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: california

  • I was here first

    Connor Dougherty published this thoughtful piece about NIMBYs over the weekend in the New York Times. And it has been making the rounds online ever since.

    It is thoughtful in that Connor tries to understand what makes NIMBYs tick. And he does this by interviewing people like Susan Kirsch, a resident of Marin County, California who generally opposes all of the things that California is doing to try and address its housing shortage and who has been fighting a townhouse project in her neighborhood for the last 18 years.

    The developer, who is now 86, started the project in his 60s. In the article he is quoted saying that he’s either going to succeed or he’s going to die. It’s one or the other.

    What is clear is that we all see things differently. While some people might see new housing as serving an important need. Others see new development as running counter to environmentalism and good stewardship. Indeed, for some, there is no shortage of housing (even in cities that are growing in population). It’s simply a problem of too many investors buying and creating rental homes or too many Airbnbs or some other red herring.

    Whatever the case may be, it’s hard not to pay attention to quotes like this one:

    “From my backyard I see the hillside,” Ms. Kirsch wrote from her Hotmail account. “Explain how my property value is not deflated if open space is replace(d) with view-blocking, dense, unsightly buildings.”

    Look, we all get this. Nobody wants their views obstructed. Nobody wants more cars parked in their neighborhood. And nobody wants more dog shit in their local park, among many other things. But implicit in this statement is a view that certain people’s needs and desires are more important than those of others. I was here first. Too bad for you.

  • Our cities are full

    One of the most common objections to new housing is that the place is already too crowded and potentially even full. But Jerusalem Demsas’ recently article in The Atlantic about how much people seem to hate other people is a good reminder that the topic of overpopulation can be a complicated one.

    Because what are we really saying when we say a place is too crowded or full? Is it just that this particular neighborhood is full, or are we talking about entire cities being full?

    Moreover, who determines when a place is full? Berkeley, California is, for example, a hell of a lot less dense than a city like Paris. So if a place like Berkeley can be considered full by some people, what does that mean for Paris? Presumably it’s entirely unliveable.

    Or could it be that the entire world is simply full and we should be looking at more drastic measures to curb population growth (in the places that are actually reaching replacement-level fertility rates)?

    It’s all very complicated. Thankfully Demsas offers up some possible solutions in her article:

    We have, of course, discovered an elusive technology to allow more people to live on less land: It’s called an apartment building. And if people would like fewer neighbors competing for parking spaces, then they should rest assured that buses, trains, protected bike lanes, and maintained sidewalks are effective, cutting-edge inventions available to all.

    The rest of the article is just as good.

  • Right-click, save as — world’s first Bored Ape restaurant opens in Long Beach

    The common criticism with NFT art is that it’s just a JPEG image. So why bother “owning” it when you can just right-click, save as? Who in their right mind would spend thousands, let alone hundreds of thousands on such a thing?

    But as I’ve argued before, this is missing the bigger picture and missing what this new technology has the potential to empower. Take for example, the new Bored & Hungry restaurant that opened up in Long Beach, California this past weekend (with lines down the block).

    It is being dubbed the world’s first Bored Ape Yacht Club restaurant, and here’s the backstory. Andy Nguyen is a successful food entrepreneur in southern California. And last month he spent US$267,000 on Bored Ape #6184 (yes, a JPEG).

    After doing this, he took to Twitter and asked: “Worst decision I’ve ever made or best idea of all time?” Of course, he clearly had a new business idea in mind.

    Fast forward to today and he now has a pop-up restaurant concept that is branded with his Bored Ape. And because the Bored Ape IP is very permissive, he is perfectly within his rights to do this. He can create whatever business he wants on the shoulders of his NFT, as can others with theirs.

    His restaurant is also accepting the new ApeCoin that is part of this NFT community, and if you yourself have a Bored Ape, you qualify for perks like free food. All you have to do is scan your crypto wallet. Digital asset ownership = real-life something.

    This to me is just one small example of the kind of new businesses that crypto and other digital assets might unlock. And I am sure that it’s the tip of the iceberg.

  • In real life in New York City

    This past weekend Bright Moments opened up their NFT art gallery in New York’s Soho. This is the company’s second gallery. The first was in Venice, California. And there are plans for eight more cities, with Berlin being the next one. (When is Toronto?!)

    Bright Moments is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), which is interesting in its own right but is a topic for another post. You can read a bit more about Bright Moments and DAOs, here and here.

    What I would instead like to talk about today is how Bright Moments is operating at the intersection of NFT art and real-world spaces. They are in effect a community. It’s a place for artists to release/showcase their work and a place for people to connect.

    One of the things that the company is doing with each gallery launch is minting an NFT collection that is tied to the city and that uses the local demonym. When they opened their popup in Venice, they launched the CryptoVenetians. And last weekend in New York they launched the CryptoNewYorkers.

    In each case, 1,000 NFTs were minted and the idea is that once they have expanded to their 10 cities, there will be a collection of 10,000 NFTs.

    I have said it before, but this is an exciting time in the world. Maybe this current NFT craze ends up being a massive bubble, or maybe it doesn’t. Either way, things are exciting.

    But here’s the thing.

    Organizations like Bright Moments show you just how important physical spaces, live communities, and cities continue to be. It doesn’t matter that this is digital art being displayed on a screen and that one could be viewing it from anywhere. People want to hang out in the same room and experience these sorts of new things together.

    I can’t see that ever going away.

  • How new technologies spread (and what that means for superstar cities)

    We know that innovation and economic growth tends to be unevenly distributed. This is the bull case for living in cities and, more particularly, for living in certain cities. But of course, the big question these days is whether or not our little work from home experiment has proven that, for the first time ever, work can now decentralize.

    Well here is a unique study that looked at 29 disruptive technologies over the last two decades in the United States. Using three main sources — patents, job postings, and hundreds of thousands of earnings calls — the team traced where new innovations/technologies have tended to emerge and then how they spread (or didn’t spread) across the rest of the US.

    Their initial findings won’t surprise regular readers of this blog. There are indeed a certain number of pioneering superstar cities. Within their list of new disruptive innovations, the team found that about 40.2% of them came from California. The next “super-cluster” was along the Boston-Washington corridor in the northeast with ~21.2%. By narrowing down their list to “disruptive patents”, as opposed to all patents, innovation looks even spikier.

    Next the team looked at how these disruptive technologies tend to diffuse across the country. This is where job postings and earnings calls come into play. New technology gets created in California garage. Cool. But at what point do CEOs across the country start talking about it and hiring people who are capable of doing things with it? This next figure shows that diffusion at various time intervals.

    Now here are the important takeaways. New disruptive technologies clearly take time to spread. However, high-skilled hiring tends to spread much more slowly than low-skilled hiring. This kind of makes sense as you’ve got a built up and entrenched knowledge base in these pioneering locations.

    But what this also means is that pioneering locations tend to maintain their hegemony for quite some time — decades. The high-paying jobs stick closer to home for much longer, presumably because geography makes it harder to transfer knowledge. This is, of course, based on historical data. But I remain highly suspect that Zoom calls can really disrupt the importance of our superstar cities.

    Maps: Vox

  • US migration patterns according to one-way U-Haul truck transactions

    One of the ways to try and keep tabs on where people are moving is to look at the number of permanent address changes. Another way is to look at the number of one-way U-Haul trucks that enter versus leave a particular state. And it turns out that if you’re U-Haul, you do care to track where all of your trucks are going. Each year in the United States there are about 2 million one-way truck transactions.

    Looking at the data from 2020, the top inbound destinations — that is, the states that had the largest net gain of one-way U-Haul trucks — were (1) Tennessee, (2) Texas, and (3) Florida. This is a big jump for Tennessee as it was 12th in 2019. Texas and Florida, on the other hand, were similarly in the top three last year. In last place on this list is California, meaning that it had the largest net loss of one-way U-Haul trucks leaving the state.

    Overall, this data continues to reinforce a shift that is taking place toward more affordable housing markets, such as those in the southern United States.

    For the full U-Haul article, click here.

    Photo by Tanner Boriack on Unsplash

  • The Koblick House by Richard Neutra

    I came across the above photo this morning. If you can’t see it, click here. It’s a photo of the Koblick House in Los Angeles designed by Richard Neutra and Gregory Ain for art professor Harry Koblick. Built into the hills of Silver Lake in 1937, the house is a three-storey duplex with about 1,620 square feet according to some sources. (I couldn’t find any plans or drawings, but I’d really like to see the section.) The upper unit has 2 bedrooms and 1 bath. And the lower unit has 1 bedroom and 1 bath.

    Richard Neutra was a prolific modernist and designed numerous “international style” buildings, like the Koblick House. His work was included in the seminal 1932 MoMA (New York) exhibition on modern architecture, which was an important moment for modernism in the United States. It helped to import the international style from Europe at a time when exhibitions did things like that. It is perhaps easy to forget that ideas didn’t spread as quickly around the world back then.

    I love the simplicity of this house. The double car garage that services the two units. The side stair that leads to the front door. And the two large terraces that probably look out over some kind of landscape. Over 80 years later and it still feels contemporary. Perhaps some of you will be equally inspired by this archive photo.

  • Accessory dwelling unit (ADU) supply in California

    This recent article by Bloomberg CityLab, about “how California set off a backyard apartment boom,” has some interesting stats about the extent in which accessory dwelling units (ADUs) are quickly being adopted and delivered across the state.

    For one, a majority (87%) of jurisdictions have enacted at least one ordinance related to ADUs, though many have several. These policies might include everything from by-right zoning to some form of financial assistance if you build. Here is a graph showing the cities and counties that have created ADU ordinances since 2013:

    All of this has translated into housing supply. In 2019, California homeowners brought over 12,000 accessory dwelling units to the market (based on permits issued). Though a relatively small quantity based on the state’s overall housing deficit, this number is surely growing thanks to policies and programs, like this one here, that are working to remove the barriers to building.

    For the full CityLab article, click here.

  • Do you support having more housing built in your community?

    Back in 2019, Lake Research Partners conducted a housing study for California YIMBY. One of the questions that California voters were asked was about whether or not they support or oppose having more housing built in their community. Here is how people responded (about 700 interviews were conducted by phone and about 500 people were asked online):

    What this seems to suggest is that most people (61% of all voters) support more housing in their community, with 38% (the darker bar) feeling very strongly about it. These results also seem to suggest that if you’re already a homeowner and/or if you’re a Republican, that you are then less likely to support housing in your community (51% and 54%, respectively). Even still, one possible conclusion that you can draw from these findings is that, perhaps in all cases, a majority of people (>50%) support the idea of more housing in their community.

    However, the problem with this approach is that you’re ultimately asking a pretty generic and theoretical question about housing supply. I am presuming that this is a scenario where the rubber has not yet hit the road. Indeed, most people will say that they support new housing in their backyard, but is that actually how things will play it? It’s pretty common, for example, to hear things like: “I support new development, but I think this project is simply too ___________.”

    So while I think that there are some interesting directional indicators that one could draw from these findings, I suspect that the numbers in the real world might be slightly less rosy.

  • Crossing the chasm in Austin

    I can’t open Twitter these days without seeing someone in the tech industry talking about moving or talking about someone who just moved to either Austin or Miami. “What’s the best neighborhood in Miami for startups? My friend just moved to Edgewater. Where did so-and-so move?”

    Here’s a recent article from the WSJ talking about how accelerated tech-fueled growth is straining Austin. And below is a set of charts (from the article) comparing home prices in Austin and San Francisco. (Reminder, the California-to-Texas migratory pattern recorded the highest number of “net movers” last year.)

    But in reading through the article, I am reminded that the challenges facing Austin are not entirely unique. Growing cities all around the world are being put in a position where they need to decide whether they want to remain car-oriented and relatively low-density, or if they want to make the shift toward more transit-oriented urbanism.

    It’s admittedly not easy, both politically and practically speaking. It’s hard to rewrite deeply entrenched built form. But Austin is naturally looking at what happened in San Francisco, where restrictions on new development are thought to be partially (largely?) responsible for the city’s unaffordable housing.

    According to the same WSJ article, voters in Austin turned down two previous transit proposals. One was in 2000 and the other was in 2014. There was concern over too much urbanization. There was concern it would induce more people to move to the city. And there was concern that it would threaten the city’s low-rise single-family homes.

    But this year a transit plan was approved that includes three new rail lines, one of which will tunnel through downtown. Provided that Austin can effectively pair this with more housing, more uses, and more density — which is generally what you need to make transit work — then it may be well on its way to crossing, if you will, the chasm of urbanity.

    Charts: WSJ