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: paris

  • CryptoParisian #112

    I have written about Bright Moments before. They are a digital art company exploring the intersection of NFTs and real-world experiences. It started as a popup gallery in Venice Beach California, where artists could show new work and where collectors could buy IRL. They then created their own pixel art collection called CryptoVenetians. It included 1,000 different people-centered NFTs by artist QianQian. Since then, they have gone on to host events and create new CryptoCitizen collections in New York, Berlin, London, Mexico City, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires. And this week they were in Paris.

    (I don’t know why they skipped over Toronto!)

    Their end goal is to create a complete collection of 10,000 NFTs, most of which are tied to a specific city. (The only one that isn’t is their CryptoGalacticans collection.) What’s obviously great about this approach is that it’s a way to promote digital art and onboard new users into the crypto space. They are literally going around the world, throwing parties, and saying “look how cool and fun this whole crypto thing is.” At the same time, it also links the digital and the physical, which I believe is fundamental. We’re social beings and web3 will never change that.

    The other interesting thing about Bright Moments is that they are structured as a decentralized autonomous organization (or DOA). That’s like a company, except that governance is distributed to its tokenholders and it’s all managed on a blockchain. But it still operates as a company and it can raise money like one too. In 2021, Union Square Ventures invested 500 ETH into the DOA through a blockchain transaction that would naturally be public if you cared to look it up. Based on today’s spot price of about CA$4k per ETH, that was a CA$2 million investment.

    In the case of Bright Moments, its tokenholders are the people who own a CryptoCitizen. These are the people who get to vote on how the organization is run. They can also earn money if they do things like host a community dinner or organize a local meetup, with the idea being that, as an organization, you want to encourage this sort of bottom-up participation and innovation. I find it fascinating to watch this new governance and entity structure emerge, and it will only continue to evolve.

    I’ve been following Bright Moments more or less since they dropped the CryptoVenetians. I thought about jumping in then, but I figured I would wait to see if there would be a CryptoTorontonian. That would obviously be my number one choice. But once they announced their final list of cities, and Toronto wasn’t on it, I grumpily decided I would instead wait for a CryptoParisian. And since this week was Paris, it was time.

    I now hold CryptoParisian #112:

    I like that it has the Pont Neuf and that the human is wearing sunglasses.

    This means that I now have a small ownership stake in the Bright Moments DOA. So presumably I’ll soon have a say in important and serious matters! It also means that when they launch their final CryptoCitizen collection in Venice, Italy this spring (nice work going full circle here), there is a chance I might get airdropped a CryptoVenetian. It’s a random process, so whatever. I also know that it’s easy to look at this pixelated Parisian and think, “WTF, Brandon.” But something new is building here. And I’m sure that all of the folks who were in Paris this week can testify to that.

  • Real estate is a byproduct of economic growth

    I sometimes wonder if I wasn’t born and raised in Toronto if I still would have gone to architecture school and become a real estate developer. I mean, if I grew up in Paris, maybe I would have become a fashion designer. Or if I grew up in Park City, maybe I would have started a snowboard company, slash become a ski bum. I would enjoy doing all of these things. And places certainly do influence us, more than most of us probably appreciate.

    My point with all of this is that Canada likes to somewhat paradoxically over index on housing. I say paradoxically because we never seem to have enough of it for Canadians — certainly the affordable varietal — and yet:

    “Canada relies heavily on its real-estate sector to power the economy. Housing investment in Canada as a share of gross domestic product reached 8.9% in 2022, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, much higher than the 4.8% on average for the 38 member countries in the OECD.“

    If you look at all of the industries that make up the Canadian economy, “real estate and rental and leasing” is at the top with 13.01% of GDP (as of 2020). And if you add “construction” on top of this, the total is about 20.09% (again, as of 2020). This feels suboptimal. And I say this as a developer and builder of real estate.

    Real estate is largely a byproduct of economic growth. When someone starts a business and then needs something like an office or a warehouse, that is a positive thing for the economy. Jobs are being created by the business and further jobs are being created by the people who will deliver the space they need. But if you aren’t creating new jobs in the first place, then just dealing in real estate will only take you so far.

    Immigration helps, but it can also create a mirage of growth and prosperity. If you look at real GDP growth across the G7 from 2019 to today, Canada looks pretty good. We’re second (+4.5%) only to the US (+8.9%). But if you look at GDP per capita over the same time period, we’re dead last (-2%), whereas the US remains on top (+7.2%).

    I’m not an economist; I just build things. But in my opinion, this is a problem. We should be doing everything we can to foster a stronger culture of innovation and entrepreneurship in this country. We have the talent. I mean, Ethereum has roots in this city! We just need more people turning this intellect into wonderful new companies.

  • Are shared e-scooters now dead?

    I first wrote about Bird, the electric scooter company, back in March 2018. At the time, they had just raised $115 million and their pitch was that they were going to solve the last-mile mobility problem. This is a real problem, and so lots of urbanist-type people, including myself, were excited. I then rode my first shared scooter in 2019 in Lisbon, and I had a ton of fun. I wrote: “Now I know what all the fuss is about.”

    But it wasn’t all puppy dogs and ice cream. People started getting annoyed by the clutter that dockless scooters were creating in our cities (see above photo). Safety also became a great concern, and so they started getting viewed as a nuisance. Toronto never allowed them (despite my insistent blog posts) and Paris — which had arguably become the scooter capital of the world — banned them in early 2023.

    Now there’s this: Bird announced this week that it has filed for bankruptcy. The once unicorn, which had its stock halted back in September because its market cap fell below $15 million for too long, needs cash. According to FT, they have about $3.25 million the bank, but they have an immediate need for $16.8 million to meet some “financial obligations” in January.

    This is maybe not unexpected. But I think the important question is: Is this an existential moment for micro-mobility and shared scooters (i.e. this is a fundamentally bad business), or is it more of a case that money used to be mostly kind of free, and now it’s not? Either way, I think there’s no question that the latter is going to cause further distress throughout 2024.

    But the question remains: Can shared scooters be a sustainable business?

    My day job is not to be a scooter analyst. But I do think that a number of things are true:

    These first and last points are important ones. I believe it’s always going to be easier to get people onto electric scooters and bikes than onto regular bikes; people will generally always choose what is easiest. At the same time, here is a company that has allegedly figured out how to offer this service profitably. Assuming these two things remain true, I think we’ll continue to find scooters in our cities.

    Photo by Gemma Evans on Unsplash

  • This is how many more people Toronto could house if it increased its population density

    As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about infill housing and overall urban densities, let’s look at some basic math.

    The City of Toronto has an estimated population of 3,025,647 (as of June 2023) and a land area of 630 square meters. That means that its average population density is about 4,803 people per km2. Obviously this number will be higher in some locations, and lower in others. But overall, this is the average.

    Now let’s consider how many people we could actually fit within the existing boundaries of the city (city proper not the metro area) if we were to simply match the average population densities of some other global cities around the world.

    Again, what this chart is saying is that if we took the same physical area (Toronto’s 630 square meters) and just increased the population density to that of, say, Paris, we would then have a total population of over 13 million people and we’d be housing an additional 10,011,573 humans on the same footprint.

    I am not suggesting that this is exactly what should be done. (Though, you all know how much I love Paris.) What I’m suggesting is that calling a place “full” isn’t exactly accurate. How would you even measure that? What someone is really saying is that they are content with the status quo in terms of built form and density.

    Note: The above population densities were all taken from Wikipedia, except for Toronto’s figures, which were taken from here.

  • We’re far from full

    I tweeted this out yesterday:

    What I was getting at is that there’s lots of available room within our existing boundaries for infill housing. We are nowhere near full, despite what some people will tell you. In fact, most areas are not dense enough to properly support modes of transport that aren’t the car.

    Of course, there are a number of ways that one could be offended by a statement like this.

    One, you could argue that more density would make the city unlivable. Two, you could get into the chicken-and-egg game of whether a more expansive transit system is needed before allowing more density. Three, you could say that we already have enough zoned and unbuilt housing supply — so why do we need more? And I’m sure that there are many others that I’m not mentioning here.

    Density can be a counterintuitive feature for cities. It can actually make a place more livable by encouraging more amenities adjacent to where people live and work, and it can also reduce traffic congestion by empowering alternative forms of mobility. If the only reasonable way to get around is by car, then of course most people will drive.

    We also need to avoid the chicken-and-egg mental trap when it comes to mobility infrastructure. Land use and transportation always work hand in hand and need to be thought of and executed on simultaneously.

    Finally, the objection of already having lots of sites zoned for new housing is an enticing one. But zoned and delivered are two vastly different things. And the unfortunate reality is that there are a lot of zoned sites that won’t be able to develop in the short and medium terms because the market isn’t there. But that doesn’t mean that other housing typologies couldn’t be built.

    At the same time, we need move away from “cruise ships of urbanity.” Broadly speaking, Paris — to cite just one of many examples– is at least and on average about 4x denser than Toronto. And somehow, people still like living and visiting there.

  • The banana test

    One of the reasons why “new small-scale retail, service, and office uses” are now permitted in low-rise neighborhoods of Toronto — and why many are on to talking about these uses in our laneways — is because it’s a way to serve the “needs of residents” and “reduce local automobile trips”. But what are these needs exactly? And if you had to choose only one, what would it be?

    Let me provide some further background.

    According to this mapping, 94% of Parisians live within a 5-minute walk of a bakery. And according to this mapping, 94% of people in Mexico City live within a 5-minute walk of a taqueria. So in other words, these two cities seem to have the kind of “small-scale retail, service, and office uses” that satisfy at least some of the needs of their residents.

    People in Paris need bread. And people in Mexico City need tacos. But what do people in Toronto need? I’m not sure we have a perfectly parallel thing. But according to Instacart, the top-selling grocery item last year across both the US and Canada was — bananas. One and four carts typically contain them, and apparently this number has remained fairly consistent.

    So maybe this should be our small-scale retail and walkability test metric: What % of the population lives within a 5-minute walk of fresh bananas? (I’m open to other food suggestions here.)

  • Cruise ships of urbanity

    There are many ways to describe one of the prevailing urban forms emerging across the Greater Toronto Area. You could call it spiky urbanism. You could call it a collection of peaks and plains. Or — as it is referred to in this recent article by Alex Bozikovic about “turning the suburb into the city” — you could call it cruise ship urbanity:

    These megaprojects are where Toronto has chosen to cram much of its new growth – “cruise ships of urbanity,” as Mr. Giannone told me, in a sea of houses. As such they provide an opportunity to create citylike density and activity.

    What we are talking about is a dichotomous form of urbanism: high-density mixed-use nodes surrounded by low-rise car-oriented communities. And on many levels, this makes a lot of sense, especially if the cruise ship happens to be docked on top of a transit station. This is where density needs to go. If you have a transit station without much density, that should be addressed immediately.

    But it also presents a great challenge. If transportation planning is necessarily land use planning, then we are dealing with two very different kinds of land use patterns and, therefore, two very different kinds of mobility demands. You can address this by making the cruise ship as self-sufficient and pleasant as possible, but eventually someone will want or need to get off the ship.

    Does that mean they will then need a car?

    You don’t have this same problem with more consistent forms of urbanism. Consider, for example, cities like Paris and Barcelona. These are dense cities, but more importantly they are, for the most part, uniformly dense. Or at least, uniformly dense enough. Meaning that you can probably apply a more uniform transportation strategy. What works in one part of the city is likely to work in other parts too.

    Of course, we could also apply a uniform transportation strategy to our urban cruise ships. Given that they exist in a sea of low-rise houses, we could simply say that each urban cruise ship resident should also have their own parking space (1:1 ratio). The solution: everyone drives! But this, to me, seems like an insane long-term solution.

    In my view, the most impactful solution lies not in the ships themselves, but in the seas surrounding them. We need to look holistically at our entire city region and determine what it will take to turn suburb into city. And that likely means a whole host of things, ranging from leveraging the infrastructure we already have (i.e. upzoning around transit stations) to embracing autonomous vehicles.

    In the end, I don’t think we want cruise ships of urbanity. We need more density, everywhere.

    Photo by mkdrone_ on Unsplash

  • Introducing the Meta City

    During the pandemic, there was a lot of erroneous talk about the death of cities. Much like when the consumer internet first came around, the thinking was that technology would make geography irrelevant. I was and am vehemently against this idea, but it’s hard to not feel like technology is doing something. But what exactly? According to Richard Florida, Vladislav Boutenko, Antoine Vetrano, and Sara Saloo, it is creating something called the Meta City:

    The various communities that make up the Meta City may be in different time zones and noncontiguous locations, but they function together as a coherent network with a distinct structure and logic. The Meta City combines physical and virtual agglomeration, in seeming defiance of the laws of physics, making it possible to occupy more than one space at the same time. As a result, urban areas within the Meta City network can share economic and social functions.

    The narrative is compelling. Cities have always responded to and been a product of new mobility technologies. Streetcars, subways, and the car have all reshaped the geography of our cities. Some would argue for the worse. What the Meta City proposes is that technology today is not a disruptor of cities, it is simply another mobility shift. Rather than make cities irrelevant, it actually makes them more important by expanding their reach:

    The pandemic-era shift to remote work is yet another technology stretching the boundaries of the city into a new and larger geographic unit. But instead of doing so physically, it does so by enabling virtual expansion. The share of American workers engaged in remote work tripled from roughly 6% in 2019 to almost 18% in 2021. Remote workers can access significant quality of life at far more affordable prices in smaller cities, suburbs, and rural areas.

    Some specific examples:

    Many of these rising places are critically connected to established cities. As we will see, Austin’s rise is best understood as a satellite of San Francisco’s long-established tech hub. Miami is enmeshed in New York City’s finance and real estate complex. The rise of the Meta City informs a counterintuitive logic: Leading superstar cities are seeing their role as economic hub expand, even as some talent and some industry disperse to satellite centers.

    Finally, here’s their ranking:

    If you believe this to be true, then it should be good news for the real estate located in the cities listed above. But it also means that we are now facing a new kind of hub-and-spoke model of urbanism. London and New York remain at the center, but tech is only strengthening their reach and influence. This is a new way of thinking about the flow of human capital around the world, and I’m sure it will have impacts on how we plan and build our cities.

    Image: Harvard Business Review

  • Paris on top of Toronto

    There are about 2.1 million people who live in Paris (2023 figure).

    The metro area is, of course, much larger with over 13 million people. But if you look at Paris proper — that being the 20 arrondissements within the Boulevard Périphérique — it’s the 2.1 million number.

    The footprint of this area is 105 km2, and so that means that Paris has an average population density within its administrative boundaries of just over 20,000 people per km2.

    This is about 4.5x more dense than the City of Toronto as a whole. Which is why if you overlay the outline of Paris on top of Toronto, as Gil Meslin has done over here, you get this:

    To be fair, there are pockets of Toronto that are very dense, even by Paris standards. North St. James Town, for example, was estimated at over 44,000 people per km2 back in 2016. But generally speaking, Toronto is not that.

    And Gil’s maps do an excellent job of demonstrating it.

  • That cool coffee shop in the bottom of your building

    As an add-on to yesterday’s post about ground floor retail in mixed-use developments, I thought I would provide a few illustrative and real-world examples to demonstrate some of the challenges that I was trying to describe.

    Note that this post is not meant to be critical of any specific projects; instead, it’s intended to further explain some of the challenges facing developers, architects, policy makers, and everyone else involved in the built environment.

    Let’s start in Toronto. Below is an aerial photo of Ossington Avenue. For those of you who aren’t familiar, this is one of the most desirable and coolest main streets in city. I mean, check out this recently completed office/retail building at 12 Ossington by Hullmark.

    However, when the above townhouse complex was built (circa 2005), Ossington was not the street that it is today. In fact, it used to be pretty scuzzy. When I moved to the US for grad school in 2006, I don’t recall anyone going out on Ossington. Then when I returned in 2009, suddenly, everyone was going to restaurants and bars on Ossington.

    So when this project was being planned, residential directly on the street, was probably the highest-and-best use, which is why that’s what was built. But looking at it today, it feels like a suboptimal outcome for one of the most desirable retail streets in the city. And now that it has been built, it’s unlikely to change anytime soon. Should retail have been mandated?

    Here is another example from Toronto. This is the north side of High Park. In this case, the street (Bloor Street) is not a great retail street. It’s single-sided because of the park. There’s only a scattering of restaurants and small businesses. There are a lot of single-use buildings. And even some of the newish developments don’t have any ground floor retail.

    In this particular instance, it’s certainly more of a stretch to force retail. But at the same time, I think there’s an argument to be made that the edges of Toronto’s primary urban park should do more. The buildings should be taller. The street walls should be more defined. And yes, maybe there should be more retail.

    Now here’s a counter example from Paris:

    This is the 7th and there’s absolutely no ground floor retail in sight and pretty much only blank and non-active facades. It’s hard to imagine retail opening up here today or anytime in the future — and that’s okay. The streets are still narrow and walkable. And the buildings are just what you’d expect from the capital. The point here: ground floor retail can’t and doesn’t need to go everywhere.

    Finally, let’s return to Salt Lake City:

    This is maybe the antithesis of our Paris example. 300 W is a wide street clearly designed for Toyota 4Runners. It’s hard to imagine a lot of people walking around here. Even though it’s relatively close to the central business district and it’s on the edge of the emerging and very cool Granary District. (This is The Post District.) But you know what, retail seems to work just fine here:

    You just need to think about it in the right way. SLC’s wide streets and large blocks may not make for a broadly walkable environment. But they do give you the room to create your own internal street network and, of course, build a bunch of parking. And that’s what was done and needed here.

    I also find it interesting to think at this sub-block level and consider how it might become a new network and layer to the city over time. Maybe Salt Lake needs its own version of Barcelona’s superblocks. And maybe this has already been considered.

    So once again, ground floor retail is good. Everyone wants that cool coffee shop in the bottom of their building. But sometimes we miss the boat. Sometimes it’s unclear what we should do. Sometimes it’s not necessary or viable. And sometimes we get it just right. That’s, I guess, retail.

    If you find yourself on 300 W, check out Urban Sailor Coffee.

    Site Plan: Post District