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: vancouver

  • 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 new typology of cities

    Earlier in the week, my friend Rodney Wilts of Theia Partners sent me a JLL report called, World Cities: Mapping the Pathways to Success. I am admittedly only getting around to it now.

    The report proposes a new typology of world cities that looks like this:

    image

    It is based on 10 overall categories of cities, grouped into 4 main buckets. The first bucket is “Established World Cities”, within which there is the “Big Seven”, and then the “Contenders.”

    The Real Estate Highlights that accompany each category of city is a good place to start if you’re looking to do a quick scan of the report.

    Here’s a taste:

    One-quarter of all capital invested in commercial real estate globally currently lands in one of the “Big Seven” cities. And London and New York are easily at the top.

    Cities that recently graduated from “New World City” status – namely Toronto, San Francisco, Sydney, and Amsterdam – are all struggling to address housing and infrastructure deficits.

    “Lifestyle” cities – such as Vancouver, Auckland, and Oslo – are some of the most active investment markets. Biggest rental growth for prime offices (since 2000) in the “New World Cities” category.

    Click here for the full report.

  • Buy land, Chip. Buy land.

    Bloomberg Businessweek just published a longish article about Vancouver and the Chinese capital that fuels it. It’s called, The City That Had Too Much Money. 

    Most of you are already familiar with this narrative, but here’s an excerpt that talks about the city’s economic base and its apparent dependency on foreign capital:

    Change will be difficult and fraught. Vancouver has been closely connected to Asia since the late 19th century, when the first Chinese laborers arrived to help build the trans-Canada railway, and the city is proud of its record of integrating immigrants. Also, beyond real estate, Vancouver’s economic base is shallow. It’s not the business capital of western Canada—that’s Calgary—and it has few major corporate headquarters or large-scale manufacturing operations. “Asian capital has kept this economy alive, end of story,” says Ron Shon, a Chinese-Canadian venture capitalist who arrived as a teenager in the late 1960s. “You can see it in every aspect of our lives.”

    One of the things I found particularly interesting were Chip Wilson’s comments around what is going on. Chip is the founder of Lululemon and is largely credited with pioneering the current “athleisure” trend.

    Yet as Wilson explains, sitting in his office on the top floor of a century-old warehouse, these days he’s as interested in bricks and mortar as in quick-drying fabrics. “The global capital flowing out of China across the world, you’d have to be an idiot not to acknowledge it,” he says. “You know, we could just be at the cusp of that.”

    To profit from the deluge, he’s been buying up land all over town, especially in False Creek Flats, a derelict industrial area that’s slated for redevelopment. He estimates that about a third of his holdings are now in real estate. British Columbia’s current government may succeed in slowing inflows temporarily, Wilson says, but China’s boom has created many multimillionaires who need a place to put their money. “So where do you go if you’re Chinese? Sydney, maybe. But nowhere, probably, is more friendly than Vancouver.” One way or another, he says, those funds will find their way to Canada.

    That’s why, Wilson says, whenever he returns from a trip to Asia, his first thought is simple: “Buy land, Chip. Buy land.”

    For the full article, click here.

    Image: Jens Kristian Balle/The Forbes Collection/Contour/Getty Images (via Bloomberg)

  • Unzipped wall on King Street West

    image

    Last night I checked out the Unzipped Toronto exhibition, which is the relocated Serpentine Pavilion (pictured above) that was designed by Bjarke Ingels Group in 2016. 

    It was initially housed in Hyde Park London, but it’s now on King Street West Toronto. Westbank purchased the “unzipped wall” after it was installed in London and supposedly it will eventually find a permanent home in Vancouver.

    The official opening of Unzipped Toronto is September 15th, 2018. It will be free and open to the public. If you’d like to get a complimentary ticket, you can do that here. 

    The timing of all this lines up with condo sales for Bjarke Ingels’ first project in Toronto. I believe that will be starting this fall. And I am sure they will end up setting some new records for the King West submarket.

  • Homes built in the past year

    I’m on a flight right now reading the latest issue of Monocle Magazine in a seat that barely accommodates the length of my femur. This month’s issue has their annual ranking of the top 25 cities in the world.

    Munich is first, which is not unusual for their ranking methodology. It generally scores well. Quality of life is high. Crime is low. The economy is strong. Beer gardens are fun. And you’re close to the Alps for snowboarding.

    One stat that caught my attention — and it’s not included for all of the cities — is the number of homes built in the past year. Presumably this is all housing units in the metro area — for sale, for rent, subsidized and so on.

    Here are their (clearly rounded) numbers. The order is as they appeared in the ranking, but again, not ever city included this stat.

    • Munich: 8,300
    • Tokyo: 150,000
    • Copenhagen: 5,000
    • Berlin: 11,000
    • Madrid: 1,600
    • Hamburg: 7,000
    • Melbourne: 5,100
    • Helsinki 4,400
    • Stockholm: 7,000 (18,000 in Greater Stockholm)
    • Sydney: 39,000
    • Hong Kong 17,000
    • Vancouver 22,600
    • Amsterdam 5,100
    • Kyoto 8,900
    • Dusseldorf 2,600
    • Barcelona 1,000

    Some of these numbers appear to stand out, such as the counts for Tokyo, Sydney and maybe Vancouver. But it’s hard to draw any conclusions around housing supply and housing affordability.

    Melbourne and Amsterdam allegedly have the same number of homes built over the past year, but according to Monocle the metro areas of Melbourne and Amsterdam have populations of 4.85 million and 2.4 million, respectively. This also says nothing about their growth rates.

    So which one is doing a better job of addressing housing demand? I’m not sure.

    But it was still interesting to see that Tokyo delivers somewhere around 150,000 homes a year. Tokyo is somewhat unique globally in that it’s a big city — one of the biggest — that somehow manages to gracefully balance both scale and quality of life.

    Photo by Elias Keilhauer on Unsplash

  • Airbnb and affordable housing

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    Fred Wilson published a good post last weekend on the proposed bill that went to New York City Council this week regarding new reporting requirements for Airbnb and their hosts in NYC. You can read more about his position on his blog, but he is in favor of a comprehensive bill that would properly legitimize short-term rentals. He is also not opposed to city and state taxes on the service.

    What I wanted to focus on today were his comments around housing. This is already sounding like a broken record, but Fred draws attention to the severe supply-demand imbalance that is occurring in the boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, precisely because many/most young people were priced out of Manhattan long ago and want to live in these places.

    But I particularly like his comments around what makes for good policy and what makes for good politics. I agree with his view that it is often a case of the latter over the former. I think a lot of the excitement around Airbnb is a red herring. For me, it’s akin to the fixation on foreign buyers and their impact on the local housing market in places like Toronto and Vancouver.

    Yes, they are factors. But the data suggests they are marginal ones. As Fred points out, they are almost certainly not the root cause of the problem. The reality is that we need a lot more housing – both market-rate housing and subsidized housing. The challenge is that nobody wants to pay for the latter and so we’ve instead decided to focus on things that sound like they’re going to help.

    Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

  • Vancouver revisits laneway house program

    Vancouver is light years ahead of Toronto when it comes to laneway housing/suites. And by light years I mean that their Laneway House (LWH) Program is about a decade old now.

    Last month the City of Vancouver published this staff report which outlined recommendations for improving the program. It includes simplifying the regulations, reducing processing timelines, and improving livability in LWHs.

    This aligns with their Housing Vancouver Strategy (2018-2027), which has set a target of 4,000 new LWHs over the coming ten years. That may not seem like a lot and certainly it won’t solve everything, but I reckon that 4,000 is better than 0.

    The city also estimates that approximately 50% of these new LWHs will be two and three bedroom homes, which makes them a viable housing solution for families who want to remain in the city. (Related post: Where are all the kids?)

    There’s a lot of good stuff in the staff report if you’re so inclined, but I’ll leave you with a few facts about the current LWH program in Vancouver. 90% of LWHs are built along with a new house. And 45% of all new houses, so almost half, are now built with a LWH.

    Only 10% of LWHs are single storey, which certainly helps to support the above percentage of two and three bedroom homes. And in both 2016 and 2017 over 500 building permits for LWHs were issued each year.

    So 4,000 LWHs over the next decade may actually be a fairly conservative estimate. Thank you to Michael Geller for sending me this staff report.

    Photo by Spencer Watson on Unsplash

  • Going down east

    I live in Toronto. 

    When I am headed north to cottage country, I say that I am going up north.

    When the Florida snowbirds talk about escaping the winter, they usually say that they are headed down south.

    These geographic references are fairly straightforward.

    If a friend were to move to Vancouver, I might say that she or he moved out west. This one starts to get a bit more interesting because it speaks to a location that is out, or away, from the center. Toronto is the center and that person has moved out from it.

    But the one that really made me think was down east. My mother was born in the Canadian Maritimes and when she references this part of the country she calls it down east. 

    I used to ask her: “Why is it called down east? Geographically, it is actually up east.”

    Turns out that down east is (probably) a nautical reference. It is used to identify parts of the east coast in both New England and Canada. The prevailing winds in these parts blow from the southwest. So when sailors traveled from the west to east they were going downwind.

    So there you have it. Do you have any peculiar geographic references in your part of the world?

    UPDATE: I should have also mentioned that the St. Lawrence River generally flows north-easterly and that there’s an elevational difference between what was formerly known as Upper Canada and Lower Canada.

    Photo by Matthias Jordan on Unsplash

  • The golden era of Canadian graphic design

    Over a year ago I wrote about a Kickstarter campaign that wanted to make a documentary to celebrate “the golden era of Canadian graphic design.” 

    And after I wrote about it, my friend Dave Wex – who, like me, is a lover of all things Canada – backed the project. Yesterday he flipped me the latest update. 

    The trailer is out and the world premiere of Design Canada is scheduled for Wednesday, June 13, 2018 at the Hot Docs Cinema here in Toronto. After that, it will move to Montreal and Vancouver. 

    If you can’t see the trailer below, click here.

    [vimeo 263571655 w=640 h=280]

    Tickets available, here.

  • Vancouver’s Empty Homes Tax

    In an effort to curb the much talked-about and much debated empty home situation in Vancouver (supposedly the number is ~20k vacant homes), the city, as many of you know, implemented an Empty Homes Tax.

    To enforce this, the City of Vancouver now requires that every year, every owner of residential property must file a status declaration. If you don’t file this by the deadline, the property is automatically deemed vacant and the tax (1% of assessed taxable value) and a penalty ($250) are applied.

    Last month, 11 days before the 2017 deadline, the city published the below heat map showing the concentration of Vancouver property owners who hadn’t yet made their declaration. There were just under 4,000 undeclared properties.

    image

    But as Jens von Bergmann points out on his blog, Mountain Doodles (great data-driven blog), this was really just a map of where people live. Because if you also create a map of residential properties subject to the tax, which he did, it looks pretty similar to above.