Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1309

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I have been thinking a lot about city branding lately. It’s a topic I’m interested in to begin with, and all of the Blue Jays mania going on in Toronto right now has got thinking about our own brand.

Because at the end of the day, yes, it’s baseball. But it’s also something much larger. It’s about civic and national pride, and it’s about who we are as a city. That’s why city branding has become a global industry and why it’s so closely connected to tourism, media, sports, and entertainment.

Still, great city branding is incredibly difficult to do. Lots of cities have tried and lots of cities – from  Adelaide  to Toronto – have failed. Anyone remember the “ Toronto Unlimited ” brand of the mid-2000′s? It had absolutely zero stickiness.

But in reality, cities are brand building all the time whether they realize it or not. Here in Toronto, our biggest brand builder right now is probably Drake . That might sound silly to some, but I believe it to be true. And next to that, you have people like Jose Bautista with his bat flips and his support of local brands like Peace Collective . In addition to their day jobs, these people are helping to shape the identity of the city.

What, then, is professional city branding supposed to do?

Well, in my opinion, it is their job to mine a city for the things that already exist. A city brand, no matter how great it may be, cannot be expected to create something from nothing. There has to be something there to begin with.

But once you identify that something, a great city brand can tie it all together; create a cohesive and collective identity; and serve as a guide for future decision making. And when that’s done effectively, you actually begin to enhance the things that you initially started out with. The associations become even more powerful.

So today I thought we could have a discussion in the comments about city brands. How would you describe the brand of your city in one sentence?

For me, I would describe Toronto along the lines of being the most livable and multicultural 24/7 global city. And when you think of it this way, you can probably see why I think a 2AM last call at the bar is laughable .

Yesterday I wrote about a new book that was just released called The Next Urban Renaissance . 

The first essay in the book, written by Ingrid Gould Ellen of New York University, is centered around three ideas to help cities deal with the affordable housing problem. This is something that successful cities all around the world are grappling with.

The first idea is land-value taxation, which is also known as a “split-rate” tax. I’ve touched on land-value taxation before on ATC, but I never really dug into it. So this was a good reminder to do that.

The idea behind land-value taxation is to split property taxes into a land tax and an improvements tax (i.e. the building), and then shift more of the burden over to the land side. Economists tend to really like this model because taxing buildings/improvements can discourage property investment and development, whereas taxing land doesn’t impact supply. The supply of land is fixed.

So in the context of affordable housing, land-value taxation is thought to be a way to encourage more development and to increase the supply of new housing – which is usually a good way to keep home prices in check.

Here’s how Ingrid Gould Ellen described it:

…a land tax would discourage speculators from hoarding undeveloped land and incentivize them to develop their parcels to the full extent allowable. Regardless of whether a parcel sits vacant, houses a partially occupied, one-story retail strip, or holds a 30-story apartment tower, the annual tax bill would be the same. By switching to a land tax, a city could therefore increase the supply of housing and, by doing so, reduce prices across the board.

But I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t more applicable to cities or areas that are currently struggling to encourage development. For instance, would boom town Toronto really benefit (in terms of affordable housing) from a tax change that ends up encouraging more high-rise development?

It also strikes me as being exceptionally difficult to implement, particularly in city like Toronto that is growing and changing so quickly. Is it reasonable to ask the owner of a small downtown parking lot to being paying property taxes as if a 90 storey supertall had been built on top of it? Because that is the reality in some parts of this city.

And if we opted to phase in this new land tax, would it then become a game of arbitrage where developers look for properties with the lowest land taxes but the highest achievable densities?

Finally, I wonder if it wouldn’t exacerbate some of the problems that already exist in rapidly growing cities, one of which is the preservation of smaller heritage buildings in centrally located neighborhoods:

In the case of a split-rate tax, the losers will be owners of parcels with high land-to-building value ratios, or owners of small buildings on valuable, centrally located parcels, who will likely see an increase in their tax bills after the switch to a split-rate tax.

Land-value taxation is something that I’ve been thinking about for a number of months now. But I am struggling to come up with a decisive position. If you have any thoughts on this, it would be great to hear from you in the comments.