Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1128

FiveThirtyEight (Jed Kolko) published a post last month called, “ Americans’ Shift To The Suburbs Sped Up Last year .” 

What Kolko did was take recent population estimates from the US Census Bureau and group them into 6 categories based on the size of the metro and its population density. 

By doing this he discovered something that runs counter to the narrative that we are living through an urban renaissance: lower-density suburbs grew faster than urban counties. The former grew at ~1.3% in 2016. And in the south and west, the lower-density suburbs of large metro areas topped over 2% growth.

What gives? 

Well, this urban renaissance is lopsided. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

That revival is real , but it has mostly been for rich, educated people in particular hyperurban neighborhoods rather than a broad-based return to city living. To be sure, college-educated millennials — at least those without school-age kids — took to the city, and better-paying jobs have shifted there, too. But other groups — older adults, families with kids in school, and people of all ages with lower incomes — either can’t afford or don’t want an urban address.

Richard Florida is calling this phenomenon: The New Urban Crisis .

On Monday, Tesla surpassed GM in market value, making it the most valuable U.S. automaker . It’s also the first time in modern history that this title was held by a car maker not based in Detroit. The gravitational pull to Silicon Valley is immense, today.

I subscribe to Alan Murray’s CEO Daily newsletter and his overarching comments were as follows: GM sold 10 million cars last year. Tesla sold 76,230 cars (albeit high value cars – my 2 cents). And Tesla lost three quarters of a billion dollars last year. Are we partying like it’s 1999 ?

This is an expectations game.

Elon Musk crafted an electric sports car that was actually cool and Tesla is certainly one of the leaders when it comes to autonomous vehicle technology. If Tesla is the company that transitions our economy to both electric and autonomous vehicles, then is a current market cap > $51 billion justified?

I don’t know.

But given how often we talk about electric and autonomous vehicles on this blog (in the context of city building), I thought it would be worthwhile to also talk about where Wall Street is putting its money and placing its bets.

I couldn’t sleep last night, so I got up and pulled out an old issue of Monocle magazine from my nightstand. I then stumbled upon the following article by Taras Grescoe.

What really stood out for me was this line:

“Thickets of haphazardly planned condo towers, compacted amid neighbourhoods of single-family houses, have led to congestion nightmares in Toronto and notoriously out-of-hand housing costs in Vancouver.”

It bothered me for a few reasons:

- The frame of reference is the single-family house. It perpetuates the cultural bias that what matters most in cities, like Toronto and Vancouver, is low-rise housing.

- I don’t get the “haphazardly planned” comment. New tower development has been heavily concentrated in the downtown core, growth centers, along the Yonge subway corridor, and so on. Their built form is also significantly influenced by their relationship to these low-rise “Neighbourhoods.”

- I believe that building up, as opposed to out, is the way to address congestion nightmares. Though I will concede that our ability to plan and execute on transit in this city is positively deplorable. 

- How did thickets of condos create an affordability problem in Vancouver? Many factors at play in this city, including a powerful geographic supply constraint.

Those are just a few of my thoughts from early this morning. What are yours?