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: new york city

  • Eliminating poopy water

    Lots of cities around the world, including Toronto, have (at least partially) what is called a combined sewer system. If the sewer system was built prior to the 1940s and it hasn’t been replaced, there’s a good chance that it could be a combined system. About a quarter of Toronto and about 60% of New York City still run on combined systems.

    What this means is that both stormwater and sewage run in the same pipes. Most of the time this is fine, but if there’s a heavy precipitation event and the system backs up, then you have poop getting diverted into rivers, lakes, and other bodies of water. In Toronto, this happens in places like the Don River and the inner harbor, and in Paris it happens in places like the Seine.

    I was recently reading something suggesting that sewage generally gets dumped into the Seine about 12x per year as result of major rain events. This is why it’s such a difficult and expensive task to make these bodies of water swimmable, which is something that Paris wants to do before it hosts the Olympics next year.

    Thankfully, Toronto also wants to do the same. And in 2018, it started construction on the largest stormwater management program in the city’s history. The overall budget is about $3 billion. Once complete, it should more or less eliminate combined sewer overflows, meaning our waters will become a lot cleaner and more swimmable.

    This certainly isn’t the sexiest capital project to announce and talk about. It largely happens behind the scenes. But it is going to lead to a significant quality of life upgrade for the cities willing to take it on — one that will pay dividends well into the future.

    Photo by Andre Gaulin on Unsplash

  • New York City enacts strict short-term rental law

    This past week, New York City enacted a new short-term rental registration law that is not very friendly toward platforms like Airbnb and VRBO. Here are some of the new rules:

    • All hosts must register with the city
    • No more than 2 paying guests can stay in a short-term rental at one time, regardless of the size of the home (does this mean families are excluded?)
    • Hosts and visitors must leave all doors inside the dwelling unlocked (presumably this is to stop people from creating self-contained suites within a larger home)
    • And the host must be physically present while the dwelling is being rented

    So in a way, this takes us back to the original use case of Airbnb: “Hey, I have extra space in my home. Would you like to rent this mostly clean air mattress in my living room and be my roommate for a bit?” Of course, this is not how most people like to Airbnb today. And so this is also a kind of ban on short-term rentals in New York City.

    It’s certainly stricter than the regulations we have in Toronto. Here, it must be your principal residence. Meaning you’re only legally allowed to operate one short-term rental at a time. But you don’t need to be physically present while the home is being rented. If you want to earn some extra cash while you’re away in Rio de Janeiro for New Year’s Eve, you can do that.

    However, the rules are still fairly strict. For instance, if you have a basement apartment or a laneway suite on your property, you are not technically permitted to short-term rent these dwellings, even if you live in the main portion of the home. It has to be your exact principal residence.

    Presumably the intent behind this is to not remove any housing from the long-term rental market. And if it’s your principal residence, then yeah, there’s no net loss. Though this feels like an overreach to me. It’s the same property and a homeowner could very easily decide to not even do a long-term rental in these secondary suites.

    But overall, I guess it’s still slightly more flexible than forcing hostel-like short-term rentals. Long live the hotel?

  • People tend to prefer independent restaurants over chains

    I just came across the above chart from City Observatory showing the percentage of restaurants in each city that are part of a chain. (The data is taken from Yelp.) On the top is New York City, where only about 13% of restaurants in the city are a chain. And on the other end is Louisville, where more than 35% belong to a chain.

    The article also observes that there appears to be a correlation between restaurants per capita and the percentage of independents. In other words, the more restaurants you have, the higher the likelihood that more of them will be independents. New York City is once again at the top with 22 restaurants per 10,000 people.

    What is perhaps most interesting about this data is that Yelp ratings show a pretty clear preference for independent restaurants. Meaning that, on average, independent restaurants receive a higher rating compared to chain restaurants. At the same time, this spread seems to be widening. Here’s data from 2012 to 2017:

    This is maybe obvious; but it’s worth reiterating. As city builders, it’s good practice to encourage independent and small businesses. They are a competitive advantage. People, at least based on this Yelp data, seem to clearly like them more. So I guess Jane Jacobs was right: “The greatest asset a city can have is something that is different from every other place.”

    Charts: City Observatory

  • Geography of activity centers

    We need more “activity centers”. That is my takeaway from this report by Brookings.

    Activity centers are exactly what they sound like. But to be more specific, the definition used in the report is based on five categories of assets: community, tourism, consumption, institutional, and economic. And what the authors did was look at the relative concentration of each across the 110 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the US with at least 500,000 residents.

    They then came up with 3 different kinds of activity centers. Monocenters (blue in the above map), secondary centers (yellow), and primary centers (orange). Monocenters have, as you’d probably expect, a lot of one kind of asset. Secondary centers, on the other hand, have “some of at least two kinds of assets.” And primary centers have “a lot of at least two kinds of assets.”

    Looking at the above map, it is pretty clear — and not at all surprising — that Manhattan is, for the most part, one giant activity center. There is a lot going on. But this is not the typical condition. In the 110 metro areas looked at in the study, activity centers only occupy about 3% of land on average. The remaining 97% of land is, based on the above definition, a non-activity center.

    Why this matters is that activity centers punch above their weight. Despite representing a small land area, activity centers are home to 40% of all private sector jobs in the US. Supposedly, they also increase productivity (by an additional ~$1,723 per worker), yield higher property values (+26%), increase inclusivity, and reduce vehicle miles travelled.

    So yeah, more activity centers sounds like a good thing for our cities. Though as we have learned in recent years, we need to be careful with monocenters.

    Map: Brookings

  • Sloping columns and columns in tension

    I had an interesting meeting today talking about the structural approach behind this OMA-designed project in Brooklyn (pictured above).

    I have always found structural engineering fascinating. Structures, along with physics, were some of my favorite classes from high school all the way to grad school. So even though I don’t think my personality is ideally suited to engineering, if I were ever to become an engineer, I’m fairly certain that I would need to be a structural one.

    For this project the big structural challenge was the large cantilevers that you see above in the tower on the left. As I understand it, there a number of ways to deal with this. One way would be to just design large transfer slabs and/or beams. But given the size of this tower, these would end up being very deep, and so you’d be really compromising the spaces where these structural transfers occur.

    How they actually dealt with it is through sloping columns (which you can see in the above photo if you look closely). What these columns do is gradually transfer the loads across multiple floors in the building, until they reach structure that runs all the way down the tower.

    At the same time, the spaces underneath the sloping columns are essentially “hung” from above. Meaning the columns are in tension, instead of being in compression, which is typically how columns work. The result is that you get some sloping columns in the suites. But I think that’s kind of cool. If you’re nerdy enough to care, it tells you how the structure of the building is working.

    Obvious disclaimer: I am not a structural engineer. You probably want to consult one if you’re looking to do a cantilevered tower with sloping columns.

    Photo: Elevated Angles via Highbury Concrete

  • Lyft might sell its bikeshare business

    So apparently Lyft is the largest bikeshare operator in North America. They operate around 68,000 bikes and scooters, which equaled some 52 million rides last year. Ridership also continues to grow. Since 2020, ridership has grown in cities like New York (+56%), Chicago (+79%), Boston (82%), and Denver (+170%).

    However, this part of Lyft’s business was in the news this week because the company announced that they are entertaining proposals to sell it, as well as “strategic partnerships.” The company has said that it remains committed to offering bikes through the Lyft app, but clearly it is trying to shore up its balance sheet.

    This raises some interesting questions. Can bikeshare be a profitable and sustainable for-profit business? Or do we now need to be thinking of it as an important public service that is deserving of subsidies — similar to how public transit and cars/roads work in most cities? My own view is that these networks are here to stay regardless of how profitable or unprofitable they might be.

    For additional stats on Lyft’s bikeshare business, click here. One of the figures that I found interesting, but not surprising, was that 71% of riders use bikeshare for “fun.” This is by far the most popular use case. The next most popular use is “errands” at 39%.

  • 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.

  • New York City is piloting about a dozen motion sensor cameras

    This won’t come as a surprise to many of you. But I recently attended a community meeting where someone was advocating for adding new lanes to a particular road. Their argument was that traffic congestion is forcing too many cars to sit needlessly idle and that that is bad for the environment. The proposed solution of adding new lanes would get traffic moving, reduce idling pollution, and therefore be overall better for the environment.

    I disagree entirely.

    But transportation planning seems to be one of those things that many people feel is intuitive. It’s one of those things where people feel confident saying, “I know how to fix this. We just need to do this.” But the reality is that cities are incredibly complex organisms and it’s not always obvious what should be done. So I think that a big part of making our cities better comes down to having much better data. And that’s why I’m very intrigued by the work that startup Viva, and others, are doing.

    Viva uses small street-light mounted cameras and machine learning to track urban mobility (see image above). Currently they track 9 different modes: pedestrian, bicycle, e-scooter, motorcycle, car, van, light truck, semi-truck, and bus. And after they collect this data, the relevant information is extracted and then everything else is deleted for privacy reasons. There are also plans to make this data openly available to the public so that people can use it and/or build on top of it.

    Obviously this is still going to raise privacy concerns and that is something that will need to be carefully addressed. But I do think that the data from a platform like this is going to be invaluable for cities. Among many other things, it will help us to better allocate space among the various modes and design much safer streets. Hopefully it can also help to take some of the politics out of these sorts of decisions: “Here’s the data. Take a look.”

    Viva currently has 1,000 sensors already installed in London (where they are being used to evaluate the impacts of congestion pricing), and about half a dozen in New York. So it’ll be interesting to see what this leads to. And who knows, maybe it will actually turn us all into amateur transportation planners. We’ll certainly have access to a lot more data.

    For more information on Viva, here’s their website.

    Image: Viva

  • The most expensive new subway line in the world

    In other New York City news, they apparently have the most expensive new subway line in the world:

    At $2.5 billion per mile, construction costs for the 1.8-mile Phase 1 of the Second Avenue Subway were 8 to 12 times more expensive than similar subway projects in Italy, Istanbul, Sweden, Paris, Berlin and Spain, according to a report from New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management.

    This is an important problem because public transit is good for cities:

    It is not possible to outdo the subway in capacity per amount of land consumed— and in a high-demand city, 12-lane freeways are prohibitively land-intensive. Hook (1994) argued that Japan focused on rail transportation in its largest cities because it had high land values in the postwar era and such strong property rights that widespread land condemnation for freeways based on the American model was impossible.

    If this is a topic that interests you, I would encourage you to check out the report, as well as their Transit Costs Project website. It allows you to compare transit project costs for 159 different cities.

  • New York City appoints first Chief Public Realm Officer

    This could be a good idea:

    New York City Mayor Eric Adams today appointed Ya-Ting Liu as the city’s first-ever chief public realm officer, delivering on a key promise from his State of the City address. In this newly created role, Liu will coordinate across city government, community organizations, and the private sector to create extraordinary public spaces across the entire city and continue to drive the city’s economic recovery.

    As chief public realm officer, Liu will focus on delivering two components of Mayor Adams’ “Working People’s Agenda.” She will execute on a plan to invest $375 million to create and expand high-quality public spaces in all five boroughs, which includes the Broadway Vision plan, a full reconstruction of Jamaica Avenue from Sutphin Boulevard to Merrick Boulevard, and permanent upgrades to Open Streets in the Bronx and on Staten Island. At the same time, she will lead the administration’s work to deliver a permanent outdoor dining program in partnership with the City Council that works for businesses and residents, building on the massive success of the pandemic-era temporary Open Restaurants program, with clear design guidelines and accessible tools for restaurant owners and communities.

    When done right, public spaces have been proven to promote economic development. Perhaps the most obvious example in New York is the High Line. The first two phases cost around $153 million to construct, and as of 2014 it was already attracting some 5 million visitors a year and thought to be responsible for over $2 billion of economic activity. As of 2019, the number of annual visitors had increased to 8 million.

    So if New York ends up with more of these spaces — you know, enjoyable spaces that attract lots of humans and investment — this could be a good idea.