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

  • + POOL receives “confirmation to proceed with due diligence”

    I learned this morning that + POOL (pictured above) recently received an official” confirmation to proceed with due diligence.” This is after more than a decade of planning, fundraising, negotiations, prototyping and, I’m sure, a bunch of other stuff. City building takes a long time. I’m not exactly sure where this milestone sits in the full spectrum of idea to realization, but it certainly sounds like meaningful progress.

    The idea behind + POOL is pretty simple: People like to swim in water. But the East River is dirty and not the best place to swim (supposedly it’s been this way — unswimmable — since the 1930s). So why not create a dedicated swimming pool in the river and why not make it so that it filters the dirty East River water at the same time. Pretty clever. (The plus sign format is so that it can be split up into four separate uses.)

    New York City is in the midst of creating some incredibly unique public spaces. The other big news is that Little Island opened up this past weekend within the larger Hudson River Park. Also more than a decade in the making, the free 2.4 acre public park, which was designed by Thomas Heatherwick, is the result of a $260 million donation from Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg.

    Start with an idea. Put some money around it. And then fight like hell for many years. That’s how these remarkable urban spaces are getting created. This is also pretty much how real estate development works.

  • Ray: Architecturally-inspired homes at the intersection of art, culture, and community

    Back in 2008, Dasha Zhukova and Roman Abramovich hired starchitect Rem Koolhaas and founded a new contemporary art museum in Moscow called the Garage Museum. Supposedly this was the first philanthropic institution in Russia dedicated solely to contemporary art. (Here’s a short video in case you’re curious what it looks like.) After it opened, the founders apparently had a realization about the way people like to consume art. Yes, people like to look at art and ponder deep things. But it turns out that people also like just being around art and other art-like things. People started coming to the Garage Museum not only to view the various exhibitions, but also to just hang out.

    This insight is now being used to inform a new real estate development company, also by Dasha, called Ray. The mission of the company is to create “architecturally-inspired homes at the intersection of art, culture, and community.” Their first two projects are in Harlem and Fishtown, Philadelphia, but apparently they have something cooking in Miami as well. What Ray hopes to do is integrate art and culture in a more meaningful way through cultural programming, exhibitions in their buildings, artist studio spaces, and other creative ideas.

    There’s also an affordable housing angle. According to the WSJ, Ray’s Harlem project is a joint venture with L+M Development Partners. I don’t know any of the specifics of this deal, but I know L+M, because one of their founding partners, Ron Moelis, was a professor of mine in graduate school. L+M is focused on affordable and mixed-income housing and uses tools like the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) to make these sorts of projects financially feasible. They aren’t, otherwise. I learned all about them in school and I always found it to be a great way to get the private sector building affordable housing.

    “Art and culture, community, and accessible pricing.”

  • New York City rolls out contactless fare payment at every single subway station

    I’m late to the party here, but I was reading this morning about how New York City recently completed the rollout of its One Metro New York (OMNY) fare payment system. What this does is allow you to use contactless payment systems, like Apple Pay, to get on the subway. ONMY is now available across the five boroughs on every bus and at all 472 subway stations (feel free to impress your friends at virtual parties with this stat).

    Metrolinx here in Toronto is similarly piloting contactless payments on the Union Pearson Express. You now have the option of tapping a credit card, a phone, or a watch. Maybe this doesn’t seem like such a big deal, but I still remember when the PRESTO payment card was first rolled out — it felt late to me. Apple added near-field communication (NFC) to iPhone in 2014, and at that point I think it was fairly obvious that standalone payment cards wouldn’t be around much longer.

    That time has arrived for New York City and will be hopefully arriving shortly for Toronto. And I think it will be particularly useful for tourists who may not have a Metrocard (NYC) or PRESTO card (Toronto) and just want to jump on a train. I’ve only taken the subway a handful of times during this pandemic, but I’ll be back at it once the world fully resumes. And I definitely can’t wait to take the UP Express to the airport again (and to the Junction).

  • It’s okay for urbanism to be a bit messy

    The urban-to-rural transect is a New Urbanist planning framework that prescribes a smooth continuum of settlements that go from least dense to most dense. The six zones are as follows: natural (T1), rural (T2), sub-urban (T3), general urban (T4), center (T5), and core (T6).

    Part of this framework is about rejecting single-use Euclidean zoning. Instead of segregating uses, New Urbanism looks to return to a mix of uses within close proximity of each other. This is a good thing.

    But the transect also advocates for a certain orderliness. There should be a smooth transition as you move outward from T6 toward T1. It is about placing things in their useful order and maintaining a certain kind of character.

    Witold Rybczynski makes an interesting observation about this in a recent post called “urban discontinuities.” The point he makes is that some of the most remarkable urban moments are the result not of smoothness, but of “odd juxtapositions.”

    Think:

    – Mount Royal (T1) in the middle of downtown Montreal (T6).

    – The North Shore Mountains (T1) that terminate views from within the building canyons of downtown Vancouver (T6)

    – The walls of tall buildings (T6) that frame Central Park (T1) in Manhattan

    – The wonderful ravines (T1) that cut through Toronto’s urban fabric (T6)

    These are contrasting zones in the transect bumping up against each other. And it turns out that most of us really like these moments. But I think that the bigger point to be made here is that urban environments aren’t always neat and tidy, and that’s because they are a constantly evolving organism.

    That’s not a bug. It’s actually a feature to be celebrated.

  • Upsizing to a larger apartment in New York City

    This is an interesting story about New Yorkers starting to seek out larger homes. Last month, Manhattan saw 140 purchase agreements signed for homes priced at $4 million or more. In the last week of February alone, 40 contracts were signed, which is apparently a weekly record for this price point that hasn’t been seen since August 2016.

    What’s also interesting is that, in some of these cases, we’re talking about buyers who bought preconstruction and then went back to the developer to swap for a larger apartment. Developer Scott Avram is quoted in the above article saying that 10 buyers have “upgraded their contracts” at 130 William (David Adjaye project) over the last six months.

    As we’ve talked about before, this is likely happening for a bunch of reasons. People have been working from home and want more space. Interest rates are low. And New York saw some softening in prices and now people are jumping back in to seize on those opportunities. At the same time, it is yet another example of people going long on dense urban living.

  • Future flexibility in multi-family buildings

    It was recently reported that Jimmy Fallon and his wife are selling their New York City Penthouse in Gramercy Park. It’s listed for $15 million. In looking at the photos, it’s pretty much what I would have expected. It’s fun and quirky. And they have a “saloon room” that looks like it could be in Wyoming. But what I also find interesting is how they assembled this apartment over time.

    It started in 2002. Jimmy Fallon was single and he bought his first place in the building — a one bedroom for $850,000. According to the article, he couldn’t really afford it. But as he was nearing the end of his run on SNL, Lorne Michael encouraged him to buy his own place. So he went and did that in Gramercy Park in a building that dates back to the 1800s.

    As life evolved and as Jimmy got married, he and his wife started buying contiguous apartments — three more to be exact. Their penthouse apartment is now about 5,000 square feet and spans three floors in the building. It’s an interesting case study in the flexibility of multi-family buildings. Here is a building that was built in the 1800s and has probably seen a myriad of changes over its lifetime.

    Future flexibility is something that is talked about here in Toronto in the context of new construction. We talk about “knock-out panels” so that someone like Jimmy can grow into a larger suite. I’m not sure how often this actually happens, but I would imagine the frequency is relatively low. But it’s very possible and not just in older buildings like The Gramercy Park.

  • Net new housing units in New York City since 2010

    Here are a few interesting stats from a brief report that New York City published this month about their supply of new housing units:

    • From January 1, 2010 to June 30, 2020, New York City delivered 205,994 net new housing units across the five boroughs.
    • This total includes 202,956 units from new construction and 29,161 units from the alteration/conversion of existing buildings. However, it also factors units that were lost as a result of demolition (-17,400) or alteration (-8,723).
    • Brooklyn saw the most supply, followed by Manhattan. The four highest-growth Community Districts were responsible for 1/3 of all new housing additions. These CDs are all formerly non-residential areas that were rezoned to allow living.
    • Manhattan saw the greatest loss in housing units as a result of alterations (people combining units). This was most prevalent in wealthy neighborhoods such as the Upper East Side, Upper West Side, and Greenwich Village.

    What is interesting about this last point is that it shows you that cities are far from static. New York City lost 26,123 housing units during the above time period, with 8,723 units being lost to alterations and people combining units.

    The orange areas on the above map are neighborhoods which actually became less dense over the last decade. And of course, this phenomenon is not unique to New York City. We are seeing the same thing play out in some/many neighborhoods in Toronto.

    What this mean is that the role of new development is really twofold. It allows a city to grow (i.e. house new New Yorkers), but it also replaces lost housing and relieves some of the pressures on the existing housing stock. I don’t think many people appreciate this dynamic — or perhaps they don’t care.

    For a copy of the full report (it’s only two pages), click here.

  • A new Frame Home in Brooklyn

    Fred Wilson (venture capitalist) and Joanne Wilson (also an investor) have been working on a passive house apartment building in Brooklyn for the last five years. Their development company is called Frame Home. And this past week they received a pretty great Christmas gift in the form of a Temporary Certificate of Occupancy from NYC Buildings.

    At 5 storeys and with only 10 two-bedroom units, you could classify this building as the kind “missing middle” housing that gets so much air time here in Toronto. And so not only have they managed to build relatively small, but they’ve done it using passive house design principles.

    Here are some of the apartment building’s features:

    • Cross-laminated timber (CLT) structure
    • Passive house design approach
    • Triple-pane windows
    • Interior polished and insulated concrete walls (presumably to act as a thermal mass to moderate heating/cooling throughout the year)
    • Solar panels installed on the upper facade and roof (passive house design should, in theory, allow these to supply a big chunk of the building’s energy needs)
    • No fossil fuels used throughout the building — everything is electrical
    • Fully sub-metered units
    • Outdoor circulation spaces/stairs, providing access to a shared rooftop courtyard (I’m assuming these also serve as required egress for the building)
    • Dedicated elevator entrance for every suite (i.e. no interior circulation/corridor spaces)
    • Composting facilities within the building
    • Bike room connected to the ground-floor lobby

    There’s also a co-working and community space planned for the ground floor called “Framework.” Interestingly enough, they have already responded to the current pandemic. Instead of open-air desks, you rent fully enclosed 8′ x 8′ pods that are sound-proofed and come with their own HVAC systems.

    Congratulations Fred and Joanne on such an exciting and pioneering project. (I would love to see the development pro forma!) If you’d like to learn more about Frame 283, here is their website and here is a profile that the New York Times did on the project back in January. Building with CLT is apparently prohibited in NYC. Frame 283 got an exemption.

  • Swiss running brand On opens NYC flagship

    Swiss running brand On recently opened up a new flagship store in NYC’s NoHo district. It was designed by the Swedish architect and designer Andreas Bozarth Fornell (whose firm is called Specific Generic), and I think it’s a good example of the whole push toward “experiential retail.” Before Zappos there was a belief that nobody was prepared to buy shoes online. Surely shoes are something that you need to try on to make sure that they fit properly. But then Zappos and Tony Hsieh came along and decided to offer free returns so that you could just order a few different sizes to try on at home and return the ones that don’t fit. And then just like magic, we’re now living in a world where I myself couldn’t tell you the last time I bought a pair of shoes offline.

    What is obvious at this point is that people will buy pretty much anything online — everything from boats and real estate to shoes and tires — and so, in many cases, the physical retail experience needs to be exactly that — an experience. Something special. What On has done with their flagship store in NYC is try and create a space that, among other things, tells their brand story, acts as a hub for the local running community, and offers up a unique technological experience that is likely pretty difficult to replicate online. One of the key features is a “magic wall” that analyses your technique and scans your feet as you run past it (pictured below). The invisible foot scanner is supposed to help you find the perfect shoe size, accurate to within 1.25mm.

    If you’re a serious runner, I could imagine this being a pretty appealing in-store experience. (And if you’re not a runner, I guess you could just take a selfie in front of the magic wall. People seem to like pink walls). Whatever the case may be, I think On has done a great job trying to rethink the retail experience around its brand story and philosophy. But it leads me to a bunch of questions. Which brands and/or products are suitable for a new retail experience? (Does toilet paper, for example, want a new high-tech warehouse space in NoHo?) Assuming we continue down this path toward experiences, does this ultimately lead to less retail space per capita? Probably. And if we’re destined for less space, what does that ultimately mean for the ground floor experience of our cities? What should these spaces become? How does street life evolve?

    Cities aren’t going anywhere. But change is inevitable.

    Images: On

  • Economies of agglomeration in London

    The Financial Times is running a series right now on the future of the City of London. In their latest article, they looked at “How London grew into a financial powerhouse,” while at the same time comparing it to other global financial centers. It’s interesting to see how much of a banner year this was for companies going public. Companies listing on the Nasdaq and the NYSE raised a record $150 billion in 2020. This is compared to about $6 billion raised in London (both the London Stock Exchange and AIM). But what I really want to draw your attention to are the below maps from FT showing the clustering of banks, hedge funds, asset managers, insurers, and professional services firms in London. This is what urban agglomeration economies look like.