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

  • Your own 24/7 chauffeur

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    If you had a free 24/7 chauffeur to drive you anywhere you wanted, do you think that would impact where you lived, worked, and played? 

    Put differently, if you were relieved from actually having to contend with traffic yourself and if you never had to worry about parking and/or drinking and driving, would you be more inclined to live further out of the city to get bigger and cheaper housing?

    This is the question I tried to ask in a Twitter poll this morning:

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    Personally, I think that this scenario would impact my behaviour, only slightly. I would certainly take advantage of the free chauffeur, but I would not be more inclined to live 1 or maybe even 2 hours of the city.

    Sure, I would be able to get more real estate, but I wouldn’t want to sit in a car every morning – even if I wasn’t the one driving. Maybe I’d be more inclined to have a cottage out of the city, but I can’t imagine a big commute. In my view, minimizing commute times is one of the most effective ways to up your quality of life.

    I’m thinking about all of this because of this TechCrunch article, arguing that technologies such as driverless vehicles and VR (for telecommuting) will soon cause rapid decentralization. This reminds me of what was said during the dot com era. Real estate was out of favor and it was all about tech. 

    Though I am sure that there are technological impacts that you or I cannot foresee right now, I think it’s important to remember that people live in cities for many different reasons. It’s not only for access to a labor market, it’s also for access to a dating market, as well as other things that involve people coming together. I believe that we are inherently social beings. And technology is not going to make that disappear overnight.

    I would be curious to see how you all feel about this topic. Please leave a comment below so we can discuss.

  • The most fascinatingly boring city in the world

    The Guardian Cities UK is currently focusing on all things Canada for a special week-long series. The first post is up and it’s about why Toronto is “the most fascinatingly boring city in the world.” The piece is by Stephen Marche.

    I don’t agree with everything in the essay – or maybe I just despise being called boring, steady, and predictable – but there are a number of great gems that I would like to reblog today. Here are the 5 that stood out for me.

    1. Chicago vs. Toronto:

    “What Chicago was to the 20th century, Toronto will be to the 21st. Chicago was the great city of industry; Toronto will be the great city of post-industry. Chicago is grit, top-quality butchers, glorious modernist buildings and government blight; Toronto is clean jobs and artisanal ice-creameries, identical condos, excellent public schools and free healthcare for all. Chicago is a decaying factory where Americans used to make stuff. Toronto is a new bank where the tellers can speak two dozen languages.”

    2. London vs. New York vs. Toronto Bankers:

    “In London and New York, the worst stereotype of a banker is somebody who enjoys cocaine, Claret and vast megalomaniac schemes. In Toronto, a banker handles teachers’ pension portfolios and spends weekends at the cottage.”

    3. Montreal vs. Toronto:

    “I was 19 when he said that, and I knew even then that for the rest of my life, Canada’s future would be built on money and immigrants. I wasn’t wrong. Most Canadian business headquarters had already taken the five-hour drive west. After 95, the rest followed. Montreal decided to become a French-Canadian city. Toronto decided to become a global city.”

    4. The last time Toronto built a white elephant subway line:

    “On any given morning on the Sheppard subway line in the north of the city, you can sit down in perfect peace and order, although you will find little evidence of good government. As the latest addition to Toronto’s fraying infrastructure, the Sheppard subway is largely untroubled by urban bustle. The stations possess the discreet majesty of abandoned cathedrals, designed for vastly more people than currently use them, like ruins that have never been inhabited. Meanwhile, in the overcrowded downtown lines, passengers are stacked up the stairs. The streetcars along a single main street, Spadina, carry more people on a daily basis than the whole of the Sheppard line, whose expenses run to roughly $10 a passenger, according to one estimate. A critic has suggested that sending cabs for everybody would be cheaper.”

    5. On Mayor Tory:

    “The current mayor, John Tory, is not an idiot, although he is hardly a figure of the “new Toronto”. He represents, more than any other conceivable human being, the antique white anglo-saxon protestant (Wasp) elite of Toronto, his father being one of the most important lawyers in the city’s history. The old Wasps had their virtues, it has to be said – it wasn’t all inedible cucumber sandwiches and not crying at funerals.”

  • The back-end of our cities

    I love cities. We all love cities right now. 

    Everyone, for good reason, seems to be fixated on both people returning to cities (like those narcissistic Millennials) and people urbanizing for the very first time. This latter scenario is happening rapidly across the developing world and in many cases – but not all cases – it is helping to lift people out of extreme poverty.

    But by most measures, urban areas represent only about 2-3% of the world’s land area, despite housing over 50% of our population. So here’s an interesting thought for this morning: What is happening and what will happen with the remaining 97-98%?

    In this recent talk by architect Rem Koolhaas, he attempts to dissect the future of living, loving, and working through the lens of architecture. However, he starts by saying that architecture is, in fact, too slow to properly capture the zeitgeist of any time period. It is, “an unbelievably slow art.” That said, Koolhaas has a remarkable ability to identify what is happening (see Delirious New York) and then call it out in a way that you probably haven’t thought about. 

    In the above talk, he hones in on the impact of Silicon Valley – certainly the spirit of our time – on the rural landscape outside of our cities. Interestingly enough, he also talks about how the tech industry has begun to borrow terminology from architecture in order to describe itself.

    Screenshot from the video:

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    Despite their ethereal appearance, technology giants still have large physical footprints for servers, production, logistics, and so on. But there’s no reason – or way – to accommodate them inside of our cities and so they cluster outside, in the 97-98% areas. These are places like the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, which is the home of Tesla’s new Gigafactory.

    Because of sheer scale and because there’s no need for them to possess much in the way of humanistic qualities, these are spaces which are void of architecture, urbanism, and, in some cases, a light spectrum beyond what is absolutely necessary for the specific function of the building (discussed in the video).

    Of course, the periphery has long serviced the core. But Koolhaas’ thinking has, as it often does, made me consider this phenomenon in a slightly different way. He paints a picture of a spiky world where we are all crammed into sensor and app-driven cities (the front-end), all of which are then powered by big mechanistic boxes that many of us may be naive to (the back-end). In some ways it feels like the Matrix. What we see and experience could just be the tip of the iceberg.

    Architecture may be unbearably slow, but as a society we have always built what matters to us most at the time. At one point it was places of worship. But today, at least for part of our landscape, it is boxes not intended for us to really experience. Maybe that’s not really architecture. Maybe it is simply the back-end for our cities.

  • State of Center City, Philadelphia

    The Center City District and Central Philadelphia Development Corporation recently published a report called: State of Center City 2016. The objective was to measure the progress being made in Philadelphia’s downtown. 

    I moved out of Center City (Rittenhouse Square) in 2009, but I still like to follow what’s happening. I really enjoyed my time in Philly. In fact, I remember missing its immensely walkable downtown after I returned to Toronto and touched down in the suburbs briefly before moving back downtown.

    If you take a look at the report, one of the first things you’ll probably notice is the concentration of jobs and the concentration of knowledge works (with advanced degrees) in the Center City area. We are seeing this shift in so many cities around the world.

    Here are a few graphics (all of which are from the report):

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    Part of the reason for this is that Center City is anchored by a number of fantastic Universities. This is critical for cities, today.

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    To end this post, I thought I would post the below comparison of average office rents in major CBDs across the US. I always find these charts interesting, even though the usual suspects are up at the top.

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    I hope you’re all having a great holiday weekend.

  • The urban wealth pendulum

    Jeffrey Lin, who is an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, recently published the following chart:

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    I found it in this Washington Post article. And it’s packed full of fascinating information.

    The chart compares the socioeconomic status in US cities (y-axis) against “distance from city center” (x-axis) in 1880 and then in recent years (1960 to 2010 census data). The orange circles represent the 1880 data and the red and blue lines represent the recent census data.

    What this chart and research tells us is that in 1880, rich people overwhelmingly lived in the center of cities. And as you moved further away from the city center, socioeconomic status fell off pretty precipitously. This makes sense given that, at the time, it was hard to get around and travel long distances.

    However, in the post-war years, the exact opposite became true. We began driving and wealth decentralized. This should surprise no one. 

    But what’s interesting is how this appears to be reversing. In 2010 (the red line), there’s a sharp increase in socioeconomic status for people living basically right in the center of cities. And for the 30 – 60 km range, there has been a decrease in socioeconomic status essentially from the 1960s onwards. 

    The important takeaway here – which is spelled out in the Washington Post article – is that the neighborhoods which appear to be in high demand today are also in very short supply:

    “We have 80 years of essentially zero production of neighborhoods with these qualities,” Grant says. “We’ve spent the last 80 years building car-oriented suburbs. Then when the elites decide they want to go back into the city, there’s not enough city to go around.”

    This is one reason why supply matters.

  • Building new, better cities

    Earlier today my friend Saadat sent me the following tweet:

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    It’s a link to a new research project by Y Combinator – the famed Silicon Valley seed accelerator. They want to explore the possibility of building new and better cities.

    I don’t have the time for something like this, but if any of you are city experts (I know a lot of you are) and you’re based in or willing to be based in San Francisco (I think they are flexible on this), you should absolutely consider applying to be their full time “Cities Researcher.” The deadline is July 30, 2016.

    Here’s a taste of what they are thinking about…

    There are many high-level questions we want to think through, for example:

    – What should a city optimize for?

    – How should we measure the effectiveness of a city (what are its KPIs)?

    – What values should (or should not) be embedded in a city’s culture?

    – How can cities help more of their residents be happy and reach their potential?

    – How can we encourage a diverse range of people to live and work in the city?

    – How should citizens guide and participate in government?

    – How can we make sure a city is constantly evolving and always open to change?


    And there are tactical questions we want to dig into, for example:

    – How can we make and keep housing affordable? This is critical to us; the cost of housing affects everything else in a city.

    – How can we lay out the public and private spaces (and roads) to make a great place to live?

    – Can we figure out better zoning laws?

    – What is the right role for vehicles in a city?

    – Should we have human-driven cars at all?

    – How can we have affordable high-speed transit to and from other cities?

    – How can we make rules and regulations that are comprehensive while also being easily understandable?

    – Can we fit all rules for the city in 100 pages of text?

    – What effects will the new city have on the surrounding community?

    The convergence of city building and tech is something that I’m deeply interested in. I also think it’s inevitable. And I think that Toronto – thanks to our robust real estate industry – is in an ideal position to be a leader in this space. So I would love to see someone from here take on this job.

    But even if you’re not from Toronto, you should still apply because it’s an exciting initiative 🙂

  • Positivity at a public meeting

    I’ve been reading the blog 5 Kids 1 Condo for, I think, about a year now. It’s written by Adrian Crook who is a single dad of 5 kids, living in a 2 bedroom condo in downtown Vancouver. And his blog is about just that.

    A few days ago he posted a video of himself speaking at a public meeting in support of a new purpose-built rental building at 18th and Commercial Drive in Vancouver. The proposal includes 110 secured market rental units; 37% of which will be 2 or 3 bedroom apartments. (More information on the project, here.)

    It’s rare to see people come out in support of a project at a public meeting. Usually people only show up when they’re grouchy and upset. So today I’d like to share his speech (click here if you can’t see the video below).

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-ENWu__HdM?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

    I’m curious to know what was shouted right at the beginning after he said that he was in favor of the proposal. I listened a few times but couldn’t figure it out. 

    In any event, Adrian’s speech touches on a number of important points that transcend this specific development proposal and that are relevant to many of the topics that we discuss here on this blog.

  • This building is shit. Or is it?

    I was looking through my photo archive this past week (which is all on an Apple Time Capsule) and I came across this photo:

    I took this photo in the winter of 2011 on a snowboarding trip to Lake Tahoe. It’s of the San Francisco Federal Building, which was designed by Morphosis and completed in 2007.

    The reason this photo stands out for me is because as my friends and I were taking photos of this building a man walked by us and said:

    “Why are you taking photos of this shit?

    …you guys must be architects.”

    To me this was a frank reminder that the designs that my architecture friends and I obsess over (at least the contemporary stuff) often go completely unappreciated by a lot of other people – perhaps the majority of people.

    This, of course, raises an interesting debate. 

    If the majority of the public think a building is shit, is it a failure? Should a building’s success be judged more by how its occupants feel about it? Or is it the “expert” opinion that really matters? (Expert is in quotations because I don’t like this term.)

    While important, I don’t think it’s as simple as these questions. Architecture can take years, decades, or even longer to settle in and become fully appreciated. Think about the buildings that your city may have demolished in the past but now regrets. Tastes change.

    With that, below is an excerpt from the architect’s own description of the Federal Building. Keep in mind that this project started construction in 2003 and so design would have started years before that. Hopefully it’s clear just how relevant the ambitions of this project remain some 15 or so years later.

    The re–definition of circulation and vertical movement paths provides opportunities for chance encounters, a critical mass in circulation, and places for employees to gather across the typical confines of cubicles, departments, or floor plates. The democratic layout locates open work areas at the building perimeter and private offices and conference spaces at the central cores. As Gladwell’s article points out, “…one study after another has demonstrated [that] the best ideas in any workplace arise out of casual contact among different groups within the same company.” Skip stop elevators, sky gardens, tea salons, large open stairs, flexible floor plans, and the elimination of corner offices endow the tower with a Jacobsian “sidewalk life” of cross-sectional interactions.

    Many of the same design decisions that create high quality workspace also maximize energy efficiency. The Federal Building is the first office tower in the U.S. to forgo air-conditioning in favor of natural ventilation. As a result of the tower’s narrow profile and strategic integration of structural, mechanical and electrical systems, the building provides natural ventilation to 70% of the work area in lieu of air conditioning, and affords natural light and operable windows to 90% of the workstations. A folded, perforated metal sunscreen shades the full-height glass window wall system and a mutable skin of computer–controlled panels adjusts to daily and seasonal climate fluctuations. With an energy performance that surpasses the GSA’s criteria by more than 50%, the project sets new standards for applications of passive climate control, while physically democratizing the workplace and enhancing employees’ health, comfort, and sense of control over their environment.

  • How the UK voted

    For some reason, I woke up extra early this morning, well before my alarm. As soon as I came to and noticed the time, I immediately reached for my phone to pull up Twitter and see what happened with the UK referendum. And frankly, I was shocked to see that they had voted to leave the EU. 

    Once I saw what had happened, I then went to my computer and started looking for maps of the voting results. 

    Here’s one from the Guardian:

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    They also found that the best predictor of how people voted (with Scotland being a bit of an exception) was whether or not they had a degree. Residents with higher education were more likely to vote “remain.”

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    Here’s another vote map from the Telegraph, broken down by 12 regions:

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    According to these regions, only Northern Ireland, Scotland, and London voted to remain. If we get a bit more granular though, the map turns into this:

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    Not surprisingly, it is London and other big cities (remain) vs. the rest of England (leave). Here’s another case of urban divide.

  • Market vs. subsidized

    Miriam Zuk and Karen Chapple of the University of California, Berkeley, recently published a research brief called Housing Production, Filtering and Displacement: Untangling the Relationships. 

    It’s a nuanced look at the impact of both market-rate and subsidized housing production on affordability and displacement within the San Francisco Bay Area.

    The report is essentially a response to the debate around whether increasing market-rate housing production alone can address affordability and displacement concerns, or whether the only way to do it is through subsidized housing. What they found was that both matter, but…

    “What we find largely supports the argument that building
    more housing, both market-rate and subsidized, will
    reduce displacement. However, we find that subsidized
    housing will have a much greater impact on reducing displacement
    than market-rate housing. We agree that market-rate
    development is important for many reasons, including
    reducing housing pressures at the regional scale and housing
    large segments of the population. However, our analysis
    strongly suggests that subsidized housing production is even
    more important when it comes to reducing displacement of
    low-income households.”

    If you’re interested in this topic, I recommend reading the full brief. It’s only 12 pages. I particularly liked the information around filtering and how new housing steps down over time to ultimately serve lower-income households.