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: urbanism

  • The childless city debate

    There’s an interesting debate happening online right now. A recent article by Derek Thompson (of the Atlantic) made the claim that today’s urban renaissance is great for young college graduates, but not so good for kids.

    Here’s a quick synopsis:

    Cities have effectively traded away their children, swapping capital for kids. College graduates descend into cities, inhale fast-casual meals, emit the fumes of overwork, get washed, and bounce to smaller cities or the suburbs by the time their kids are old enough to spell.

    Raising a family in the city [New York City] is just too hard. And the same could be said of pretty much every other dense and expensive urban area in the country.

    Michael Lewyn (of the Touro Law Center) responded to this argument with a post titled “the myth of the childless city.” While it is true that the US fertility rate is at an all-time low, the numbers — at least some of them — suggest that cities aren’t all that childless:

    Furthermore, not all urban cores are doing poorly in retaining children. Washington, D.C. had just under 32,000 children under 5 in 2010, and has over 45,000 today. In Philadelphia, the number of children under 5 increased from just over 101,000 in 2010 to 104,152 in 2018. Even in San Francisco (which, according to The Atlantic article, “has the lowest share of children of any of the largest 100 cities in the U.S.”), the number of under-5 children increased from 35,203 in 2010 to 39,722 in 2018.

    What I would be curious to see is a more granular look at where children are being raised within specific cities, and how that may, or may not, be changing over time. City boundaries can be broad.

  • Driving distance between two adjacent homes

    I came across this tweet by Sean Galbraith last night. You will probably need to click through to see the full extent of the photos. It is a series of images showing two back-to-back houses. The lands touch one another. But if you were to drive from one house to the other, it would take you about 18 minutes because of the area’s road network. Approximately 7.1 miles.

    This, of course, is far from urban. It would take over two hours to walk this same distance (assuming an average walking speed of 1 mile every 18 minutes). If you’re an urbanist, this is surely galling to you. But I think it’s also important to remember that this is, at least partially, a result of a consumer preference for dead end streets that limit through traffic.

  • Out of office: Malaga

    The above photo was taken on a walk up to the Castillo de Gibralfaro in Malaga, Spain. It was built by the Moors during their occupation of the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages.

    It is located on Mount Gibralfaro (~130m up) in the center of the city, overlooking the historic core, the waterfront, and its lower elevation sibling — the Alcazaba (or citadel).

    In the Middle Ages, this is what it meant for a city to be defensible. High ground. Formidable double walls. And places to shoot from.

    Thankfully, today, I think one could easily argue that “urban defensibility” tends to instead rely on things like knowledge, innovation, and diversity.

    Here are a couple of photos from inside the fortress. It is always amazing to see what labor was able to build without the technologies that we have today.

    Portions of it were built using a very elegant and elongated brick. Above is the bar area at the top. Presumably this was a later addition, though, supposedly the Moors did make and sell wine from the Andalucia region.

    If you ever find yourself in Malaga, this complex is a must visit.

  • My first dockless scooter ride

    I now know what all the fuss is about. Yesterday I rode a dockless (Lime) scooter for the first time. I took in lieu of an Uber in order to get to the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology (MAAT) on Lisbon’s waterfront.

    Here’s another photo from my ride:

    We don’t have these scooters in Toronto, but I understand they are imminent. And now that I’ve used one — and learned how shockingly fun they are — I can see why they are proliferating across so many cities.

    They’re a solution to the last mile problem, but they’re also fast enough (20 km/h) that they can be a substitute for other forms of urban mobility, as was the case for me yesterday. I can also see myself using one to get to the office when I would rather not sweat through my suit.

    Of course, there is the much talked about problem of scooters as urban litter. It’s a real thing and I am seeing that firsthand here in Lisbon. Because they are dockless, people leave them anywhere and everywhere. At the same time, part of what makes them so convenient is that, well, you can leave them anywhere and everywhere.

    I’m confident there’s a tidier solution that doesn’t involve fixed docking stations. Geofencing, perhaps? Cars are “dockless” and we’ve sort of figured that out. Many cities are already working on and experimenting with different solutions. Here’s an example from Tel Aviv. I have also noticed a natural clustering effect.

    I’m not sure how good of a business they will prove to be. The barriers to entry seem fairly low right now. You just need some Chinese scooters and an app, which is why I am noticing so many competing companies. But as the market matures, increased regulation could change this.

    We are going through a period of growing pains and it’s not particularly elegant. However, I believe we’ll get there. So I am looking forward to riding these scooters when they do finally land in Toronto.

  • Out of office: Lisbon

    The out of office responder is on.

    I am currently on a multi-day stopover in Lisbon on my way to Malaga, Spain. One of my oldest friends (we went to elementary school together in Toronto) is getting married there this weekend. They chose Spain because that’s where they met (she is Parisian). They have an incredible love story and I’m looking forward to celebrating with them in a few days.

    The above photo was taken with my iPhone from Sky Bar.

    The green you see in the foreground is Av da Liberdade. Here is another photo from a different angle, where you can begin to see the water (Tagus). Its tree canopy is one of the most impressive that I have ever seen. Its grandeur (largely its width) is quite a contrast against the small and winding streets in the rest of Lisbon. And it may be one of the only level places in this exceptionally hilly town.

    I’m a big fan of Lisbon, already.

  • The densest urban cells in America

    Garrett Dash Nelson recently published a study looking at urban density on a cell-by-cell basis for a number of US cities. Each “cell” is a 30 arc-second grid cell, but you can think of them as being approximately one square kilometer. The goal of the project was to better define urban density and do it in a more granular way. City averages don’t tell you a whole lot about how neighborhoods vary, and they can be skewed by the denominator you use. i.e. Where are you drawing the urban boundary?

    You can play around with his interactive study, here. Each city can be explored according to its 200 most dense cells. One interesting takeaway — though it is probably not all that surprising to this audience — is that New York City is really a unique place when it comes to American cities. If you look at the above chart (sourced from CityLab), you’ll see that most other US cities don’t come close to it in terms of urban density. New York’s 200th densest cell is still denser than the most dense cells of Boston, the Twin Cities, and of Dallas.

    The y-axis is the total population in each grid cell.

  • The Japanese are renting cars but not driving them

    Lately it has been in the news that a growing number of people in Tokyo are using car-sharing services for reasons other than to drive places. It started when companies began noticing that “several percent of their rented vehicles” were not being driven at all. What they ended up discovering, largely through customer surveys, is that car-sharing services have become an affordable option for people looking to nap, work, eat, store things, charge their phone, practice rapping, and probably a bunch of other things.

    This immediately struck me as being quintessentially Japanese, partially because one of my experiences of Tokyo is that Tokyoites are often cool to sleep all throughout the city, including at the bar and on my shoulder on the metro. But I also think this finding tells you something about Tokyo’s urban fabric and, in particular, how much of a precious commodity that space is within the capital. This guy once rented a car because he couldn’t find a place to sit down and eat his boxed lunch.

    This may also be a case of mispriced private space. Cities should, of course, have well-designed public spaces that accommodate people wanting to eat their boxed lunches. But for those looking for a little quiet time, a few hundred yen for 30 minutes has proven to be a competitive, and in some cases a more affordable, offering compared to, say, internet cafes. From the sounds of it, none of the car share companies ever anticipated this use case. Pricing is interesting.

    Photo by Louie Martinez on Unsplash

  • Minimalist smart biking device

    I just came across this smart biking device on Kickstarter. It is the next generation of their original SmartHalo, which did very well and is now sold in Apple Stores. The company is based in Montréal.

    Here’s how it works:

    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/smarthalo/smarthalo-2-make-your-bike-smarter

    I know that a lot of you are cyclists, so I figured some of you might appreciate this. It looks pretty awesome. Delivery of SmartHalo 2 is expected by December 2019.

    Their Kickstarter campaign ended on July 2. The project got funded with about CAD 1.7 million from over 10,000 backers. But you can still pre-order a device, here.

  • How Cubans transformed Miami into a global city

    I have a large, and growing, stack of books sitting beside my bed. It is a symptom of my interest in reading exceeding my actual capacity to read, given all the other things I’m doing. However, summer is a good time to get caught up and over the long weekend I did finish reading, The Global Edge: Miami in the Twenty-First Century. It was great, and so now I can confidently recommend it to all of you.

    The most interesting storyline for me was the leading role that “pre-Mariel” Cubans (more on this below) played in transforming Miami from a winter destination to an emerging global city. According to 2015 figures, the City of Miami’s population is 70% Hispanic, of which 34% are Cuban. About 70% of the city’s population speaks Spanish at home. And only about 11.9% of the population is white (non-Hispanic).

    But the bit that really intrigued me was the distinction that Alejandro Portes and Aerial C. Armony make between the “pre-Mariel” Cubans who arrived in the 1960s and 1970s — many of whom became successful entrepreneurs — and the “Marielitos” who arrived in the 1980s onward. This latter group has, on average, not seen the same kind of financial successes as its predecessors.

    The other thing that I think many of you will appreciate is that the authors recognize that all urban phenomena are inherently spatial. And so almost everything they discuss is described in terms of its physical manifestation within the city. Perhaps the most stark is the region’s growing inequality. Wealth along the water; poverty inland.

    Here’s some more information on the book if you’re interested.

    Photo by Alejandro Luengo on Unsplash

  • Zoned for detached single-family housing

    We are in West Virginia now, where the only kind of housing that we have come across is — not surprisingly — low-density, detached, and single-family.

    Indeed, approximately 75% of the residential land across the entire US is estimated to be zoned for detached single-family homes. Using data from UrbanFootprint, the NY Times recently published a series of city maps outlining the percentage of land dedicated exclusively to this housing type.

    In some cases, such as on residential corner lots in Portland, duplexes are allowed. But generally speaking, the pink corresponds to detached single-family housing. About 15% of residential land in New York City is zoned for this, compared to about 94% of the land in San Jose.

    Interestingly enough, none of the residential land in Manhattan is zoned to accommodate detached single-family housing.