Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1100

The New York Times just ran an interesting piece on “ how the growth of e-commerce is shifting retail jobs .”

Here are some of the key takeaways (all US data).

Online shopping accounts for about 8.4% of all retail sales.

But e-commerce related jobs are growing way faster than all other forms of retail employment. See above graph.

That said, e-commerce jobs are still a small portion of overall retail employment. And the rise in e-commerce employment has not been enough to offset the losses in other areas, such as in departments stores.

Over the last 15 years, e-commerce added 178,000 jobs and department stores lost 448,000 jobs. In this same time period, warehouse clubs added 841,000 jobs! I found it interesting to see department stores on the bottom and warehouse clubs on the top of the graph.

Finally, e-commerce jobs appear to be concentrating in larger metros. See above map. Each mustard dot represents 40 e-commerce jobs. You’re selling more products with less human capital, and those people are clustering. This is a broader trend.

According to the New York Times, counties and smaller cities (under 250,000 people) account for almost ¼ of overall retail employment. But when it comes to e-commerce firms the number drops to around 13%.

Once again it would seem that technology and what we do online have an impact on our cities and towns. And that’s fascinating.

All images from the New York Times

I promise that this post won’t be all about laneways.

This afternoon Erin Davis of Torontoist published a post called: Are Laneway Suites a Solution to Toronto’s Housing Crisis?

There’s a quote in it from yours truly:

Brandon Donnelly, a 34-year-old real estate developer, has submitted plans to the City to build a laneway home behind the house he owns in the St. Clair Avenue and Dufferin Street area. “Look, nobody is claiming that laneway housing is going to solve all of our affordable housing woes. But it will do two important things. One, it will unlock new ground-related housing, which is precisely the kind of housing that we’re no longer able to build at scale. And two, it will create additional rental housing,” says Donnelly.

But I particularly like this one from Christopher Hume – urban affairs columnist at the Toronto Star:

“But the City has all kinds of rules against it—‘You can’t do it for this reason, you can’t do it for that reason; oh no, we can’t have that!’ Why? Says who and for what reason?

This morning my friend Alex Bozikovic also published a piece on Toronto’s new 1.75km of public space under the Gardiner Expressway called The Bentway . It’s currently under construction and will open this winter.

The timing of his article is actually quite serendipitous because I was in the area last night and as I walked past the construction site I couldn’t help but think to myself: “This is going to be absolutely brilliant once it’s done. Complete game changer for the area.”

My point with these two examples is that in both cases we are rethinking – or at least trying to rethink – neglected urban spaces. It’s about finding value where no additional value was thought to be found. And I love that.

Conventional wisdom has told us that our laneways and the spaces under our elevated Gardiner Expressway are not spaces to be celebrated. They are utilitarian at best and they are to be completely ignored at worst.

But when The Bentway opens this winter I have no doubt in my mind that it will prove conventional wisdom entirely wrong. Who wants to hang out under an elevated highway? Watch the entire city. 

One day I believe that we will also look back on our laneways just as we look back at the The Bentway before it became The Bentway. We will ask ourselves: How did we overlook this for so long?

Image: PUBLIC WORK via the Globe and Mail

Billionaire Sam Zell has a (relatively) new book out called, Am I Being Too Subtle?: Straight Talk From a Business Rebel .

I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve added it to my queue. I can, however, tell you that I always enjoyed listening to Zell speak candidly about business and real estate when I was in graduate school and he would come in. He was never one to mince his words.

He’s making the rounds right now to promote this new book and he recently sat down with William D. Cohan of the New Yorker . Not surprisingly, the Chicago Tribute debacle formed a large part of the conversation – up until Zell got tired of talking about it.

“That is the L.B.O. that drove this company into bankruptcy.” Zell said, of the Tribune experience, “I made a bet. I thought the bet was reasonable. I underwrote it appropriately. I was wrong.” He lost his entire investment.

But this misstep did nothing to phase Zell’s contrarian approach to business and life:

Zell attributes his wealth to a prescription articulated by any number of successful business people: zigging when everyone else is zagging. It’s a replicable formula, he says, and he has little patience for people who complain that it was somehow easier in the good old days, or that the moment for such opportunities has passed. (His earliest successes came from investing in real-estate assets that others shunned.)

He refuses to listen when he’s told he can’t do something. “I spent my whole life listening to people explain to me that I don’t get it,” he says. “I look at the Forbes 400 list, and if I eliminate the people who inherited the money, everybody else went left when conventional wisdom said to go right. How did I do what I did? By not listening to anybody else.”

It’s the Sam Zell way.