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.
I recently penned an article for Building Magazine called How Sexy Is Your City? The subtitle is: The next generation of talent will require cities to take a next generation approach to city building.
I know that we’re all hitting our limit in terms of people talking about millennials, so I’d like to reassure you that – excluding the actual article tag – the word “millennial” only shows up twice in the piece.
I also don’t write long-form articles very often. I’ve had people suggest that I do that periodically on this blog, but I find the time commitment to be exponentially greater than for the short, glib pieces I usually write here. 😉
So if you can bear two more instances of the word “millennial” and you’ve been looking for something longer, you are in luck. Also, if you’d like to subscribe to Building, you can do that here.
It is a timeline of all tall buildings (over 100 meters) completed in New York since 1908 when the Singer Building was completed. At the time, but only for a year, that was the tallest building in the world.
The gray bars represent the total number of buildings completed each year. And the colored dots represent specific completed buildings and their asset class (office, residential, mixed-use, hotel, and so on). It’s interesting to see the dips. During World War II, high-rise construction basically stopped.
Check out the full report if you’d like to see a bigger version of the graph.
For whatever reason, some of the people living in high-rise buildings believe that if you flick a cigarette butt off a balcony that it will magically disintegrate on the way down. It’s either that or they don’t give a shit about anyone else.
Because if you happen to live in or manage a building which has patios or terraces at the base of tower, I bet you have this problem:
Above is a picture of a Belmont cigarette burning through the tarp covering the wooden harvest table on my patio.
It’s a destruction of property, an environmental concern (many butts end up in stormwater drains), and a pretty scary fire hazard. I know of many incidences where thrown cigarette butts have started fires in a high-rise building. It happened last year in my mother’s building.
However, the frustrating thing about this problem is that it’s exceptionally difficult to stop. I know this because I sit on the board of my condo building. The typical response is for management to send out notices to all the residents asking them to stop doing this. But frankly, that does nothing.
So if any of you know of a company or service (or have a product idea) that can help with this, please contact me. But if no such company or service exists, I am positive that you could create it today and sell to almost every condo corporation and property management company that have a condition where terraces or patios sit below a tower. Because inevitably, there will be someone upstairs throwing butts.
Many buildings have a similar issue with dog poo. People simply don’t pick up after their dogs. So some property managers have started taking stool samples of every dog who lives in the building. That way they can easily determine which residents aren’t picking up after their dogs. I guess that’s what it takes to get some people to give a shit.
Of course, this isn’t a problem just in buildings. Cities in general are always fighting litter. That’s why you see ideas like this pop-up:
This particular one (in London) was designed to stop people from throwing their cigarette butts on the street. Instead, you use your butt to vote. In this case: England vs. Australia.
We talk a lot about big ideas here on Architect This City. What driverless cars will mean for cities, how laneway housing could help with housing affordability, and so on. But the smallest ideas can also matter a lot for city building. Sometimes we forget that.
Next weekend a good friend of mine from architecture school will be visiting Toronto from Philadelphia. And I’m really excited to show him the city. (Next month it’s my turn to go to Philadelphia.)
He’s a fellow city geek. He hasn’t been to Toronto in a number of years. And I haven’t seen him since our trip to Detroit 2 years ago.
For those of us living and working in Toronto, there’s a lot to celebrate. Sure the Gardiner Expressway East decision didn’t go as I – as well as many other urbanists, including our Chief City Planner – had hoped. But there’s no shortage of other things to brag about.
So here are 10 reasons to visit Toronto right now:
1. We’ve created an entirely new business district south of Union Station called South Core. Now the region’s primary mobility hub is in the middle of the country’s most important business district, as opposed to on the edge of it. It’s a better use of infrastructure.
2. We now have a dedicated train (the Union Pearson Express) that takes you from the country’s busiest airport directly to downtown in 25 minutes. You’ll find local retailers at the stations and a brand created by the brain behind Monocle Magazine. You can even use a smart card to ride it and our local transit system.
3. We didn’t shut down Uber. Instead our mayor wants to create new policy that will allow these services to coexist with conventional taxi services. We don’t yet know how this will turn out, but I believe it’s a step in the right direction. It’s Toronto taking a leadership approach to innovation as opposed to trying to stomp it out.
4. We are about to host the largest sporting event in Canadian history. The 17th Pan American Games will have double the number of athletes competing as the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
5. We created an entire neighborhood from scratch in order to house all of these athletes (Canary District). And I think it’s destined to become one of Toronto’s great neighborhoods. I’m saving my first visit for next weekend, so expect a follow-up post on this.
6. We are dramatically rethinking this city’s public realm. From the plaza out front of Union Station to the new Queens Quay Boulevard along the waterfront, we are prioritizing people and creating more complete streets. It has given Toronto an entirely new urban feel.
7. We are slowly starting to embrace our forgotten laneways and alleys through the help of organizations like The Laneway Project. And this is going to eventually lead to a further rethink of our pubic spaces and urban fabric.
10. The ATC community is in the process of identifying a new, quintessentially Toronto food dish. But since we have every type of imaginable cuisine here, we’re struggling to pick just one. When you visit, you can help us identify the best and most Toronto dish.
So there’s a lot to be excited about. I for one can’t wait for us to host the Pan Am Games, starting tomorrow. It’s a chance to show off this great city.
So if you’re also in town next weekend and want to geek out about cities, drop me a line.
When you rezone a property to build something new, pretty much every city will ask you to provide reports and studies that assess the potential impacts of that something new.
They’ll ask you to look at the impact on traffic, the impact on storm water, the impact on shadows in the area, and the list goes. This, of course, is fair and reasonable. It makes sense to measure the impact of the proposed changes to see if it will work in the given context.
But those are not the only impacts to consider. I think that many of us underestimate the flip side, which is the impact of doing nothing, or in this case, building nothing. Here’s a recent quote from an excellent interview with urban economist Edward Glaeser:
Personally, I believe there are always huge costs to saying “no” to people who want to create space for new families that want to live in the city; who want to make the city more affordable. There are always costs – I believe that very, very strongly – but, sure, there are also benefits to saying “no” at certain times.
Glaeser is, of course, not saying that we should allow unfettered development. He is saying that there are costs (or impacts) to building and costs to not building. The challenge is that we assume, often incorrectly, that saying “no” simply means the status quo will prevail. And we do not consider the impacts.
What the report did was compare growth and settlement patterns in both the Greater Toronto (and Hamilton) Area and Metro Vancouver between 2001 and 2011. And what they found was two different stories.
Of the one million people that moved to the Toronto region between this period, roughly 80% of them settled in new greenfield housing subdivisions at the urban edge. And only 18% of people moved to areas that were well serviced by public transit.
By contrast, only 31% of Metro Vancouver’s population growth went to greenfield areas and 69% went to urban intensification areas. Nearly half of these new residents ended up settling next to high frequency transit.
From an environmental standpoint, Vancouver’s settlement pattern is obviously preferable. But it takes hard work to achieve that. The barriers to infill development are more formidable than the barriers to greenfield development. This is despite the fact that there are well documented social, economic, and environmental costs associated with urban sprawl.
My point with this example is that growth and demand will find somewhere to settle. Some locations make more sense than others, but sometimes there’s no choice when we have decided to say “no.” So what we ought to be doing is measuring both the impact of building, as well as the impact of not building.
Ever since I was a little kid, I have thought that I would one day get into politics.
A lot of it has to do with me wanting to affect positive change, which is also one of the reasons I love real estate development (and one of the reasons I write this blog). Developers might have a bad rap in some circles, but I view it as a mechanism for positive change in the built environment.
However, I have also felt that politics is something that’s better to do when you have grey hair and you don’t actually need the money to live. That way people take you more seriously and you can, hopefully, just do what you feel is right as opposed to playing the political game.
But more and more I find myself thinking: Brandon, you would make a terrible politician.
I don’t want to play games. I don’t want to have to think about which stance will win me the most votes. And I don’t want to have to dance around questions so I can avoid upsetting certain constituents. I’d rather be clear and decisive about what I think is the right thing to do.
But that doesn’t always work so well in politics. So I think I’ll just stick to building things and writing this daily blog.
I was out for lunch with a colleague of mine yesterday afternoon and he said to me: “Brandon, I’m really surprised that you’re so interested in technology. It just seems so different compared to real estate and architecture.”
And I’ve certainly heard that exact same comment from a number of people before. But I don’t see it that way and here are a few reasons why.
The common thread for me between architecture, real estate development, and technology is that in all of these cases it is about imagining the way things could be in the future and then creating it. It’s about change. It’s about growth. It’s about creation. And I consider myself a builder in practically every sense of the word.
At the same time, each of these disciplines is about creating engaging spaces for people. Architects and real estate developers do it in the physical world, but many technology products strive to do exactly the same thing in the online world.
In fact, a couple of years ago I was fascinated to learn that Facebook has and continues to draw inspiration from many of the same books and philosophies that architects, planners, and developers rely on when it comes to creating engaging communities. The medium might be different, but it’s still about people.
Finally, as I’ve said many times before here on Architect This City, I think that the distinction between tech and non-tech companies and industries is quickly evaporating. Is Airbnb a tech company or a hospitality company? Is Uber a tech company or a taxi company? Pretty soon we’ll be saying that about many other industries.
Maybe it’s because I’ve always been interested in wading through the overlaps between disciplines, but this is just the way I see it.
A controversial design proposal for the tallest building in Europe has been making the rounds online over the past few days. Designed by Morphosis Architects, the 381 meter-tall tower is being proposed in Vals in the Swiss Alps.
And pretty much everyone seems to hate it.
When I first came across the design, I truthfully had to do a double take to see if it was actually a real proposal. But it seems to be. Everyone is writing about it.
Clearly there are some interesting tensions at play here. You have a hyper-urban building typology in a mountain town setting, but with materials that are intended to make it dematerialize into the landscape.
So I thought we could have a discussion about it in the comments.
Is a small mountain town the right place for the tallest building in Europe? Could it work as a one-off tower?
Poll: How much do you think this home is or will be worth? Respond in the comment section below. I’ll be giving away one free ATC t-shirt. (Comments)
A few weeks ago a good friend of mine – who is a builder – called me up and told me that I had to come and see a house under construction in Etobicoke (west end of Toronto). He told me that the owner was doing everything from geothermal to a car elevator, and that he was doing it all, not with the intent of ever being able to sell it, but because he just wanted to build something really cool.
I thought: Amazing. I need to see this.
So this past Saturday afternoon, I drove out to 37 Canerouth Drive in Etobicoke to take a look. Situated near Centennial Park, the house is at the end of an unassuming cul-de-sac filled with post-war bungalows that you could probably pickup for anywhere between $800,000 to $1M, fully renovated. This house, on the other hand, has had many multiples of that sunk into it.
But before I get into the house, let me start from the beginning.
The owner actually used to live next door on Canerouth Drive. He lived in a nice, newly renovated bungalow, but he wanted something else. Something cooler. Something he could create from scratch. Being a car collector, one of the driving forces behind a new build was to create a place for all his cars. At one point he had around 7 or 8 of them. So he had decided that it was time to do a knock-down and start again.
But before he could demolish his house, his neighbors – whose bungalow hadn’t been renovated, but which had a slightly bigger and better lot – said to him: “You’ve got to be crazy. Your place is fully renovated.”
Somehow that comment led to the two neighbors actually switching houses. (I think this is fascinating, because I wonder how many of these types of transactions would be possible under the right circumstances.) The neighbors got a newly renovated house, and he got a better lot to build his dream home. It was a huge win for the neighbors, but it also meant one less neighbor to oppose him at the Committee of Adjustment when he went in for his variances.
The biggest variance was apparently density. The house is almost 6,000 square feet. It has somewhere around 4 bedrooms, but also includes a few studio and study areas, a spa area, 2 walk-in closets the size of the bedroom in my condo, and even a “meditation hallway”. The master bedroom and main living areas are all on one floor so that as the couple ages the home remains functional. (There’s also an elevator just in case.)
Being at the end of a cul-de-sac, the lot is pie shaped and the architecture of the house mimics it. The front is concave and the rear is convex – opening up the main living areas and master bedroom to the ravine at the back (see above photo). The owner was absolutely firm in his belief that these curves were central to the architecture. Without them, the house simply wasn’t worth doing, he said.
The initial intent was to build a completely passive solar house, but he found that it was extremely difficult to do so within the confines of our building code. Still, the house contains a significant amount of thermal mass, which is one of the principles of passive solar design. The home uses precast hollow core slabs with 3" of poured concrete on top and in-floor radiant heating and cooling. All of the floors will be polished concrete – love it.
Here’s the main stairwell (check out the support stringers):
Here’s the view from the kitchen looking towards the living room and out to the backyard (the far wall will be outfitted with custom millwork for his pottery collection):
Here’s a shot of the through-fireplace that will connect the living room area to the main stairwell area shown above:
And here’s the meditation hallway:
The most over the top part of the house though, is probably the underground parking garage. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to you given that he’s passionate about cars and it was one of the main reasons he wanted a new house in the first place. At the front of the house (shown in the first image above) is a single car garage, which conceals a parking elevator he sourced from the US.
It looks like this from the basement:
And it leads into this below grade parking area:
There’s enough room for all of his cars and it’ll be fully equipped so that he can work and tinker on them.
But what stood out to me most from my visit – more so than the scale of this project or all the fancy bells and whistles – was his attention to detail and his passion for design. Here is a guy who is worrying about baseboard details and the design of the space down to the centimeter.
Here’s his door detail:
In fact, he gave me a number of examples where a couple of inches here and there were having a profound impact on the experience of the space and he forced the trades to change it. He even spoke about how the 3" concrete floor topping had changed his experience of the outside (for the better). These are subtleties that most people don’t even notice, or care about.
But he sure does.
Of course, in some ways, this is the difference between building for yourself and building strictly for profit. When it’s a passion project, you do things that you love, but that other people will tell you don’t make economic sense. But sometime it’s good to be crazy. I mean, what do those other people know?
So today, I thought we would play a little game on ATC where you try and guess what you think this home will be worth upon completion? Take a guess. There’s no wrong answer here. I’ll also randomly select somebody from the comments to receive a free ATC t-shirt.
I have a rough idea of the costs in my head, but I’d like to see what you come up with on your own first. I’ll also be forwarding this post to the owner, so make sure you respond in the comment section below as opposed to via email or on social media. I’m sure he’d love to see your numbers 🙂
To add one last piece to this story, I discovered midway through our tour that the owner of this house used to be my family’s veterinarian before he retired sometime in the mid 2000s. What a small world. He was an excellent veterinarian (my mom told me to tell him that), but that clearly wasn’t his only passion.
Last week I wrote a post on my personal blog about housing policy in San Francisco. My argument was that the backlash against the tech community (for allegedly driving up real estate prices) is actually misdirected and that housing policy should be the target.
The reasoning behind this is simple: More people are moving to San Francisco than new housing is being provided. And so regardless of whether you have tech workers or not, you have an environment where the rich are always going to outbid the poor for housing.
If you look at the numbers from the past 2 decades, San Francisco on average builds 1,500 new housing units a year. And yet the city gained approximately 25,000 new people between 2010-2012 (that’s roughly 8,300 people per year). So what you have is a perpetual housing supply shortage.
To correct this problem, San Francisco needs to start building. And I’m stealing this idea from Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, who wrote an article on this very same topic back in December of last year for Bloomberg (and a book called Triumph of the City). His argument was that “the surest way to a more equitable housing market is to reduce the barriers to building.”
Now, if you compare San Francisco’s situation to Toronto’s, we’re almost on the opposite end of the spectrum. Toronto doesn’t have a problem building. We’re building lots. So much so that it’s become fashionable to joke around and complain about all the condos going up in this city.
But it’s important to remember that all of these condos are making us a relatively affordable city by global standards. We have more people moving to this city every year than San Francisco and yet home prices are less. We’re also less expensive than Vancouver, where there are strong natural barriers to building, namely water and mountains.
So rather than complain, I’m going to be the contrarian. I like seeing new housing built. I like knowing that the neighborhoods I love in this city are becoming home to more and more people.
At one point, my home (which is in the St. Lawrence Market) was a “new development” and somebody could have fought and opposed it. But it was allowed to be built and I was allowed to move in. I’m thankful for that. And so my plan is to be just as gracious to the next person who wants to join the neighborhood.
