Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1062

BlogTO recently reported that “ snarky anti-condo signs ” have been popping up around Toronto. Here is one of them via Instagram. It reads (in all caps): Dear Condo Dwellers: Locals Hate You Go Fuck Yourself . 

I find these posters curious, though it is obvious that they are a reaction to growth, intensification, and general change in this city.

For one, it implies that condo dwellers and locals are mutually exclusive. In other words, “locals” don’t live in condos. Presumably the implication is that they live in low-rise grade-related single-family housing. Or maybe they live in rental housing? Is it a tenure thing?

According to the latest 2016 Census data, just over 26% of private dwellings in Toronto are condominiums . And about 30% of people live in a building that has 5 or more storeys . If you include “apartments” less than 5 storeys, this latter number jumps to 40%. So many potential non-locals.

However, it could be that these posters are primarily directed toward new condos and new condo dwellers. This poster seems to have been plastered in front of this recently completed condo building on College Street.

If that is the case, then I wonder if there is a temporal cut-off for the hate. For example, the condo building that houses (at its base) my regular grocery store was completed in 1983. 

The units are large and the demographic seems to skew a bit older. Are these condo dwellers – some of which may have been there for over 3 decades – to be hated? Are they non-locals? Or does urban myopia set in after awhile and they become locals?

At the same time, it wouldn’t be unusual for the residents of an older condo building to oppose a new proposed condo building. So perhaps “local” isn’t about building typology and it’s more about who came first. That’s certainly a tricky one. Better end here.

A curious poster that could use a bit more specificity. What do you make of it?

When I was in New York a few weeks ago, my friend (a New Yorker) said to me that he couldn’t imagine owning a car (he used to but got rid of it with zero remorse). He then elaborated on all of the nuisances that driving in the city produces.

There are parts of Toronto where you can feel similarly. I feel fortunate to live in one of those parts. Of course, there are other parts of this city where the exact opposite is true. It’s inconvenient not to have a car. These are typically areas where lower land costs have been exchanged for higher transportation costs.

The City of Toronto has a land area of approximately 630 square kilometers. If that’s all the land we had (the metro area is almost 6,000 square kilometers), you can bet we would think about land use and transportation a bit differently.

Take for instance, Singapore, a city-state with an area of approximately 719 square kilometers. The Land Transport Authority estimates that 12% of the republic’s total land area is taken up by roads.

Because of this, they just announced that they have  lowered their vehicle growth rate (for cars and motorcycles) from 0.25% per annum to 0% effective February 2018. They can do this through their Certificate of Entitlement (COE) quota. And it won’t be revisited until 2020.

Put differently: No more cars and motorcycles until, maybe , 2020.

The new GoPro HERO6 is a miraculous little camera.

It now films in 4k at 60 frames per second. It has great image stabilization. And the screen on the back is new for me and a real game changer. The creative possibilities are endless.

But probably more importantly you can tell that GoPro is investing heavily in their software. They have to make it easier for people to share the content they create.

They also know that their survival likely depends on some sort of software layer.

At its peak, GoPro was trading at $86 per share. Right now, as I write this post, it’s $9.40. Some think the company will be sold within the next year .

Here is a recent quote from Benedict Evans :

As we saw with first GoPro and now perhaps Sonos, if you’re riding the smartphone supply chain cornucopia but can’t construct a story further up the stack, around cloud, software, ecosystem or network effects, you’re just another commodity widget maker.

To borrow Marc Andreessen’s line:  Software is eating the world .