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: boston

  • China is building and megalopolises are now national policy

    Well here are some interesting figures (via MIT Technology Review):

    • In the past two decades, about 400 million people moved into China’s cities — so more than the entire population of the United States
    • By 2035, about 70% of China’s entire population is expected to be urban (up from 60% today and up from 30% two decades ago)
    • To accommodate this scale of growth, China’s national urban development approach has shifted to something that now revolves around city clusters, or megalopolises (term coined by French geographer Jean Gottmann back in the 1950s to describe the Boston-Washington corridor in the Northeastern US)
    • By 2035, there are expected to be five major city clusters (see above)
    • One of the reasons for this is to improve cooperation across the various clusters — less competition and less redundancy
    • But it’s also about creating smaller more manageable cities — is this what one needs to do after a certain scale, go polycentric?
    • To service these clusters, China is rolling out a network of 16 new high-speed rail lines
    • By 2035, China expects to have 200,000 kilometers of rail, with a third of it being high-speed — assuming this happens, China will be home to 60% of the world’s high-speed rail coverage
    • Current cost estimates for the construction of this network comes out to about US$150 million per kilometer
    • 1-2-3 Rule: The plan is that everyone should be able to get around a city within 1 hour; a city cluster within 2 hours; and travel between the country’s clusters inside of 3 hours

    China is building.

  • London super prime and the City Trifecta Index

    The latest (15th) edition of Knight Frank’s annual The Wealth Report was published last month. I find these interesting because they give you a global view of how and where capital is flowing into real estate (specifically prime real estate). London, for example, did rather well last year despite the pandemic. Buyers from the around the world spent nearly $4 billion on what is commonly referred to as “super-prime properties.” This is real estate with a sale price of US$10 million or more. London saw 201 super-prime properties trade hands last year, with an average price of $18.6 million and with 31 of these transactions being at or above $25 million. This is an increase compared to the year prior (2019), which I suppose is something given that the UK’s housing market was more or less frozen between March and May of last year. These figures put London at the top, ahead of New York and Hong Kong, when it comes to super-prime real estate sales in 2020. (London figures via the Financial Times.)

    Another interesting thing that you’ll find in the report is a city ranking that Knight Frank calls their City Trifecta. What this index does is take Knight Frank’s City Wealth Index (which considers where wealth is currently concentrated) and then adds in two other dimensions: innovation and wellbeing. The idea here is that innovation should drive future economic growth and wealth, and that wellbeing (quality of life) is pretty important when it comes to the future competitiveness of our global cities. When you look at the world’s top cities through this lens, the ranking starts to differ from what you may be used to seeing with cities like London, New York, and Hong Kong at the top (see above chart). Now you have Munich taking the number one spot; Boston and Toronto in 5th and 6th position, respectively; and cities like Zurich jumping up ahead of cities like Hong Kong. These kind of rankings always need to be looked at with a critical eye, but they can be interesting nonetheless.

    Image: Knight Frank

  • Job mixes and job losses

    Recent job posting data from Indeed has revealed a bit of a paradox. The metro areas where more people are able to work from home — i.e. tech hubs and finance centers — have experienced larger job posting declines compared to all other US metros, as well as to tourism destinations such as Las Vegas and Orlando.

    We know that the hospitality and tourism sector has been the hardest hit by the current environment. But that doesn’t appear to be the biggest driver for overall job losses. In fact, one of the key takeaways is that job losses between February and June 2020 look to be correlated with metro size. That is, the bigger the city, the greater the job losses (% change).

    So what’s going on?

    Well, according to Indeed, it’s important to look at the local job mix. In “work-from-home metros” like Seattle, San Francisco, and Boston, there has been a relatively high percentage of people who were able to quickly transition to working from home. This is reflected in the anonymized mobile-device data for these cities. More people at home. Less mobility. And a seemingly stronger adherence to social-distancing protocols.

    The problem with this outcome is that it crushes most of the in-person sectors and businesses that relied on this workforce moving about the city — things like food prep and beauty & wellness. I mean, just think about all of the food businesses that survive off lunches in a CBD. According to Indeed, it is these sorts of local economic connections that have really been driving the declines in job postings and overall payroll employment during lockdown.

  • The America we need

    The New York Times is running an opinion series right now called, The America We Need. It is all about how the US might emerge from this crisis “with a fair, resilient society.” This piece by Carol Galante covers many of the topics that we discuss on this blog. Carol is a former city planner and nonprofit housing developer. She is now the faculty director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC, Berkeley. Here are a couple of excerpts from her article that I think will resonate with many of you:

    There are two things we know: The U.S. economy will recover. And the recovery will start in and be strongest in the same cities that were thriving before the pandemic. Economies in places like Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Boston are driven by the innovation, technology and biotech sectors, which are proving to be remarkably resilient to the impacts of Covid-19.

    We have an obligation to ignore the short-term reactionary impulse to blame density for the spread of the coronavirus and instead use this opportunity to rethink the policies that impede the construction of new housing, at more price levels, in the places where housing is most needed.

    In my subsequent career as a nonprofit housing developer working in prosperous coastal California communities, I spent far too many nights in City Council meetings working to get apartment buildings for lower-income older people and families approved. Underlying the “density” battle was almost always a battle over who has access to the opportunities of a place and who doesn’t, cloaked in arguments about neighborhood character and traffic impacts.

  • Fees on homes

    A colleague of mine sent me this Bloomberg article today and said, “Here’s an article about things you already know.” The article cites a recent report by Altus Group that compared government-related fees on new housing across Canada and the U.S. What they discovered will not surprise any of you who are in the industry: Toronto has some of the highest government-imposed charges on new homes.

    For new condo apartments, the report found that government charges can add up to as much as C$124,582 per unit. That’s about 50% higher than the average unit in the U.S. and about 30% higher than the average unit in Canada (see above chart for the list of cities). While all of us in the industry can appreciate this, I don’t think most homeowners and tenants understand this. Hopefully they’re reading this post.

    Chart: Bloomberg

  • Equatorial Brutalism

    Generally speaking, architects are the only people I know who like Brutalist architecture. In fact, architect, professor and author Witold Rybczynski once proposed the following litmus test to determine whether a building is indeed an example of Brutalism: “If people don’t hate it, it can’t be Brutalist.”

    But as I have argued before, sometimes architectural styles take a bit of time to settle in and become fully appreciated. Consider how improbable it would seem to demolish a beautiful old Victorian home today. And yet Toronto, and countless other cities, did this on many occasions. Regent Park, Toronto was once Cabbagetown South.

    Brutalism also took on different sensibilities around the world.

    I love this recent piece in T (NY Times Style Magazine) by Michael Snyder called, “The Unexpectedly Tropical History of Brutalism.” In it he uses the term “Equatorial Brutalism” (a new one for me) and discusses the “surprising apotheosis” of Brutalism in equatorial countries (and in particular Brazil). It is a good follow-up to my recent post on Oscar Niemeyer’s work.

    So here’s an excerpt from Michael’s article. If you don’t already like Brutalism, maybe it’ll get you a little bit closer.

    What these buildings shared, beyond an aesthetic — though they shared that, too, with their radical porousness, their blunt geometric forms and their extensive use of raw concrete — was a commitment to architecture as an instigator of progress. But in the tropics, Brutalism reached an unexpected apotheosis: Infiltrated by lush plants and softened by humidity, buildings that looked cold and imposing against London’s constant drizzle or Boston’s icy slush were transformed into fecund, vital spaces. Concrete surfaces bloomed green with moss. The panels of glass necessary for sealing rooms against the northern chill either disappeared or receded from view, encouraging cross-ventilation while also protecting interior spaces from direct sun. The openness and transparency that the Smithsons had pronounced became a practical reality in these humid environments, both theoretically and literally: Built from inexpensive, readily available materials, equatorial Brutalism was as accessible and functional as it was symbolically potent, resulting in buildings that would define new societies growing around them like vines. Here, Brutalism wasn’t only an architecture that shaped the future or confronted the past — it was an architecture of freedom.

    Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

  • The densest urban cells in America

    Garrett Dash Nelson recently published a study looking at urban density on a cell-by-cell basis for a number of US cities. Each “cell” is a 30 arc-second grid cell, but you can think of them as being approximately one square kilometer. The goal of the project was to better define urban density and do it in a more granular way. City averages don’t tell you a whole lot about how neighborhoods vary, and they can be skewed by the denominator you use. i.e. Where are you drawing the urban boundary?

    You can play around with his interactive study, here. Each city can be explored according to its 200 most dense cells. One interesting takeaway — though it is probably not all that surprising to this audience — is that New York City is really a unique place when it comes to American cities. If you look at the above chart (sourced from CityLab), you’ll see that most other US cities don’t come close to it in terms of urban density. New York’s 200th densest cell is still denser than the most dense cells of Boston, the Twin Cities, and of Dallas.

    The y-axis is the total population in each grid cell.

  • San Francisco is the first city in the US to ban facial recognition software

    San Francisco recently became the first city in the US to ban the use of facial recognition software by city agencies. (There’s a second vote next week, but it is considered just a formality.) A similar ban is also making its way through the system in Boston.

    I thought the following quote by Aaron Peskin in the New York Times was an interesting one, because it speaks to some of the growing tensions between tech, policy, and city building:

    “I think part of San Francisco being the real and perceived headquarters for all things tech also comes with a responsibility for its local legislators,” Mr. Peskin said. “We have an outsize responsibility to regulate the excesses of technology precisely because they are headquartered here.”

    I can appreciate both sides of this argument.

    For those concerned about crime and safety, facial recognition promises more effective policing. That’s why this technology is already used at many airports, including SFO. (Because it’s under federal jurisdiction, it won’t be impacted by this ban.)

    At the same time, there are legitimate concerns related to the large-scale collection of personally identifiable data. And it is this same concern that is fueling the debates here in Toronto around what Sidewalk Labs is up to along the waterfront.

    I am not an expert on this particular topic (or many topics for that matter). But if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you will know that I believe in innovation and I believe in progress.

    However, I also believe that it is important and healthy for us to be having these debates. Because what I do know is that I wouldn’t want Toronto to become Shenzhen. I wouldn’t want to jaywalk across the street and have facial recognition software automatically send a ticket to my phone and post my photo to a “wall of shame.”

    That doesn’t sound like a very fun city.

    Photo by Chris Leipelt on Unsplash

  • Redfin is rolling out an online purchase option for homes

    There’s a lot of money at work right now trying to reinvent the way that homes are bought and sold. Perhaps the most popular trend is “instant buying” or algorithmic home buying. I have been writing about this for years, mostly because of Opendoor. But now there are lots of companies competing in this space. With this model, home sellers get the benefit of an almost immediate sale, though usually it’s at a slightly lower price.

    Redfin, on the other hand, is returning to something that it first tried out back in 2006: a buy now button on its online listings. It failed back then. But maybe it was simply too early. The feature allows unrepresented buyers — that is, buyers without an agent — to make online offers. Naturally, it’s far from a single click process. But when accepted, the seller ends up paying about half the amount of commission.

    According to the New York Times, the company started testing the feature in late March in the Boston area. Of the 120 homes listed on Redfin with a “start an offer” button, 5 ended up being purchased via an online bid. That’s more than I would have expected. But Redfin positions these offers as being the stronger option because they save sellers money. There’s also an option to tour the home on your own.

    Given this initial response, the company is now working to roll out this feature nationally, market by market. Is this the future of home buying?

  • Scooter trips surpassed bike share last year

    According to the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), scooter trips in the US surpassed station-based bike share trips for the first time in 2018. Here is a chart taken from Streetsblog:

    Dockless electric scooters have created a public nuisance in many of our cities, but what is clear is that the demand is there. Which perhaps isn’t all that surprising given that they require less effort than traditional cycling.

    The other interesting takeaway from NACTO’s analysis, which is likely also not that surprising, is that bike share trips are heavily concentrated in a select few cities.

    In 2018, there were about 36.5 million bike share trips across the US. And about 84% of them took place in just 6 cities: New York, Boston, Chicago, DC, Honolulu, and San Francisco.

    Almost half of the 36.5 million trips were on NYC’s Citi Bike network.