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.
My friend Ben Stevens has just published a book called, The Birth of a Building. It is a primer on all the ingredients that go into a new building: finance, law, urban planning, architecture, engineering, construction, and development. It is a book that I wish I wrote. But at the end of the day, it’s a lot easier to endorse a book than it is to write a book. So I am doing the former here today. If you decide to purchase the book, you’ll also find my endorsement within it. But to be clear, the only reason I’m writing about this is because Ben is a great guy and this is a great book.
Congratulations on this huge accomplishment, Ben. For more information, click here.
I am a big fan of lights on buildings. Here is a photo of the Massey Tower (by MOD Developments and Hariri Pontarini Architects) that I quickly took on my walk home from the office this evening:
It’s not a very good photo and it’s not doing the project justice. So here’s another shot of the mechanical penthouse lighting from their Instagram.
I’ve been noticing this lighting for a while now, and every time I see it I think to myself, “That’s really well done.” It’s simple, elegant, and it reinforces the overall architectural intent of the building.
We are entering that time of the year, at least here in Toronto, where most of us will leave work and it will already be dark out. So the lighting on our buildings and in our public spaces can serve a particularly important function.
This morning was the official ground breaking ceremony at Junction House. It was a beautiful sunny day and our FOREVER mural proved to be the perfect — albeit ironic — backdrop for our photos. Photos from the event will be released next week.
Junction House is a project that we have been working on since 2016. Development doesn’t happen overnight. So it’s important to celebrate these milestones — both for the team and for future residents of Junction House.
A big thank you to everyone who came out. We’re all looking forward to the next phase of the project: construction.
My recent post about minimum project sizes triggered some great follow-up discussions over email. Today, I learned about a Master Plan that was recently completed for Little Havana, Miami by the urban design and planning firm Plusurbia.
In it, they try to address some of the problems that I described in my post through something they call “Inverse Density.” Given the tendencies toward larger projects, they are proposing to incentivize the development of smaller and underused lots with more density.
The idea being that if you can encourage more smaller scale development, you can actually help to protect the character of a place. In 2017, the National Trust for Historic Preservation declared the neighborhood a national treasure.
What you are seeing here is existing vs. proposed policies. The proposed scenarios both result in higher densities, even though the lots are smaller. Alongside this, they are proposing to get rid of parking minimums for lots less than 7,500 sf.
It’s an intriguing idea and I’m glad they shared it with me. If you’d like to download a copy of the full Little Havana Master Plan, click here.
Brent Toderian likes to start Twitter hashtags that revolve around city building. One of his most recent is #LookWhatFitsInAParkingLot. For this one, he asked the Twittersphere to consider the things we love in cities that might fit inside a parking lot.
Venice, Amsterdam, and Shibuya (Tokyo) were all overlaid — at the same scale — on the surface parking surrounding Dodger Stadium. There are about 16,000 parking spaces, which actually take up more land than the stadium itself.
To be fair, I bet if you overlaid parts of Los Angeles on this same parking, it would look similarly astounding. But that shouldn’t change what you take away from this post: parking is very land consumptive.
On October 3, New York City did something very similar to what Toronto did on King Street. It restricted through traffic on 14th Street to only trucks and buses, and turned the street into the city’s first “busway.”
Under the new rules, cars, vans, and taxis are restricted every day of the week from 6am to 10pm, unless they’re dropping off or picking someone up, or entering into a parking garage (i.e. local traffic only). But after this, they need to make the first available right and turn off the street. Again, it’s pretty similar to the way things work here on King.
On the first day of the 18-month pilot program, the buses actually had to slow down in order to keep to their schedule. They were moving too quickly. Previously one of the slowest routes in the city, the M14 bus is now expected to increase its average speed by about 25%.
The reality is that we need to get better at moving people around our cities without a car. This is one way to do it and we know it works. My prediction is that the 14th Street pilot will prove to be a success. It will then get replicated in other parts of Manhattan. Probably on other crosstown streets.
Newly released data from the US Census Bureau has just revealed that the average household size is increasing for the first time in over 160 years. Put differently, the formation of new households has started to trail overall population growth. And that is causing the average number of people per household to increase.
In 1790, there were about 5.79 people per household in the United States. That number has been in decline pretty much since then, though there was a slight increase in the decade that began in 1850. Last year (2018), the number grew to 2.63 people per household (2.71 for owner occupied households and 2.48 for renter occupied households).
Here are two charts from Chris Fry’s recent piece at the Pew Research Center:
So what is causing this?
Well, we know that US fertility rates aren’t on the rise. In fact, they’re generally viewed as hitting record lows. I say “generally” because there are a number of different ways to measure fertility. There’s the general fertility rate, completed fertility, the total fertility rate, and others. But we are seeing some alignment here: fertility rates are down.
One probable explanation is the fact that more Americans are living multi-generationally. According to the Pew Research Center, 1 out of every 5 Americans lived in such a household as of 2016. Part of this may be a result of immigration. Asian and hispanic populations are more likely to live in a multi-generational household compared to white people.
Another demographic trend is the increase in people living in shared quarters, whether that might be with a roommate or someone else. This is interesting because it suggests that there’s an affordability constraint. Are people being forced to “double up?” The current co-living trend is at least partially because of this.
I went to graduate school in the United States. After I graduated I was given, if I remember correctly, 90 days to leave the country. The US wasn’t a good place for professionals in architecture and/or real estate at that particular time, and so I did exactly that. I left the country.
Lately, I’ve been having a number of informational coffee meetings here in Toronto where I have been connecting with highly intelligent and educated people who have moved to this city in search of success. They couldn’t get a visa in the US and so they decided to, instead, move to the greatest city in the world.
These are people from Brazil to Bangladesh. These are people who are young (late 20’s), who have multiple masters degrees, who are hungry to get ahead, and who have a strong, if not perfect, command of English (or French).
I have been finding this fascinating. As I sit and drink my coffee, I can’t help but think to myself, “This is what a merit-based immigration system looks like.”
Jerry Neumann’s recent blog post on the “taxonomy of moats” is a great summary of the ways in which companies — and perhaps even cities — can protect themselves against competition.
Here’s an excerpt from his introduction:
Value is created through innovation, but how much of that value accrues to the innovator depends partly on how quickly their competitors imitate the innovation. Innovators must deter competition to get some of the value they created. These ways of deterring competition are called, in various contexts, barriers to entry, sustainable competitive advantages, or, colloquially, moats. There are many different moats but they have at their root only a few different principles. This post is an attempt at categorizing the best-known moats by those principles in order to evaluate them systematically in the context of starting a company.
And here is his taxonomy of moats. He identifies four main sources:
As a sidebar, consider how this might also apply to cities.
If you’d like to read Jerry’s full post, click here. And if you’re interested in this space, I recommend you also check out Fred Wilson’s recent post on, “The Great Public Market Reckoning.”
The Junction House team is excited to announce that construction will start this fall and that our ground breaking ceremony will be held at 11AM on Saturday, October, 19th. Mark your calendars.
It will take place at our Sales Gallery — 2720 Dundas St W. This will be one of the last opportunities to see the award-winning Junction House Sales Gallery before it is demolished in preparation for construction.
There will be photo opportunities for everyone in attendance, and so we encourage you to bring your phones/cameras. You’re welcome to extend this invitation to family and friends, but kindly RSVP by sending an email to info@junctionhouse.ca.
