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: planning

  • The resilient city and road pricing

    Joe Berridge’s recent opinion piece in the Globe and Mail is a good reminder — in the face of a whole lot of uncertainty — about the resiliency of our cities.

    Those previous decades saw a surge of people and jobs locating downtown, with consequent escalation in rents and prices of offices and housing. Why? Partly demographic, as the well-educated children of the baby boom reached adulthood, and partly lifestyle and work style. Young people go to big cities not just to work and live, but for sex, style, money and power. For ambition and anonymity. And for risk. All in the petri dish of downtown density. These drives have always been as powerful as their subsequent search for suburban security and community.

    The structure of the modern megalopolis is not an accident – the dramatic rise of tech employment, two-earner families, the decline of manufacturing, the later date of marriage, smaller households, lifestyle consumerism, teamwork cultures, serial re-education and training – none of these societal trends looks to be diminished by COVID-19. All of them seem to prefer high-density, high-interaction environments.

    For those of us in Toronto, it’s also important to remember just how quickly this city region was growing pre-COVID-19. That is unlikely to change on the other side of this.

    But Berridge does also point out some of the potential fallouts from this pandemic. The economics of urban transit, for example, could remain a problem for quite some time. This will strain public purses. (Car usage rebounded quickly, but transit ridership has not.)

    We are also likely to see increased traffic congestion as a result of people eschewing transit (and probably a bunch of other factors). Like Berridge, I am a supporter of road/congestion pricing, and have been writing about that on this blog for many years.

    The best things to tax/price are things that are generally viewed as bad and where demand is largely inelastic. That is, even if you increase the price, many or most people will probably still do it anyway. Think of things like smoking.

    Up until now, Toronto hasn’t had the moxie to make difficult (political) decisions like this one. Perhaps this pandemic will leave us no other choice.

  • An apartment dwelling city

    Toronto’s Chief Planner, Gregg Lintern, posted this on Twitter a few days (if you can’t see it below, click here):

    A couple things came to mind when I saw this.

    First, it’s a reminder that census data is painfully slow. Five years is a long time and a lot can and will change during that time period, including the kind of built form that people are living in.

    Second, I agree with Gregg. Toronto is in the process of transforming into a majority apartment/condo dwelling city (if it hasn’t already), and it signals a pretty important juncture in our city’s history.

    It also begs an important question: How should our planning response change and adjust as this percentage of urban dwellers continues to creep upward?

  • How homeowners cause gentrification

    Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron, Director of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic, and author of, Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in New Urban America.

    In his recent piece in Beyond Chron, he makes the argument that, from San Francisco to New York, homeowners who oppose new multi-unit housing are in fact the ones driving gentrification.

    He admits that there are some exceptions and cites San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood as a place that became upscale because of new development. (I think it’s more nuanced than that.)

    But the key point is that there countless examples of neighborhoods changing their socioeconomic position without the presence of new development. (There’s investment, but at a smaller or individual scale.)

    Here’s an excerpt from Shaw’s article:

    Banning apartments from single family home neighborhoods limits new residents to those who can afford to purchase a home. Banning new multi-unit construction also artificially reduces supply, driving up home prices for existing owners.

    That’s how most San Francisco neighborhoods, and those in other high-housing cost cities, gentrified. It happened with little or no multi-unit construction. Yet homeowners have adeptly shifted blame for the gentrification of urban neighborhoods from their own land use policies to builders—even when no building has occurred.

    But in the end, do these details even matter? What we have here are competing self-interests. Developers, obviously, want to build. And many people benefit when this does happen. But others don’t see it that way.

  • Toronto approves city-wide expansion of laneway suites

    This a big month for laneway (housing) advocates in Toronto. Last week, City Council voted in favor of expanding the policy provisions for laneway suites to all Neighbourhoods within the city. (Neighbourhood is a defined term in the city’s Official Plan.)

    Previously, the policies — which allow laneway suites to be built as-of-right — only applied to the Toronto & East York Districts. Here’s a copy of the recent staff report in case you would like more information.

    On Monday, my friend Alex Sharpe (of Lanescape) was on BNN Bloomberg talking about why this is a good thing for the city. Alex and the rest of the team at Lanescape have been instrumental in these policy changes.

    If you’re a Toronto homeowner with a property that fronts onto a laneway, I would encourage you to consider this opportunity. It’s a way to increase the value of your home and it’s a way to create more rental housing in this city.

  • Uber Movement introduces new Speeds product

    Since we’re on the topic of large-scale data collection, I thought some of you may be interested in Uber Movement‘s new “Speeds” product.

    First launched in 2017, Uber Movement aggregates anonymized data from their ride-sharing business to create data sets and tools that can help cities make better transportation decisions.

    Below is a (hex cluster) map of Toronto showing average travel times from downtown. I dropped the pin at Toronto City Hall. What is shown is the average for all days of the week during the month of January 2018.

    Uber Movement’s new Speeds product looks at how specific streets are performing relative to their “free-flow speed.” Uber defines this as “the average speed of traffic in the absence of congestion or other adverse conditions.” (The 85th percentile of all speed values.)

    As of right now, Speeds is only available in 5 cities: New York City, Seattle, Cincinnati, Nairobi, and London. Here is a snapshot of London during the same time period as above, January 2018:

    In comparison to what we were talking about yesterday, I have few concerns with the fact that my Uber rides around town have likely contributed to these mappings. With these use cases, the value really only emerges once you aggregate the data.

  • Shade inequality in Los Angeles

    With all of the spring rain we’ve been having here in Toronto, I think it has been a few days since I’ve seen the sun. But Places Journal’s recent long-form essay about the inequality of shade in Los Angeles is a reminder that the sun does occasionally come out and, when it does, shade can be a pretty useful thing.

    Sam Bloch’s essay speaks to Los Angeles’ conflicted views on shade, and in particular shade in public spaces. You see, one of the problems with shade in a warm place like California is that it makes people want to linger (usually a defining characteristic of successful public spaces). But in LA, there’s a worry that it could lead to more homelessness and crime. Trees create places to hide.

    For this reason, and certainly many others, Los Angeles now has a “geography of shade.” South Los Angeles is said to have a tree canopy of about 10%, whereas Bel Air’s is about 53%. Shade has become a kind of luxury. As a point of comparison, the US national average is somewhere around 27%.

    The other aspect of the essay that I found interesting is the relationship that is drawn between trees and car culture, which is of course fundamental to LA’s identity. Here’s an excerpt:

    Despite that early fame, palm trees did not really take over Los Angeles until the 1930s, when a citywide program set tens of thousands of palms along new or recently expanded roads. They were the ideal tree for an automobile landscape. Hardy, cheap, and able to grow anywhere, palm trees are basically weeds. Their shallow roots curl up into a ball, so they can be plugged into small pavement cuts without entangling underground sewer and water mains or buckling sidewalks. 

    Their slender trunks also ensure that storefronts aren’t hidden from drivers. In 1391 alone, the city planted some 25,000 palm trees. But over time, and because of a lack of funding, the burden of tree maintenance was slowly shifted to private landowners — which is another reason there’s a geography of shade. It reflects who had and has the means.

    Photo by Viviana Rishe on Unsplash

  • Barcelona from above

    Barcelona is one of the densest cities in Europe. And Márton Mogyorósy’s recent photo series, called Barcelona from above, does an excellent job of demonstrating that. My favorite photo is this one here, showing La Barceloneta neighborhood adjacent to the beach:

    None of the buildings are particularly tall (maybe 6 or 7 storeys at the most), but the streets are probably only about 6m wide, including sidewalks. This is one way that you can achieve density without height and it is a good example of what I was getting at in my post, European-style height, but not density.

  • The perfect city

    “This book is a love story of cities. It is so well observed — the places, the people, the history and what the future holds. Joe tells a very personal and beautifully written story direct from the front line. An absolute must read for everyone who cares about, and wants to understand, what makes cities and their citizens tick.” 

    – Dame Alison Nimmo, Chief Executive of the Crown Estate

    Joe Berridge, of Urban Strategies, has a new book coming out called, Perfect City: An Urban Fixer’s Global Search for Magic in the Modern Metropolis. Perfect may be the enemy of good (as they say), but Joe argues that all great cities have moments of perfection that we can learn from.

    I just preordered a copy. If you’re interested, you can do the same here.

  • Height vs. density

    This Planetizen article (2014) by Brent Toderian surfaced over the weekend. It is about tall buildings and why we should be focused more on how they are designed, as opposed to just how tall they are. Brent talks about this in terms of “density done well.”

    One of the things that is often misunderstood when it comes to tall buildings is the relationship between height and density. It is often assumed that the two are perfectly correlated; but they’re not, which is why I like this quote from the above article:

    “Height and density have a relationship, one that can be over-simplified or mischaracterized, but they aren’t the same thing – you can have density without height, and yes, you can have height without density.” -Brent Toderian

    Part of the challenge is that density is a more nuanced metric. Height, on the other hand, is a lot easier to understand. How tall is this building? Oh, it is x storeys tall. But that’s only one piece of the puzzle.

    Photo by Erwan Hesry on Unsplash

  • A door and a street — walking Copacabana

    Rio de Janeiro has some pretty spectacular entranceways. Here is one that I found today on Rua Duvivier in Copacabana:

    imageimage

    It is a magical front door located exactly one block from the beach.

    The other gem I stumbled upon today was Rua Carvalho de Mendonça, pictured here:

    image

    Toward the left (above) is a narrow bollard-separated lane for cars. The rest of the right of way is dedicated to pedestrians and bicycles.

    When I was there today the sun was shining and the retail was in full swing.

    image

    But perhaps my favorite thing about this street is the residential terraces sitting on top of the single storey “retail podiums.”

    They add life (and eyes) to the street.