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

  • High Park vs. Central Park

    This compare-and-contrast tweet between Toronto’s High Park and New York’s Central Park was not meant to suggest that New York is a perfect comparable to appropriate (Toronto is not New York), or that foliage isn’t important in our urban environments. Instead, it was meant to highlight that:

    • The towers north of High Park (and north of Bloor Street) could almost certainly never be built in today’s planning environment. The recently built point towers exist because the slab towers were already there.
    • This condition of height/density tucked and setback off of main streets is something that you will find across Toronto, as well as in a number of other cities.
    • Sometimes it can be rightly argued that this is being done in order to preserve a fine-grained and pedestrian-scaled public realm, which is important. But in other cases, like the one above, it feels like a clear reluctance to accept big-city status and any sort of urban grandeur. Are we still trying to be a Victorian city?
    • Equally important in the design of public spaces are the edges and “walls” that frame it. And High Park’s edges need work. Why is there almost nowhere to go and hang out on the main edge of Toronto’s principal urban park? You have to go up to the Junction for that.
    • In general, the land around many of our higher-order transit stations is grossly underutilized. And this is a perfect example of that. What should happen here are some large-scale upzonings.

  • Yes, the most surveilled cities in the world are in China

    Toronto has a lot more CCTV cameras than I would have thought.

    According to this (2022?) data from Comparitech, there is estimated to be about 19,236 cameras installed around the Greater Toronto Area. With a population of around 6.31 million people, this translates into a per capita rate of 3.05 (CCTV cameras per 1,000 people). What this means is that there is almost surely footage of me enjoying a late-night shawarma sandwich after the bar somewhere on the streets of Toronto.

    In some ways, this is a high number of cameras. Tokyo, which is usually considered to be the largest metro area in the world with nearly 40 million people, only has 1.06 cameras per 1,000 people. Dhaka is 0.71. Sao Paulo is 1.04. Osaka is 1.57. And Montreal is 1.03. Though to be totally fair here, Rio de Janeiro is up at 3.34 (and it may be the most dangerous city mentioned in this post). Paris is 4.04. New York is 6.87. Los Angeles is 8.77. And London is 13.35.

    But where things get really exciting is in authoritarian places. Moscow is estimated to have 16.85 CCTV cameras per 1,000 people. And in China as a whole, there is estimated to be roughly 540 million cameras scattered around its cities, which works out to an average of 372.8 cameras for every 1,000 people. For a city like Shanghai, this crudely equals something like 10.6 million cameras.

    It turns out that surveillance is pretty important for things other than shawarma-eating videos:

    Vyborov wasn’t arrested that day, but the police informed him that he was under surveillance through Sfera, one of Moscow’s face recognition systems, for participating in unsanctioned rallies. Considered one of the most efficient surveillance systems, Sfera led to the detention of 141 people last year. “Facial recognition, and video cameras in general in a totalitarian state, are an absolute evil,” Vyborov says.

    Here’s the other thing. Safety is usually touted as the reason to have lots of cameras. But Comparitech’s data suggests that there’s an almost non-existent correlation between lots of cameras and lower crime. I mean, just look at Tokyo. It is basically the model megacity, and its per capita camera rate is only 1.06. The real utility, it would seem, is using cameras and face recognition software to restrict personal freedoms.

  • Two very different beans

    As far as I know, there are now at least two mercury-like and bean-like public art sculptures in the US by Anish Kapoor. The first is, of course, in Chicago’s Millennium Park (pictured above). Commonly referred to as just “The Bean”, the sculpture was dedicated in 2006 and, since then, has gained international fame as a solid place to take a selfie.

    But as of this year, there is now a second “mini-bean” in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood. Sitting literally underneath 56 Leonard (a residential tower designed by Herzog & de Meuron), this bean varietal was first announced in 2008, but has taken a few years to be completed. The building itself was completed about 5 five years ago.

    It turns out though, that all beans are not made equal. Here’s some initial feedback from Bloomberg CityLab’s Kristin Capps:

    New York’s half-bean feels half-baked: a disappointing imitation for the city and a franchise play by the artist. For New York to install the lesser version of a Chicago icon reeks of second-city status. And while the original sculpture is still a treasure, the second iteration feels like a monument from 20 years ago — because it is.

    But it’s all perception. If Chicago’s bean had never been unveiled in 2006, and this was the first shiny urban selfie bean, then I’m sure we’d all be headed to Lower Manhattan with our phones. But instead, here we are talking about how it “reeks of second-city status” and how it is the “eyesore that no one asked for“.

    It’s all very fascinating if you think about it. And it’s a perfect example of why blockchains are proving to be so valuable in the world of art. Because with art, provenance and authenticity are everything. You need to know where it came from, who made it, and that it’s scarce. And as we can see here, it can be the difference between loving a bean and hating a bean.

    Photo by Wicker Woodsong on Unsplash

  • Bad and good street networks

    Let’s add some historical context to yesterday’s post about autonomous vehicles. As the regular non-autonomous version of cars started to infiltrate our cities in the early 20th century, largely following the creation of the mass-produced Ford Model T, there was a general view that cars were dangerous and a menace to cities. Arguably, not much has changed.

    So in the 1930s, the Federal Housing Authority decided to publish a pamphlet explaining what street networks it thought were suitable for this new emerging car world and which street networks were not. The exact terms that they used were “bad” and “good”, and here’s what that looked like (taken from this CNU article):

    The “bad” ones are largely how the US liked to design its cities before the arrival of the car. Some historic settlements, like Boston and Manhattan south of 14th street were based on different street logics, but as far back as the 1680s, William Penn had already started laying out a grid iron plan for Philadelphia. And in reality, this kind of street pattern goes all the way back to ancient cities.

    However, when the car arrived, these grid iron plans were thought to offer an inadequate amount of separation between people and machine. The solution was to optimize around the car and introduce a clear hierarchy of different streets. Big streets for moving cars quickly, and smaller streets, like cul-de-sacs, for people to live on.

    These “good” examples, of course, represent the modern suburb. But we now recognize that these types of street networks are unequivocally terrible for walkability, the environment, public health, social equity, and a whole host of other things. I mean, look at this extreme example of two suburban homes in Orlando whose backyards adjoin but are technically separated by 7 miles and a 20-minute drive!

    My point with all of this is that, for many/most at the time, this was progress. Cars were the future and there was optimism about the kind of freedoms and other benefits that they would bring to people. And this optimism is perhaps not all that different from what many people feel today, myself included, when it comes to autonomous vehicles.

    So on the one hand, you could point to the car and say, “look at all the damage that this thing did to our cities. Let’s not do that again. Autonomous vehicles must be stopped.” But that’s akin to wishing the car was never invented. Another option is to point to the negative externalities associated with the car and say, “look at what we’ve done. We can do better. Let’s make our cities better.”

    Positive change, no matter how late, is always a possibility.

  • The most expensive home in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood

    The most expensive home in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood is currently under contract and is expected to close in the next few months (at least according to the WSJ). It is a 4,270 square-foot penthouse, with a 500 square-foot terrace, that occupies the full top floor of Olympia Dumbo.

    The asking price / contract price is $17.5 million, which works out to be about USD 4,098 per square foot (or CAD 5,486 per square foot based on the exchange rate right now). Based on this price per pound, an equivalent 600 square foot suite would cost you about CAD $3.3 million.

    The land was purchased in 2018 for about $98 million. I don’t know what the total GFA of the building is, but it does have 76 residences, so that works out to about USD 1,289,473 per suite (or CAD 1,726,624 per suite), for the land cost alone.

    This should give you an indication of what the end suite pricing would need to be to make this development feasible, and likely also speaks to its average suite size. New York City tends to build much bigger suites. Certainly compared to here in Toronto.

    Also, notice that I didn’t say unit?

  • Our current public transit problem/opportunity

    Over the past few years, I have been writing about the fall off in public transit ridership that we have seen as a result of the pandemic. Most recently, I mentioned it in my predictions for 2023.

    This topic doesn’t seem to get a lot of air time, but it is a problem. Because the standard way to operate a transit system in North America is at a loss.

    According to this recent WSJ article, the average fare recovery ratio across the US is somewhere around 1/3, with the remaining 2/3 of operating costs being covered by public money.

    (Somehow Japan has figured out a way to make money on rail.)

    During the pandemic, federal aid was disbursed in order to maintain service levels. The MTA in New York, for example, received $15.1 billion. But these aid packages will eventually run out, and ridership has yet to fully return:

    New York’s subway system has regained about two-thirds of its pre-pandemic ridership with about 91 million trips in November, according to the MTA. But that is about 50 million fewer rides than in November 2019. Officials worry usage has stalled out at that level.

    In San Francisco, the Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART, recorded 3.7 million trips in November—a little more than one-third of the ridership before Covid.

    The obvious answer is likely to be a combination of service cuts and/or more public money. But an even better answer would be to use this opportunity to figure out how to make our transit systems a little more Japanese.

    That is, let’s make them more financially sustainable. And yes, that is going to necessarily involve looking at how we build around and on top of transit.

  • The Architect’s Newspaper — 2022 Best of Design Awards

    This week AN announced its 2022 Best of Design Awards, which is intended to celebrate outstanding built and unbuilt architectural projects from around the world. And this year I am excited to share that Studio Gang was awarded two editors’ picks: one for 11 Hoyt in Brooklyn (Built-Residential, Multi-Unit) and one for One Delisle here in Toronto (Unbuilt-Residential, Multi-Unit). Selfishly, it of course makes me very happy to see our project being celebrated for its architecture. Go team! But from a less selfish perspective, it also makes me very happy to see Toronto being recognized in these awards. Because this is about city building, right?

  • A “New” New York

    Earlier this year, the Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, and the Governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, assembled a panel of civic leaders and industry experts to try and come up with a plan for a “New” New York.

    Initially, this panel was intended to be entirely focused on reviving the city’s business districts, and in particular those that have been slow to recover from the pandemic. But scope creep happens and it ultimately grew to include two other important goals: make it easier to get around and encourage “inclusive, future-focused growth.”

    The recommendations from this panel were released today and it’s in the form of a report with 40 specific initiatives. In keeping with its original intent, the first recommended initiative is one that you would expect: “Make Midtown and other business districts more live-work-play.” And what that means is the following:

    We will remove barriers that have kept Midtown and other business districts stagnant by making it easier to convert and redevelop outdated office buildings to other uses, including residential, thereby empowering the market to create more vibrant, mixed-use districts. We will also update old-fashioned regulatory codes that have prevented small businesses from locating, expanding, and innovating in those districts, providing zoning flexibility for businesses to thrive. And we will unite our business districts behind a shared goal of vitality by aligning incentives for businesses to help maintain vibrant business districts.

    New York isn’t the first city to be encouraging office-to-residential conversions and it certainly isn’t going to be the last. I think most of you know that I am a firm believer in office-centric cultures and that I’m in mine 5 days a week. But this is a recalibration that is going to need to take place in some submarkets.

    And here is one of the capitals of the world — New York City — telling us that it needs to happen there.

  • New ideas like buildings people don’t want

    There is a very common story that plays out in cities. It starts with an area that has seen disinvestment and is probably a little seedy and/or dangerous . This creates an environment where rents and real estate as a whole are relatively inexpensive. New, cool and creative businesses start to move in (attracted by said inexpensiveness) and the area begins to turn around. Eventually it becomes suitable for institutional-type investors, and this ultimately leads to everything becoming expensive as a result of demand outstripping supply. Gentrification complete.

    The great irony of this story is that you sometimes, or oftentimes, lose the very things that made the area cool and interesting in the first place. Here is an example from Miami:

    The result has been a property speculation boom that, when combined with the city’s relatively low wages, put many businesses and residents on the street. Asking rents for industrial space, for instance, went up by 53 percent in the last year alone. Nobody can afford to buy, let alone rent, adequate space for a music venue because so much land has been snapped up by outside investors with a predilection for grand, “world-class urban” designs. 

    And for some areas, it is arguably the result of a careful and deliberate plan that was put in place nearly two decades ago:

    Teele’s commissioner district in the early 2000s included both Park West and the historically Black neighborhood of Overtown. At the turn of the millennium the area was blighted and crime-ridden thanks to years of racist, regressive policy decisions from segregation to redlining. His plan was simple but incredibly effective. He spearheaded a campaign to revitalize the area by granting a limited number of 24-hour liquor licenses to clubs like Space. Dozens of venues rose up on and around 11th Street, including vast, multi-room clubs like Metropolis, live venues like Studio A and Grand Central, and more intimate spots like Vagabond. Sporadic police raids also gave the area a druggy, dangerous reputation, inadvertently raising its allure. 

    This reoccurring arc has led some people to conclude that cities and/or areas seem to want to follow a kind of binary outcome: they’re either dying or they’re too successful. Why can’t we just have urban homeostasis? I don’t think this is necessarily always the case. Cities go through cycles just like any other market. I also know that it’s complicated. But I do feel strongly that we need to be mindful that part of what makes cities such wonderful places is that they are factories for new ideas and creativity.

    I can’t remember when or exactly how he said it, but YouTuber Casey Neistat once described New York City as an incredible island (Manhattan?) where misfits from all over the world come to do whatever the hell they want. And that part of the reason for this is that nobody cares what you do, because everyone is just so damn busy. You could certainly argue that New York isn’t what it used to be. But the lesson here remains the same: Cities are at their best when they allow humans to create, build, experiment, and express themselves.

    And oftentimes a great place for that is in a space that nobody else wants.

  • New York City proposes a bounty for reporting bike-lane blockers

    The general rule when it comes to bike lanes is that, if you build them without some sort of grade-separation, at some point a car is going to park in them. But here are two possible solutions to this problem. The first is that you could build some sort of grade-separation that can’t be driven over. And the second is as follows:

    Now a New York City Council member is pushing a bill that would give civilians the power to report bike lane scofflaws, as well as vehicles that block entrances or exits of school buildings, sidewalks and crosswalks. New Yorkers who submit evidence of a parking violation can earn 25% of a proposed $175 ticket. The Department of Transportation would review the evidence to determine whether an infraction has occurred, according to the bill’s text.

    What this essentially does is decentralize rule enforcement by paying people to be rats. Off hand, I can’t think of any other cities that have done something like this and so I don’t know how effective it might actually be. But being a rat sounds like it could be a good paying job.

    Let’s assume that somebody decided to treat this as their full-time job and work 8 hours a day, Monday to Friday. And then let’s assume that they were able to rat out one person per hour. Here’s how much money they could make in a year:

    • $175 x 25% = $43.75 per illegal incident
    • $43.75 x 8 incidents per day = $350 per day
    • $350 per day x 5 days a week = $1,750 per week
    • $1,750 per week x 52 weeks = $91,000 per year

    Now, if the goal of this rat-people-out program is to ultimately change behaviors, then it might make sense to assume that your revenues would decline over time as more people start following the rules. Either way, something tells me that more than a few people would be happy to take on this job.