability for crowd-based platforms (like Kickstarter) to both get radical new ideas off the ground and to empower local communities to affect change. Here’s a quote from PSFK:

    It’s very difficult to get funding for these ‘out there’ ideas that regular systems might not support. Creators have to take risks and be imaginative, as well as put their ideas out there and let the public decide. There are no traditional guidelines on crowd-sourced platforms—they’re much more meritocratic. You can think in big scope and that changes what gets made and who can access it. Anybody with a couple of doubles can voice what they want to be built, and in that way we see the entire community having a huge say in the design world.

    And when I see projects and platforms like this, I can’t help but wonder if (when) city building is going to become even more decentralized. 

    Last night I was also at an event – being put on by Ryerson University’s City Building Institute – called Bridging Divides: What Can Cities Do? And one of the suggestions that came up was that Toronto needs more local and granular community councils (there are currently 4) in order to bridge some of the divides that are happening in our city.

    But in a world where it’s possible for each and every person in a city to not only have a say but to quickly say it from their smartphones, why can’t we go even more local? Instead of 4, 10, or 90 community councils, why can’t we have everyone more engaged?

    I think we’re headed in that direction.

  • “Regulation for thee but not for me”

    Urbanist Aaron Renn recently published an interesting article in City Journal called “Libertarians of Convenience”. It talks about how today’s urban progressives are selectively favoring deregulation for the things that only matter to them – everything from urban housing to food trucks.

    Here’s a snippet:

    But it’s hard to avoid thinking, too, that some of the inconsistency reflects elite biases. The things that liberal-minded city residents like and want to do—eat from hip food trucks, smoke dope, and other “bourgeois bohemian” pursuits—should be left as free as possible, consequences be damned (raw-milk advocates downplay the nearly 1,000 cases of illnesses caused by it from 2007 through 2012). Those that they consider déclassé—Big Gulps, Marlboro Lights, McDonalds—should be restricted or even shut down. It’s regulation for thee but not for me.

    I like his angle, because we’re probably all – at least a little – guilty of subjectively wanting more of the things we like and less of the things we don’t like.

    What do you think of his argument?

  • The infrastructure sandwich

    Today I came across the following tweet by Brad Tabke. (Brad is the mayor of Shakopee, Minnesota.)

    //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    On the left of the image is downtown Memphis. On the right is the Mississippi River. And in the middle is, well, a bunch of elevated highways. 

    It’s a powerful image regardless of where you happen to be from. But if you’re from Toronto, you might know why I’m posting it today.

  • Red stripes, iceberg homes, and laneway houses

    This morning I was reading a CityLab article talking about a homeowner in London’s wealthy Kensington neighborhood who painted her house in red stripes after the city and her neighbors derailed her renovation plans. I’m thinking it is supposed to be symbolic of government “red tape.”

    She had hoped to add a two-floor “mega-basement” to her home, which is curiously enough a thing in London due to how restrictive traditional home expansions can be. Locally they are called “iceberg homes.”

    What’s interesting about this phenomenon is that it shows you how far people will go to find and/or create the space they want in the neighborhoods they want to live in. Kensington is an incredibly wealthy area and so one has to assume that she is not without other housing options.

    As another example, here’s how the article describes her house:

    The candy-striped home in question, for example, is actually a mews house, a kind of outbuilding running along an alley behind a great house, originally intended as a place to tidy horses, carriages and maids away from the main residence.

    So not only did she want to create an “iceberg home”, but she wanted to do so in what was previously a back alley. In Toronto, this home would be called a laneway house.

    What this tells me is that as real estate values rise, people will naturally start to seek out overlooked spaces to repurpose. They will look for some way to carve out a home. And it’s for that reason that I think laneway housing is an inevitable outcome here in Toronto.

  • Name your laneway

    Photograph Urban Explorer by Andrew B. on 500px

    Urban Explorer by Andrew B. on 500px

    Laneway housing is becoming an incredibly popular topic here in Toronto. Lots of people seem to be interested in building, or least living in a compact ground-related laneway dwelling. 

    A big part of this, I think, has to do with affordability (or the perception of affordability). A lot of people want to live in a central urban neighborhood, but it has simply gotten both expensive and difficult to secure low-rise housing. Here’s an example of a young couple in Toronto who went door-to-door in their desperation to find a house.

    I believe that laneway housing has the potential to be a more affordable low-rise housing solution in this city, as well as in many other cities around the world who have a similar urban condition. But today, at least here, it’s not that way.

    Since the City of Toronto does not officially support laneway housing, it would be an uphill to get one approved and you need to be willing to put a significant amount of money at-risk in order to try. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the reality today.

    I’m certain that will change. But it will take a bit more pioneering. The Laneway Project, which I advise, is working to change the way Toronto thinks about its laneways and I know that there are many other small entrepreneurs working on doing the same.

    One of the first things that will need to happen is that we’re going to need to name our laneways. Some of them are already named, but many of them are not. And while this may not seem like a big deal, it is. For laneway housing to become a reality, they will need to have addresses and we will need to think of our laneways as legitimate streets.

    Recently The Laneway Project published a how-to guide called: How to Name Your Laneway. So if you’re interested in laneways and laneway housing here in Toronto, I would encourage you to give it a read and then try and get your local laneway named.

  • Dubai time-lapse video

    I’ve only been to Dubai once. I had a lot of fun, but it’s not my favorite city in the world. That’s largely because I tend not to be drawn to cities where you feel like you need to drive in order to properly experience it.

    But boy, this time-lapse video sure makes the city look cool. Click here if you can’t see the video below.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGtz_GOA79w?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

  • The unfinished city

    Photograph 1042 Queen St W by Kevin Steele on 500px

    1042 Queen St W by Kevin Steele on 500px

    https://500px.com/embed.js

    Earlier this week I attended a talk at the University of Toronto called Data Innovation and City Governance. It was by Mark Kleinman who is from London, but is now a Visiting Scholar at the Munk School of Global Affairs.

    The topics covered would have been familiar to anyone who is a regular reader of this blog (the power of open data, the knowledge economy, etc…), so I’m not going to repeat it all here. But I did want to touch on one of his impressions of Toronto, which is that this is a city that is “never finished.”

    What does that mean?

    The opposite of a city that is never finished would be a city like Paris that feels a bit like a monument that is now done and shouldn’t be touched anymore. It’s a city that almost feels too precious to intervene in. This is obviously not the case for all of Paris, but I think you get the point.

    Toronto, on the other hand, is a city that is constantly building, changing, and renewing itself. There are often layers upon layers of new interventions being applied, which gives you the impression that the city will never be done. It’s constantly in flux.

    Some of you may not appreciate this kind of “messy” urbanism, but I think it gives cities a kind of entrepreneurial resiliency (resiliency is a hot topic right now in urbanist circles). Cities are an ecological system. And the most resilient ecological systems in the world are the ones that are able to adapt to constant change.

    So in my view I look at this as a feature, not a bug. The only constant is change.

  • Learning to build real estate financial models

    One of the things I did when I was in graduate school studying real estate and early on in my career was take a bunch of ARGUS and Excel modeling classes. Some of them I took through the University of Pennsylvania. Some of them I took through work. And some of them I just took on my own.

    Regardless, I always found them incredibly helpful. Because at the end of the day, you’re not just learning the software; you’re also learning the real estate business. You can’t build a financial model if you don’t understand the business. And I mean really understand it.

    So if you’re looking to get into real estate development or you just want to brush up on your skills, I would encourage you to consider taking a financial modeling course. I plan to do a refresher later this year.

    The last one I completed was through a company called REFM (Real Estate Financial Modeling). The founder is a Penn (Wharton) alum – so it must be good, right? 😉 There are a lot of self-study options if you just want to take them online from home and all of them include prebuilt Excel models that you can then use (and customize) going forward.

    Click here to check out REFM.

  • Value creation, transparency, and authenticity

    Photograph Ideas by Janet Kwan on 500px

    Ideas by Janet Kwan on 500px

    https://500px.com/embed.js

    I started writing this blog a year and 10 months ago. 

    At that time, I had no real title for it (it was just called “Cities”) and I had no idea where it was going to take me. All I knew was that I enjoyed the discipline of writing every day and that I wanted to talk about cities and city building. It was a way for me to neatly organize all of my passions – which span everything from architecture and real estate to technology and transportation.

    Since that time, this blog got a name (Architect This City). It was named by the Guardian (UK) as one of the best city blogs in the world. I’ve met an incredible array of different people (send me an email if you like coffee and are doing cool things). I get invited to comment on city building issues on a regular basis. And an incredible community of almost 10,000 daily readers has emerged (you can email subscribe here).

    A big thank you to everyone who reads and contributes to ATC.

    But over the course of writing this blog, something else unexpected happen. I started getting referred to as a “brander, marketer, and content creator.” Now, I’ll admit that I’ve become increasingly interested in these fields over the years, but it was certainly not something I thought of or could have predicted at the outset.

    What really happened though is that I simply started riding a wave that arguably took hold sometime around the mid-2000s and then focused my attention on an industry that has historically been slow to change (real estate). And that wave is the shift towards inbound marketing (as opposed to outbound or interruption marketing).

    If you’re a marketer, this is old news. You already know this. But I think there’s still lots of room for this to take hold in the real estate industry. So let’s talk about it a bit.

    To give you an example from outside real estate, take a look at Five O’ Clock magazine by Harry’s. Harry’s is a shaving company out of New York that offers moderately priced well-designed shaving supplies for men. It’s simple model that works very well.

    Their positioning has been around the idea of “Own Your AM”, which makes sense given that they are a shaving company. And so what they often do in their Five O’ Clock magazine is profile the mornings of interesting people, such as professional skier Jimmy Chin (who happens to live in one of the best places on earth).

    But if you do a search for the word “shave” in that Chin article, you won’t find it. Because it’s not about just creating content so that you can plug your business at every opportunity; it’s about creating value for your customers and building a relationship.

    And that’s really fundamental to the change I’m talking about. 

    Today, the marginal cost of reaching your customers has dropped to almost zero (even if you’re reaching out to them on a one-on-one basis over, say, social media). And so the opportunity exists for companies, brands, and individuals to do things that simply weren’t feasible before.

    Because of this, it is now possible for everyone to easily establish their own personal brand. I think we’re going to see more, not less, of that. And it has changed how we message and communicate – whether it be via blogs, social media, or online magazines.

    In my view it comes down to 3 considerations: value creation, transparency, and authenticity. If you can create value for your target audience and be transparent and authentic, you’re going to naturally draw people in. I try and do all of that on this blog and hopefully it comes through.

  • Driverless cars, urban mobility, and Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway

    image

    About a week ago I wrote a post questioning what driverless cars will mean for cities. I ended by saying that that it feels as if we’re going to see increasing tension between private and public transport.

    What I meant by that was simply that conventional notions around private car use are going to change. And ultimately that is going to mean that we need to rethink public transport and how that fits into a broader urban mobility framework.

    What do I mean by this?

    The International Transport Forum at the OECD recently published a fascinating report called, Urban Mobility System Upgrade: How shared self-driving cars could change city traffic. And it deals with exactly the sorts of things I am thinking about.

    The study looked of what might happen when all cars become self-driving in a mid-sized European city (specifically Lisbon, Portugal). They leveraged existing transportation data from the city, but replaced 100% of the human powered cars with two types of self-driving cars: TaxiBots and AutoVots.

    TaxiBots were driverless cars that would be shared with multiple people at the same time. In other words, they were a kind of pseudo-public transit. And AutoVots we’re your more conventional private taxi. They picked up one person at a time.

    So, what did they find?

    In the first scenario, they combined their TaxiBots and AutoVots with public transit (light rail) and discovered that the same number of people could be moved around with only 10% of the cars currently on the road. That’s a 90% reduction!

    They also found that the city needed 20% less on-street parking and 80% less off-street parking since driverless cars don’t need to sit idle waiting for a driver.

    In the second scenario, they removed mass transit from the equation. And in this instance they found that the city was still able to get around, but with an 80% reduction in the number of cars on the road. Remarkably, it also led to a 10% reduction in rush hour commute times.

    These are pretty profound changes. Reducing the number of cars on the road by 80-90% is a significant change. 

    But it’s also why I’ve been thinking about the tension between private and public transport. As we get better at optimizing “cars” (their definition will change), what becomes the role of true public transit?

    Ultimately, I think what will happen is a blurring of the two. In the example above, the TaxiBots served basically as small scale public transit. But that does not necessarily mean that true mass transit will become irrelevant. We’re just going to need to rethink how the entire mobility network fits together.

    I’d now like to bring this discussion back to Toronto for a minute.

    As many of you probably know from this blog, Toronto is on the cusp of deciding what to do with the eastern portion of the Gardiner Expressway (an elevated highway that runs across the downtown waterfront). It will go to City Council next month. 

    I firmly believe that we should remove it, but there many people who believe we shouldn’t. The main objection seems to be that the traffic projections indicate that removing it could make commuting into downtown – by car – 3 to 5 minutes longer by 2031. 

    By today’s standards, I believe this concern represents an outdated way of thinking about cities and urban mobility. Adding more lanes is like loosening your belt to deal with obesity. However, it gets even worse when you think about urban mobility in the context of this post.

    Given the profound transportation changes that are currently underway, I think there’s a strong likelihood that the Gardiner projections we have today will be completely wrong by 2031. I don’t know know for sure, but I’m guessing the models don’t account for the efficiencies being created by driverless cars and peer-to-peer networks.

    In other words, I am suggesting that those 3 to 5 minutes could prove to be a red herring. The relevant question should be: Which decision will allow Toronto to build the absolute best waterfront in the world? And in my opinion that leads to removing the Gardiner East.

    If you feel similarly, I would encourage you to write your local City Councillor.