Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1206

Earlier this month, I came across the following chart from USA today. 

It was based on market caps as at July 29 and so the order wouldn’t look quite the same today. Still, here are the largest companies by market cap and the top 5 are US consumer-facing technology firms.

Remember when it was a big deal that Apple had surpassed Exxon Mobil as the world’s most valuable company?

We are living in a tech-driven world.

Then yesterday, I was reading this New York Times article talking about Uber’s acquisition of Otto (a startup focused on self-driving truck technology) and its plans to allow riders in Pittsburgh to summon self-driving vehicles later this month.

The vehicle will be a tricked out Volvo :

These two snippets from the NY Times stood out for me:

Suddenly, it seems, both Silicon Valley and Detroit are doubling down on their bets for autonomous vehicles. And in what could emerge as a self-driving-car arms race, the players are investing in, or partnering with, or buying outright the specialty companies most focused on the requisite hardware, software and artificial intelligence capabilities.

“There’s an urgency to our mission about being part of the future,” Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, said on Thursday in an interview. “This is not a side project. This is existential for us. ”

The way it will work in Pittsburgh this summer is that the self-driving Volvos will still arrive with a driver, in addition to a sidekick in the passenger seat taking notes about how the vehicle is performing. But the goal is to start weaning us off of human drivers. These pilot rides will be free to start.

This is quite possibly the start of a general change in terms of the way cities operate (quote from Bloomberg ):

In the long run, Kalanick says, prices will fall so low that the per-mile cost of travel, even for long trips in rural areas, will be cheaper in a driverless Uber than in a private car. “That could be seen as a threat,” says Volvo Cars CEO Hakan Samuelsson. “We see it as an opportunity.”

Uber is currently logging about 100 million miles per day. Hopefully it is clear at this point that this is not as simple as ride sharing vs. traditional taxis. Cities who are thinking about it in this way are thinking short-term and missing the bigger picture.

Companies such as Uber, Tesla, and Google are aiming for a fundamental rethink of urban mobility. There is an arms race going on that I believe will completely eradicate the need for human drivers.

Introducing The Lofts at SoDoSoPa and The Residences at The Lofts at SoDoSoPa (South of Downtown South Park).

The following South Park video is a great parody of every real estate marketing video you’ve ever seen. Real estate marketing can be so terrible.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAPmjcBnxIs?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

This video is probably old news, but I never watch TV and so it’s the first time I’m seeing it.

If you can’t see the embedded video, click here .

Here is an interesting discussion paper on the Toronto region’s economy, demographic outlook, and its land use. It was recently published by IBI Group and Hemson Consulting to support the 10-year review of our regional transportation plan.

I wanted to share a couple of charts from the report that I thought were interesting. If you’re not in the Toronto region, I would be very curious to hear how your city might compare in terms of the way it is trending.

The first chart is net migration by age group. Like Vancouver – similar chart posted  here – people have been moving into the city/Toronto when they’re young and then moving out to the suburbs once they start having families. 

Will that continue? The oldest Millennials are now hitting their mid-30′s and I am very interested to see if there will be any reversal in this.

Given the above trend, people in this region are not surprisingly also swapping apartments for ground-related housing as they get older. The crossover point seems to be (or at least has been) when people hit their mid-30′s. Again, I am curious how this may evolve as the city matures.

Because if you look at housing completions from 2001 to 2016 (chart below), the only municipality that was able to meaningfully increase its housing supply was Toronto. 

Every other municipality – except for Hamilton, which posted modest gains – experienced significant declines in the number of new homes delivered to the market over the last census periods. 

Of course, the only reason Toronto was able to increase its housing supply was by building up – in other words by building condos and apartments. (Shown in the purple below. For some reason the legend is incomplete in the report.) 

If you look at the share of housing completions, over 80% of new homes in Toronto are now in apartment form. 

Intensification is a deliberate policy choice. And we can certainly debate whether it’s a good or bad thing (I believe it’s a good thing). 

But putting that aside, the above charts are a great answer to the perennial question: “How is it that Toronto is building so many condos?” This is why.