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: bay area

  • Wealthiest cities in the world

    According to this annual survey by Henley & Partners (first chart from Bloomberg), these are the top 10 wealthiest cities in the world when you count the number of high-net-worth individuals (i.e. people with investable wealth greater than US$1 million):

    However, if you instead count billionaires, the top city flips from New York City to the Bay Area (which includes San Francisco and all of Silicon Valley). This isn’t all that surprising.

    Also not surprising is the precipitous decline in the number of HNWIs residing in Hong Kong. From 2012 to 2022, the number declined by 27%. That said, a bunch of other cities fared even worse. The city that lost the most millionaires over this same decade was Moscow. It declined by 44%.

    For those of you wondering about Toronto, we placed 12th, just after Chicago, with 105,200 millionaires, 193 centi-millionaires, and 18 billionaires:

    The next city in Canada on the list is Vancouver, and following that is Montreal:

    It is interesting to see how much further behind Montreal places with these metrics given that it is an urban region with about 1.6x the population of that of Vancouver’s.

    Also interesting — given its size and global importance — is Paris (18th when it comes to HNWIs):

    However, when it comes to seasonal draw, Paris is second only to Miami, which appears to be the undisputed global destination for rich people in the winter. Paris has 126 centi-millionaire residents, but during its peak holiday month (presumably summer), this number is believed to increase to over 300:

    Finally, looking at Park City, Utah, it has 8 permanent centi-millionaires and this number is thought to increase to over 100 during the winter snowboarding season. And to be clear, this transient population figure only includes people who own a second home there. It does not include rich people paying US$3,700 per night to stay at Deer Valley. That’s pretty good for a small town of only 8,500 permanent residents.

    To check out the full list of 97 cities, click here.

  • California has a plan for 2 million new homes

    On July 1 of this year, a new California bill, called the “Affordable Housing and High Road Jobs Act of 2022”, will go into effect. And the goal of this legislation is to significantly increase the supply of new homes in the state by allowing multi-family construction on lands that are currently zoned for commercial uses.

    On some level, it is of course curious that there even needs to be this bill. Because what we are effectively saying is, “hey, we should allow people to build a mix of uses on our main streets and with high enough densities that we might actually be able to support transit.” Why was this not always the case? (Rhetorical question.)

    In the words of architect and planner Peter Calthorpe, who was recently interviewed here in ArchDaily, this is a “landmark piece of legislation” that has “received very little attention.” So that’s why we’re talking about it today.

    Calthorpe was actively involved in crafting this legislation, and his work apparently started with different scenario land-use models. The first experiment looked at a 43-mile stretch of El Camino running from San Francisco to San Jose (pictured below). And what they found was that this one strip alone could accommodate somewhere around 250,000 new infill homes.

    To put this into context, the state of California is currently building about 140,000 new homes each year, through a roughly equal (1:1) split of multi-family and low-rise single-family. Already this represents a shift, as supply used to be slanted (3:1) toward low-rise. (I don’t know when exactly this was the case, but Calthorpe mentions the figure in his interview.)

    Moving on from El Camino, Calthorpe and his team then ran a similar exercise for the five-county inner Bay area. And here they found that some 700 miles of commercial land could produce up to 1.3 million multi-family homes at “reasonable densities.” This was then expanded to the entire state of California and the number increased to 10 million new homes.

    Of course, as we have talked about before on this blog, not all of this land might actually be feasible for development. Sometimes the math doesn’t work even at a zero land cost; you might need a negative land cost in order to pencil a new development. Meaning, you might need to be paid, perhaps through some sort of subsidy.

    So what Calthorpe and the team did was use MapCraft to quickly run development feasibilities on the above sites. They had it run 6 different pro formas using local rents, construction costs, city fees, and so on. And what they determined was that this 10 million number drops down to 2 million when you apply the economic realities of the world.

    As a disclaimer, I’m not at all familiar with MapCraft. But I’m going to take this number at face value and say that this is still a lot of new homes. And this is what people are hoping for come July 1 of this year.

    Image: HDR / Peter Calthorpe

  • San Francisco is kind of on the verge of abolishing single-family zoning

    The headline sounds pretty promising: San Francisco is on the verge of abolishing single-family zoning, and will soon allow 4-plexes across the city and up to 6 units on corner lots. It is also clear recognition that, “hey, we have a housing problem and should probably figure out a way to increase overall supply.”

    Unfortunately, when you look at the policy details, you’ll see that this is likely to be more symbolic than effective. What is being proposed is to take the 40% of San Francisco’s land area that is zoned exclusively for single-family houses and upzone it to allow for duplexes on an as-of-right basis.

    And then, if you happen to have owned the property for at least 5 years — or inherited it from a family member that did — you can apply for a special “density exception” from the city. This would allow you to build 6 units on corner lots and 4 units on all remaining mid-block lots.

    But here’s the other thing: if you are granted this density exception, the additional units (beyond your as-of-right two) will be subject to rent control. So the important question here is about whether or not anyone will end up building more than luxury duplexes and, if they do, will there be enough scale to produce a meaningful impact.

    I’m not familiar with development cost structures in San Francisco and I’m not sure if there will be any incentives/subsidies for delivering these additional rent controlled units, but the above feels like far too many barriers if the goal is more housing.

    But it remains a step in the right direction. Symbolism certainly has its merits.

    For other posts on infill housing, click here.

    Photo by Braden Collum on Unsplash

  • San Francisco’s “Monster on Sixth Street” rejected by Board of Supervisors

    So, this seems dumb.

    San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors recently voted 8-3 in favor of rejecting a new 495-unit residential project at 469 Stevenson Street in SoMa. The property is currently a parking lot used by Nordstrom.

    Of the project’s 495 units, 73 were to be offered at affordable rents (about 14% of the project). In addition, the developer was prepared to donate a nearby parcel for additional off-site affordable housing. This would have brought the total count up to 118 units (or about 1/4 of the project).

    Apparently gentrification was a serious concern with this project:

    “It’s very clear to me that this will have a very significant displacement and social-economic impact on the Sixth Street corridor, on the Filipino community, and the broader low-income community here,” said District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton.

    The mayor seems to get it though:

    “This project met all the criteria for approval, and it would have created 500 new homes on what is currently a parking lot surrounded by tall buildings, located near transit,” Breed told the Chronicle. “We can’t keep rejecting new housing and then wondering why rents keep rising.”

  • Apartment rents in San Francisco have yet to fully recover

    On last week’s earnings call, apartment landlord Equity Residential mentioned that the two US markets most impacted by a delayed return to office appear to be San Francisco and Seattle. They went on to say that San Francisco is the only market in which they operate where rents have not fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels.

    According to Bloomberg (which is relying on employee swipe-card data), office utilization in the San Francisco area is sitting at around 25% as of October 20, 2021. This is compared to a national average of around 37%. The obvious rationale here is that large tech companies have delayed their return to office and/or been more aggressive in adopting remote/hybrid work.

    Looking at these numbers, it is clear that as someone who has been going into the office every day since the start of summer, I am currently in the minority.

  • Where Americans moved over the last year

    According some recent data from the US Census Bureau and USPS (via this CityLab article), the number of Americans who registered (between March 2020 and February 2021) that they were making a permanent move somewhere else, only increased by about 3%. And the vast majority of people that did move tended to simply spread out and move within the same metro area — about 84%. About 7.5% moved within the same state. And about 6% moved to some other top 50 metro area in the US.

    Some are of the opinion that these moves to the outskirts of cities would have happened regardless. The pandemic simply sped things up. Perhaps. But whatever the case may be, CityLab and others have argued that an “urban exodus” is likely the wrong way to describe what is happening. Despite reports that everybody seems to be moving to Texas and Florida (yes, Miami saw a spike), most people are simply spreading out in geographies where they already happened to live.

    The notable exceptions are the Bay Area and New York. San Francisco and San Jose — both of which usually register as being two of the most expensive housing markets in the US — saw permanent moves increase by 23% and 17%, respectively. Compared to other metro areas in the US, these figures stand out. (I assume this data is collected after somebody goes to the post office and says that they want to change their address forever.)

    But we are already seeing net outflows from San Jose and San Francisco start to taper off (see above). It’s also important to keep in mind that these cities were losing people well before the pandemic started. They are expensive places. And the fastest growing cities tend to be ones that sprawl, have a more elastic housing supply, and are consequently more affordable. That said, I suspect we’ll see this tapering off continue. The “urban exodus” isn’t going to be what it’s cracked up to be.

    Images: CityLab

  • Luxury housing surges in San Francisco

    The story of two markets continues. Median rents in San Francisco are down some 27% percent over the last year. Sales of homes priced under $300,000 are down by about a fifth. And yet, according to the Financial Times, sales are up significantly for homes priced above $2 million. For the top 5% of homes, prices ended the year up about 26.5%. Overall, the median home price in San Francisco was up 16.8% last year. It now sits at $718,000. As we’ve talked about before, much of this can be chalked up to the fact that the financial impacts of this current environment are being unequally felt. But I also see it as evidence that, despite all of the media headlines, many/most people aren’t actually betting against cities.

    Chart: FT

  • Where people are moving in the US

    Another day, another set of announcements about large companies and rich people moving to lower cost US states. Yesterday it was announced that Oracle will move its corporate headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas. (If you remember, Elon Musk also recently announced that he had moved himself to Austin from California.) The company has said that the move puts Oracle in the best position to grow and to give its employees greater flexibility about where and how they work.

    While these sorts of moves are making headlines right now, it’s important to keep in mind that this is not necessarily a new phenomenon. In fact, depending on how you look at it, you could argue that these headlines are a lagging indicator for trends that have been underway for some time. Below is a chart from New Geography showing the top 50 state-to-state moves last year. Number one is the move from California to Texas with 45,172 net movers. And number two is the move from New York to Florida with 38,512 net movers.

    According to New Geography, California saw a net domestic migration loss of 912,000 people from 2010 to 2019. And the most popular receiving states are what you would expect: Florida (1,230,000 people) and Texas (1,146,000 people). A big part of this story obviously has to do with housing affordability and the search for an overall lower cost of living. As well, since companies are always in need of young and smart talent, it makes since for them to locate in places where young and smart people want to live.

    But urbanists like Richard Florida have also pointed out at this relocation of companies could be a leading indicator for something else: the decline of innovation in America. Here, he argues that in the nascent stages of a new invention, there tends to be a tight clustering phenomenon. Think steel in Pittsburgh, cars in Detroit, and computing in Silicon Valley. However, as the industry matures, the tendency to centralize seems to decline and companies then start moving around.

    I’m not yet convinced that this is what’s happening. Because there seems to be a pile on happening in specific cities like Austin (which, by the way, I hear is terrific). Even before this pandemic, there was a growing sense (from the outside, mind you) that the Bay Area had simply gotten too expensive, both for individuals and for companies. It would seem that when you greatly restrict the supply of new housing and make it unattainable for many, people go find housing somewhere else. Sometimes in other states.

    Photo by Tomek Baginski on Unsplash

  • Housing supply in the Bay Area


    Back in March, SPUR Regional Strategy published a report called: “What It Will Really Take to Create an Affordable Bay Area.” Much of its focus is on all of the housing that the San Francisco Bay Area should have been building over the years and all of the housing that it will need to start building in order to prevent things from getting worse.

    Here are a few stats to put things into perspective. Since 2000, the Bay Area has added about 1 million people (about a 15% increase). From 2011 to 2017, the Bay Area also added some 658,000 jobs, but only created about 140,000 new housing units. That’s 4.7 jobs for every new house built. SPUR further estimates that over the last 20 years, there has been a shortfall of almost 700,000 new housing units.

    If you look at the above chart showing residential building permits issued between 1980 and 2018, you can see that the Bay Area was actually more prolific in the 1980s — peaking at nearly 50,000 units per year. Those levels have yet to happen again, despite the region growing in population. (If you looked at new housing units per capita or some other normalized metric, the supply decline would be even more pronounced.)

    Part of the reason for this is that the supply of housing in the 1980s had a higher percentage of low-rise single-family homes. We could get into a discussion about sustainability, but that’s not the topic of today’s post. The reality is that this housing typology was easier, faster, and cheaper to build as compared to today’s urban infill housing. We have made it very difficult to build.

    To download a copy of the SPUR report, click here.

  • Learning from Steve Falk

    Building new housing — in the places that really need it — is exceedingly difficult. This recent New York Times article by Conor Dougherty is a good example of that. It tells the story of a man named Steve Falk.

    Steve was previously city manager for Lafayette, California (a suburb of San Francisco), but he eventually grew frustrated by his inability to affect positive change, and actually build things. He ended up resigning.

    Below is a quote from the article. Steve is talking about housing affordability and supply.

    “I’m not sure individual cities, left to their own devices, are going to solve this,” he told me once. “They don’t have the incentive to do so, because local voters are always going to protect their own interests instead of looking out for people who don’t live there yet.”

    Steve is right in this assertion. I think it was Charlie Munger who once said, “Show me an incentive and I’ll show you an outcome.”

    I don’t know the specifics of the proposed 315 unit apartment building in Lafayette (perhaps it was ugly), but the article claims it was an as-of-right proposal close to a BART station (transit).

    How does that turn into 0 units and numerous lawsuits, while we all continue to debate housing affordability? Something is broken.