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: population density

  • America’s most and least car-oriented cities

    My partner Kieran sent me this chart this morning:

    It is a summary of the average weekday miles traveled by adults in private vehicles, including taxis and ride-hailing vehicles, for the 50 largest metro areas in the US (data is from the fall of 2023). At the top of the list with the most miles traveled is Raleigh, and at the bottom of the list with the fewest miles traveled is, not surprisingly, New York.

    The other cities on the bottom of this list probably won’t surprise you either. But it’s a good reminder of how built form determines our mobility choices. If you look up which US cities have the highest population densities and the most compact built forms, I think you’ll generally find that it mirrors what you’re seeing here.

  • Three ways to optimize investments in transit

    Sometimes I’ll hear people in Toronto talk pejoratively about all of the development that’s been happening at Yonge & Eglinton (in midtown). They’ll say it’s too much density.

    But then you come across charts like the ones above (source previously shared here) and you realize that this location is the only section along the new Eglinton Crosstown LRT line that is actually starting to have enough people.

    Based on 2021 Census data, there were about 40k people within 800m of the future Eglinton and Mount Pleasant stations. In contrast, there are many downtown stations along the Ontario Line (also under construction) with around 80k people.

    Why this is important is because if the objective is to get people to ride this new transit and collect a lot of fares, then the single most important factor is going to be the amount of people that live, work, and play adjacent to each station.

    Now, I’m not a transportation planner, but in my mind there are three simple ways to think and go about optimizing for this:

    1. You can look at where population densities are already high and then add new transit to service these densities. This is what is happening with the Ontario Line and it was long overdue. We know that ridership is going to be relatively high because of the chart at the top of this post.
    2. You can look at where there’s existing transit and then work to optimize the land uses around it. This is what we should be doing a better job of along the Bloor-Danforth line, where certain station areas have actually lost people over the last few decades. This is the opposite of what you want next to transit investments.
    3. Lastly, you can also proactively plan new transit while simultaneously encouraging more density. An example of this would be the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre (just north of Toronto). Extend the line and encourage growth. This is good. The only thing with this approach is that it can seem a bit misaligned if you’re currently failing at #1 and #2.

  • Toronto’s unstable neighborhoods

    This is a telling map from Jens von Bergmann. It shows the changes in population density across Toronto from 1971 to 2021 (measured in people per hectare). What is obvious is the spikiness of our city. We have been very effective at adding lots of people downtown, along the central waterfront, and in certain other pockets. But at the same time, we have let our older inner city neighborhoods move in the opposite direction and lose people.

    The irony of this outcome is that we have long created policies that refer to these areas as being “stable” neighborhoods. The idea was that they weren’t supposed to change, at least not too much. But what this data shows is the opposite. By restricting growth, we actually created the right conditions for them to lose people as demographics changed and household sizes got smaller, among other things. We created unstable neighborhoods.

    Thankfully, we have started to change course and allow some intensification. We’re not there yet, but I do believe that the next 50-year map will look quite different than the one you see here.

  • Population-weighted densities, compared

    Boy, population densities can be so misleading. The typical approach is to just take the number of people and divide it by a given area. This then gives you something like X number of “people per square kilometer.” The problem with this approach is that there are countless factors that can skew your result.

    Hong Kong, for instance, is really dense. But as a city, it also has a lot of green space, mountains, and other undeveloped areas. Only about a quarter of Hong Kong’s land is developed. So when you divide total people by its administrative boundary area, it is going to appear less dense than it really is.

    One alternative approach is to use a method known as population-weighted density. The way this works is that you take the average densities of smaller more granular subareas and then weight them by the population of each subarea. It is a little more complicated to calculate, but the overall intent is to try and capture a density figure that more accurately reflects what the average person experiences on the ground.

    And this is exactly the method that Jonathan Nolan decided to use in his new website CityDensity.com. What his site allows you to do is compare population-weighted densities across various cities, and then see how it tapers off as you move outward from their city centers.

    Once again, it is hard to beat Paris’ supremely dense mid-rise built form:

    Well, that is, until you check out Hong Kong:

    Charts: CityDensity.com

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • A few charts on working from home…

    Here’s an interesting paper from WFH Research that looks at, “the evolution of working from home.” Not surprisingly, remote work tends to vary by industry, with tech being the most likely to work from home and with hospitality & food services the least likely.

    By extension, WFH prevalence also appears to correlate with population density. This largely has to do with the kinds of jobs that center themselves in big and dense cities. This is interesting because one conventional way to think about cities is that they are places where businesses and people cluster to accumulate wealth. That clustering is still happening, but work is evolving.

    And that is always the case.

    Overall, the authors conclude that about 40% of US employees are now working at least one day a week at home, and that just over 11% are fully remote. They also argue that fully remote work lowers average productivity by about 10-20%, but that hybrid work is closer to flat. Interestingly enough, opinions on productivity differ whether you ask employees or managers.

    If you’d like to read the full paper, click here.

    Figures: WFH Research

  • Population density map of the world

    I came across this interactive world population density map over the weekend and I immediately thought to myself, “this is going on the blog.” It uses data from the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) produced by the European Commission and by CIESIN (super long name) at Columbia University. And it’s a fascinating way to explore how our world is urbanizing.

    What you will want to do is make sure that you head over to China and check out regions like the Yangtze River Delta (shown above). If you hover over a location, it will also bring up a graph and table showing you how that place has evolved from 1975 to 2015. Note: Shanghai’s peak population density in 2015 was 104,400 people per square kilometer!

  • Walkable areas are a scarce commodity in cities

    According to this recent report by Smart Growth America, which looked at “walkable urbanism” in the largest 35 metro areas in the US, only about 1.2% of land is, on average, built out in this way. Everything else needs to be driven.

    But here’s the thing. Humans seem to really enjoy walkable urbanism, and will usually pay more for it:

    City dwellers will pay to live in a walkable location. Real estate in these areas averages a 34% price premium per square foot in for-sale housing and 41% for multifamily rental apartments.

    It also, by definition, punches above its weight:

    Walkable neighborhoods in just those 35 metro areas account for 19.1% of the total US real GDP and 6.8% of the total US population, by the researchers’ calculations.

    That’s how density works. You get to do more, with less.

    At the same time, not every place should be Midtown Manhattan (which the report labels as the highest walkable urban place with a floor area ratio of 40). There are a wide range of densities that will work, including modest ones (FARs between 1-3).

    Here in Toronto, many of our single-family home neighborhoods have densities that are zoned for a maximum FAR of 0.6, which is quite restrictive if you’re hoping to build something like a multi-unit building.

    This is, of course, the point. But imagine what all could be done here with even an incremental change.

  • Most of Europe is getting denser

    Here is an interesting set of maps (from this study) showing density trends, population trends, and residential area trends (i.e. sprawl), across Europe between 2006-2012 and 2012-2018:

    The key takeaway is that, broadly speaking, there is — or at least there was five years ago — a new density trend across most European cities. From 2006 to 2012, the prevailing trend was de-densification. That is, fewer people per hectare. However, from 2012 to 2018, that trend largely reversed. With the exception of the Iberian Peninsula and Eastern Europe, the majority of cities flipped to densification.

    The study tells us that there are two main reasons for this switch. The first is that more cities started growing again. During the first period, about 60% of cities in the sample size of 300+ cities, were adding people. In the second period, this figure increased to 75%. It’s also worth noting that this growth is being largely driven by immigration, and increasingly so. The number of cities with positive natural growth diminished from 67% to 51% between the two study periods.

    The second driver is a reduction in sprawl. Though almost every city in the study continued to expand outward, the rate of expansion was much lower between 2012 and 2018. So less land consumption, and more people. That’s how you increase your urban density. Of course, it would be interesting to see if any of this has changed or reversed (again) as a result of the pandemic. 2018 kind of feels like eons ago, doesn’t it?