Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1172

A few weeks ago I received a community meeting notice in the mail for a new development happening in my neighborhood. I am excited about the project and so I immediately put it in my calendar and told myself: “I’m going to this.”

But then a work commitment came up and I skipped the event. I always do this. I put these public meetings in my calendar with every intention of going, but then as soon as something else comes up, it gets bumped. So in the end, my voice will not be heard.

I say this not because I think my singular voice is all that important, but because I suspect I’m not alone when it comes to these community meetings. I live and breathe city building and if I struggle to attend these things, what does that mean for the average resident?

As soon as you create friction – such as having to go somewhere, physically – you’re going to lose a large segment of people. This also means that only those who are highly motivated will attend.

I saw this phenomenon play out in my condo building. At our first annual general meeting – when the building still had a bunch of deficiencies and the elevators were spotty – we had a sold out and lively crowd. 

But as soon as things started humming along in year two (we are now a well-oiled machine), we then struggled to reach quorum. Why show up unless you’ve got a bone to pick, right?

What was the last public meeting that you attended in your city?

The New York Times has an interesting article up talking about the possible impacts of climate change on coastal real estate in the United States. In it they make the argument that sales velocity is declining in flood-prone areas. Here are two snippets:

Over the past five years, home sales in flood-prone areas grew about 25 percent less quickly than in counties that do not typically flood, according to county-by-county data from Attom Data Solutions , the parent company of RealtyTrac. Many coastal residents are rethinking their investments and heading for safer ground.

In the past year, home sales have increased 2.6 percent nationally, but have dropped about 7.6 percent in high-risk flood zones in Miami-Dade County, according to housing data. Many coastal cities are taking steps toward mitigation, digging runoff tunnels, elevating roads and building detention ponds.

I would like to see more data supporting this argument, but I can’t say I’m surprised. Flood risk is certainly something I would think about – particularly in high-risk areas such as South Florida. Florida has 6 of the 10 most vulnerable urban centers in the US.

The other piece that caught my attention is this:

Flood risks are easily overlooked because past flood damage often goes unreported and, as in Virginia, the burden of discovering it falls to the buyer. LexisNexis, a news and legal research company, can supply sellers a report with the history of flood claims on the property, but buyers usually do not know to ask for it. FEMA collects information on federal insurance claims for homes nationally, but the agency has been reluctant to make it public for privacy reasons.

It is yet another example of how opaque the real estate industry is. A lot of the information – assuming it’s even available – is fragmented across a number of different sources. If you’re playing hot potato, this obviously works to your benefit. But I don’t believe it’s the best thing for the overall market.

Facebook, as part of their internet.org initiative, is working on bringing internet access to people in rural areas all across the world. For obvious socioeconomic reasons, this is an important initiative. From a business standpoint, it also grows the base of potential Facebook users at a time where that top line number is starting to plateau.

In order to understand how people are settling and aggregating throughout the world, Facebook has been using high-resolution population maps and then creating models to drill down and analyze individual buildings. 

This is interesting because: how else could you track informal settlements? So far this seems to be the most effective method. In fact, in architecture school I worked on a project in Dhaka, Bangladesh and I remember relying heavily on aerial photography because I simply couldn’t find the data I was looking for.

Here’s an excerpt from a recent World Bank post . They, along with Columbia University, are collaborating with Facebook.

Facebook’s computer vision approach is a very fast method to produce spatially-explicit country-wide population estimates. Using their method, Facebook successfully generated at-scale, high-resolution insights on the distribution of buildings, unmatched by any other remote sensing effort to date. These maps demonstrate the value of artificial intelligence for filling data gaps and creating new datasets, and they could provide a promising complement to household surveys and censuses.

And here’s an excerpt from a recent Facebook post on the same topic:

From this preliminary analysis, we’ve determined that slightly less than 50% of the population lives in cities. However, 99% of the population lives within 63 km of the nearest city. Hence, if we are able to develop communication technologies that can bridge 63 km with sufficiently high data rates, we should be able to connect 99% of the population in these 23 countries. [”These 23 countries” represents about 1/3 of the world’s population.]

I would imagine that this type of model works better in sparsely populated / low-rise areas. Still, I am very interested in thinking about ways in which our current survey and census methods could be improved. Here in Canada we conduct our national census every 5 years. In today’s world that feels like eons. One day, I am sure, it will be real-time.

Image: World Bank