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.
Earlier this week I posted this teaser photo on social (full photo above) and said to stay tuned for a big announcement. Well, that announcement is here and you can read all about it over on the Globizen blog. Please let me know what you think in the comment section below.
Back before the 2008 financial crisis, I did a short stint working for a real estate developer in Dublin, Ireland.
Most of our projects were in Ireland, but our consultant teams were sometimes from all over.
One day we were having a meeting with our architect from Germany and we started talking about a particular project’s green space.
But this wasn’t the sort of green space that was supposed to be actively used. It was a green space that, I guess, you were just supposed to look at and admire for its greenness.
So one of my Irish colleagues asked, while referencing the proposed design: “How are we going to keep people off the grass?”
Our German friends didn’t immediately appreciate the concern and responded with: “What do you mean?”
Irish: “How will we stop people from walking and hanging out on the grass?”
German with serious face: “Oh. We will put up a sign.”
At that point, every Irish person in the room just started laughing and more or less said: “Yeah, that’ll never work.”
Cultural differences can be subtle.
A few weeks ago Surface Magazine interviewed Ian Schrager. If you don’t know who Ian Schrager is, you should look him up. He started Studio 54 in New York (along with Steve Rubell) and is largely credited with inventing the boutique hotel genre. His latest project is Edition Hotels, which launched in London in 2013 and in Miami in 2014.
What I found particularly interesting about the interview are the “serious snafus” that Edition experienced at the outset. There was a project in Waikiki and a project in Istanbul. Both failed. Here’s a guy who invented the genre and had partnered up with Marriott to pioneer a new brand. And it wasn’t until Edition London that they were able hit their stride.
I say all of this not to poke fun at their failures. Nobody should do that. Poke fun at not trying instead. My point is the exact opposite. To create something new and amazing, such as Edition, you often have to subject yourself to a few scrapes and bruises along the way.
The Wall Street Journal recently asked: Venice Beach Is a Hot Place to Live, So Why Is Its Housing Supply Shrinking?
According to Issi Romem, chief economist at BuildZoom, it’s because Venice Beach is the toughest place in America to build housing.
Here are some numbers from the WSJ:
“The Venice Beach population is shrinking even as the local economy has boomed. The neighborhood had about 27,000 residents in 2015, about 3,800 fewer than in 2000, according to U.S. Census data. At the same time, the ZIP Code has added 4,000 new jobs, according to Jed Kolko, chief economist at employment website Indeed.”
And here is a chart that speaks to the relationship between housing prices and housing supply:
Housing supply, alone, isn’t going to solve all of our problems. But it certainly matters. Also, what’s up with Chicago?
I’m a few months behind on this one, but back in April the CBC published a documentary called: Where’d the night go?
It’s about Toronto’s grassroots music community and “DIY venues”, all of which are under pressure as a result of rising real estate values and an overall crackdown on illegal venues. This is a perfect example of what Jane Jacobs was getting at when she said that new ideas require old buildings.
If you can’t see the video below, click here. When I watched it, I got stuck watching 3 pre-roll ads. Sorry if that happens to you as well.
BILD (the Building Industry and Land Development Association) just released its June 2017 data for the Greater Toronto Area’s new housing market. You can read the full release here. But I would like to point out a couple of things:
About 91 percent of the 6,046 new homes sold last month were multi-family condo apartments in high-rise and mid-rise buildings and stacked townhomes, while only nine percent were low-rise single-family homes.
The average price of available new condo apartments continued to rise with an increase of more than $22,000 from May. June’s $627,000 average price marked a 34 percent increase from a year ago. The average available unit was 845 square feet with an average price per square foot of $742. A year ago, the average price per square foot was $587.
From this, it’s once again clear that Toronto is in the midst of an incredible transformation from a low-rise city to a more vertical city. New supply on the low-rise side of the market is heavily constrained.
I get the sense sometimes that many people in this city, and others, believe that access to a low-rise detached house should be a right. Go to school. Get a good job. And then buy that house with a backyard.
The data speaks to a very different reality.
Photo by Victoria Heath on Unsplash
In 2015, Studiolada Architectes (of Nancy, France) completed a 117 square meter home for a retired couple. On the firm’s website they call the project: Réalisation d’une maison individuelle à Baccarat.
Here are two photos (1 exterior and 1 interior) via the architects:
Most of the house is finished in wood. It was a modest build costing 174,361 € in total before taxes. The house itself cost 146,506 € and the standalone garage cost 20,245 € (both before taxes). The balance of the costs seem to have gone to exterior landscaping.
If you consider only the house, that works out to be about 1,252 € per square meter or about 115 € per square foot. Speaking of reasonable.
What’s particularly interesting about this project though is that after it was completed the architects published what they call a dossier de synthèse en Open Source (click through to download) – effectively an open source file of all the project’s documents.
Included are all of the plans, assembly details, construction photos, and even the entire construction budget. The ambition was to build an affordable and sustainable house and then make all of the information publicly available so that others might replicate what was done.
I think this is great.
So I’ve decided to publicly commit to doing the same for my proposed laneway house. If and when it gets built, I will document and publish the entire journey – including all development/construction costs – and make it freely available on this blog and probably elsewhere.
I got a bit of flak (on the internet) for calling my laneway house a “prototype” project. But that’s truly what I want it to be for Toronto. Hopefully sharing more, rather than less, information will help it to serve that purpose.
This morning I gave a presentation and participated in a design charrette that was organized by B+H Advance Strategy about the “mall of the future.” (See photo above.) It’s a 2-day event and I was only able to stick around for a few hours in the morning, but I think it’s great that B+H Architects takes the time to research and get a deeper level of understanding in the areas in which they work. Great design demands that.
The way the charrette was structured was around a handful of future scenarios. The idea being that it’s impossible to accurately predict the future, but it is possible to play out different possible futures to see what you get. I’m looking forward to seeing what the teams ultimately come up with at the end. I would also be really curious to hear your thoughts in the comment section below.
But before we decide on what malls are going to become in the future, it’s perhaps useful to think about how they got their start. The man largely credited with inventing the fully enclosed mall typology is a man by the name of Victor Gruen. He was a Vienna-born architect who moved to the US in 1938.
In the words of Malcolm Gladwell:
“Fifty years ago, Victor Gruen designed a fully enclosed, introverted, multitiered, double-anchor-tenant shopping complex with a garden court under a skylight—and today virtually every regional shopping center in America is a fully enclosed, introverted, multitiered, double-anchor-tenant complex with a garden court under a skylight. Victor Gruen didn’t design a building; he designed an archetype.”
The most interesting thing about this story though is that Gruen’s initial hope was that the mall would urbanize America’s suburbs. The garden court was supposed to be a kind of town square. And his broader vision included a mix of higher density uses surrounding the perimeter. But in reality the opposite happened: The mall helped to further suburbanize America.
However, as our malls begin to show their age (or die) and as we relearn to appreciate walkable urban environments, mall landlords are increasingly thinking mixed-use and higher density. And ironically, many of the plans probably don’t look all that dissimilar to Gruen’s original ideas. So maybe one possible future is simply the one that Gruen wanted to create all along.
Image: Kinetic Commerce
Over the weekend, Marcus Gee of the Globe and Mail published a terrific article about Toronto’s King-Spadina district and how “condos conquered a rundown district of the city.” (This post will argue that condos were not the catalyst, but an outcome of other changes.)
The image at the top of this post (City of Toronto Archives) is the intersection of King Street and Spadina Avenue around the early 1900s. And here is roughly that same view from May 2016 (Google Streetview):
From this perspective, it may look like not much has changed. The buildings at the two corners are still there, although their uses have changed. The streetcars are still running, although we now have slightly newer machines. And there are overhead lines providing a canopy across the intersection.
But as Gee points out, the reality is that in recent years King-Spadina has arguably seen more change and development than any other precinct in the city:
No fewer than 99 projects have been built, approved or pitched since 2004. That’s one quarter of the total for the entire city and more than the count for two vast suburban districts – Scarborough and Etobicoke – combined. King-Spadina is overtaking even high-rise hubs such as Yonge and Eglinton in midtown Toronto and the Bay and Yonge corridors downtown.
Below is a diagram showing the built form of that change.
But as we talk about this massive change, I would argue that this didn’t happen by accident.
Gee starts his piece by saying that “cities have an endless ability to evolve, to rebound, to reinvent and regenerate themselves, sometimes in ways that would astonish generations past.” I would add one word: Successful cities have an endless ability to evolve.
King-Spadina has indeed reinvented itself many times. Prior to its current iteration, it served as a manufacturing district and as the center of Toronto’s garment industry. But from the 1970s through to the early 1990s, the area fell into decline as its manufacturing base left.
The game changing moment happened in 1996 when “The Kings” – which includes the areas around both King-Spadina and King-Parliament – were redesignated as “Regeneration Areas.” The overarching goal was to deregulate away from single-use industrial zoning and allow the area’s buildings, both old and new, to take on almost any use.
Now all of a sudden it was possible to have light industrial, commercial, entertainment, retail, residential, and live/work uses all mixed together. And with the bones already in place, the market responded.
In my view, it is these earlier changes that laid the groundwork for what has become one of the most exciting neighborhoods in the country.
However, today some are worried about whether or not this is too much of a good thing. And I am sure that many would like to blame developers for piling up in this neighborhood. Why continue to build here when there’s lots of land elsewhere?
King-Spadina is a perfect example of what Richard Florida would call “winner-take-all urbanism.” There are powerful clustering forces at play both globally and locally in our cities. And so there are real economic reasons for why King-Spadina has seen more development than Etobicoke and Scarborough combined.
Permissive land use policies and the right building stock may have kickstarted things, but now economies of agglomeration have taken over. Retailers, restaurants, clubs, tech companies and people, among many others, are now fighting for space in this area for the same reason that Toronto’s garment industry once felt the need to cluster here. There are tangible benefits to doing so.
What people are effectively asking today is at what point do we start to see diseconomies of agglomeration. This is an important question and one that needs to be actively managed.
Without getting into any of the details, I believe that the King Street Pilot Study – which puts transit first along the King corridor – is one very appropriate answer to this question. It is a direct response to diseconomies of agglomeration, in this case traffic congestion.
But there are important corollaries to this question that are also worth considering: How do we now create more King-Spadinas and how do we create more broad-based and inclusive urbanism in the face of these powerful clustering forces? These are questions that go well beyond King-Spadina, but there are lessons to be learned from the successes seen on the west side of downtown Toronto.
Images via The Globe and Mail and Google Street View
Last night I received an email from a 27 year old woman in Virginia Beach that really made my day. With her permission, I am sharing that email in full here on the blog, but redacting her identity. Here it is:
Brandon,
You don’t know me, but I just wanted to take a moment and say, thank you. I am a 27 year-old woman living and working in Virginia Beach, VA, with a Civil Engineering degree from Virginia Tech. Up until recently, I have been trying to “find myself” in my career with little success. I always had a feeling that I was “meant to do something” with my career. The problem was that I didn’t know what the hell I wanted to do.
Anyway, fast-forward to November 2016, and I decided to start applying to real estate development companies in the area. After all, it seemed like a pretty cool job. I began sending random emails to a few companies to see if they would hire me…. There wasn’t a real position open – I sort of just begged. Through all my random internet searches, I happened to find your blog one day… And to be honest, you have become a great inspiration to me.
I began to love real estate development. Not just normal development, I want to make a difference. I began to feel excited and passionate about a science, a line of work, and an end vision and goal that several people share. I want to build these wonderful, competitive, beautiful, sustainable cities. I want to make our world better and more beautiful one place at a time. I was finally able to find myself through your work, so I thank you. You have helped me to commit to a career switch, be patient with my job hunt, and apply for an MBA program.
Thank you for doing what inspires you because by doing it, you are also inspiring this crazy girl down in Virginia Beach! Keep it up.
I wanted to share this email for two reasons.
One, if you’re a firm in the Virginia Beach area, you should consider meeting her for a coffee. Send me an email and I’ll forward it along to her. It’s always challenging breaking into a new industry.
And two, her email does a great job illustrating how important it is for people to feel fulfilled with their work. People want to make a difference. And some would argue that this desire is even more pronounced in the next generation coming up and entering the workforce.
I feel lucky that I love what I do. And I know that many of my colleagues feel the same way.
Sometimes my friends in the development business will say to me that it’s hard not to become cynical and jaded over time. You start out wanting to change cities for the better and you think you’re doing the right thing, but then it feels like you’re getting punched in the gut every step of the way trying to do exactly that.
That’s what life will do to you every now and then: It will punch you in the gut. If you want to accomplish great things, you have to take those. But it’s a hell of a lot easier to take them when you’re fulfilled by the work you do.
Trying to build better cities is pretty damn fulfilling. I am sure that many of you would agree, regardless of what side of the industry you happen to be on.
Photo by Ravali Yan on Unsplash
