Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1036

New York Magazine is running a weekly series right now that tells the stories behind key moments in the city’s cultural history. This week’s is about how the Time Warner Center came to be.

Like most real estate projects, it took an enormous amount of time for it be realized. Multiple developers had attempted to buy the site, which previously housed the New York Coliseum .

In 1987, the agency put out a call for proposals, its parameters calculated to yield the highest price and the biggest building. Among the 13 developers who responded was Donald Trump, who proposed the world’s tallest tower, 137 stories high.

It’s a good example of just how difficult it can be to get a large project off the ground. The Time Warner Center opened in 2003. Thank you Paul for sending this along. Click here for the full story. 

French photographer and graphic designer François Prost has a new photo series out that I thought I would share with you today. It’s called “ Paris Syndrome ” and I discovered it via CityLab.

What the series does is visually compare Paris to a housing estate in Hangzhou, China called Tianducheng , which was designed to be a replica of Paris. Tianducheng even has its own Eiffel Tower, though this Chinese version is only 108m tall and the French original is 324m.  

Still, in many of François’ photos , you may find it difficult to distinguish between the two (provided you ignore the Chinese people and the Chinese signs). The neighborhood was initially a ghost town, but apparently it’s now starting to fill up.

The reason I mention this photo series is because it reminded me of the day that I spent in Macau last week. I’m not much for gambling – and Macau is firmly the gambling capital of the world with revenues that greatly exceed Las Vegas – but I was curious to see it.

Similar to Hong Kong, Macau is a Chinese Special Administrative Region with a lot of autonomy. But from 1557 to 1999 it was under Portuguese administration . And so historically it has been home to this very unique Eurasian culture spanning everything from food to language. 

I say “historically” because the Macanese and their Patuá language – which is supposedly a blend of Portuguese, Cantonese and Malay – seem to be on the brink of extinction . 

Today it’s all about the casinos. And the demand is firmly coming from mainland China. In 2016, 90% of Macau’s 31 million tourists came from there.

I fully appreciate the demand drivers, but I struggle to understand the allure of replicating and bastardizing attractions from other places. Macau also has an Eiffel Tower, as well as a Venetian (like Las Vegas). You can go for gondola rides in its canals.

The more interesting part for me was the historic center of Macau with its Portuguese paving on the sidewalks. But maybe that’s just me.

Image: François Prost

According to Bloomberg (using data from CMHC), 2017 was a surprising record year for housing starts in Canada: 219,675 units. This is the most since 2007 and is up from 197,916 units in 2016.

The explanation: job growth (nearly 400,000 new jobs) and population growth were both more robust than expected.

Multiple unit project starts are also up significantly with 142,840 units starting in 2017. This is a 15% increase from the prior year. Of these units, 102,516 of them were “apartment-like homes.”

But all of this is nationwide data. Look at what happened in Toronto and Vancouver:

The increased activity mostly sidestepped land-constrained Toronto and Vancouver, the country’s two most expensive markets, but was robust in the suburbs and less pricey surrounding cities. Starts in Toronto fell 1 percent to 38,738 in 2017, while declining 6 percent in Vancouver to 26,204 units.

This is not because of a lack of demand. It’s becoming systematically more difficult and more costly to build new housing in these two markets.