Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1324

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This afternoon I was chatting with some friends about Toronto real estate (which is something that happens a lot in this city), and we started talking about “The Starbucks Effect.”

Basically, we were talking about how this neighborhood just got a Starbucks and how that neighborhood already has one. We were, like a lot of people, using Starbucks as a proxy for neighborhoods that are emerging and neighborhoods that have already arrived.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the correlation between home prices and the presence of a Starbucks. But the big question is what comes first: the home prices or the Starbucks?

Earlier this year, the CEO, Spencer Rascoff, and Chief Economist, Stan Humphries, of Zillow.com argued that the mere presence of a Starbucks can cause gentrification. 

They argued that Starbucks knows the next hot neighborhood before anyone else does and that they are “the fuel, not the follower.” And through their data they demonstrated that homes (in the US) near a Starbucks appreciated significantly faster than homes not near a Starbucks, or even homes near other coffee shops such as Dunkin’ Donuts.

But I – as well as others – wonder if this isn’t an oversimplification.

I certainly believe that Starbucks could help fuel home prices in a neighborhood. I think it gives people a comfort level that the neighborhood has arrived and that there are people in the area who are willing and able to spend money on discretionary items.

But I suspect that for Starbucks it’s a balancing act. They would never want to be late to an emerging neighborhood (and miss that prime corner property), but they also don’t want to be in the business of placing bets on neighborhoods with very few vital signs.

So I think it’s both. I think Starbucks is analyzing the data and watching home prices like a hawk (the follow) and when it reaches a certain point, they move. And that likely causes a further acceleration of neighborhood change (the fuel).

What do you think? I would love to learn more about their site selection process.

Earlier this week I wrote a “Tech Tuesday” post talking about Uber’s new Smart Routes functionality , which it is currently testing out in San Francisco. At the end of the post I ended by saying that it’s not just the taxi industry that should be thinking about Uber, it’s also public transit authorities. 

And that’s because many people in cities rely on multi-modal forms of transportation (I know I do) and in my mind it is clear that Uber is trending away from just “Everyone’s Private Driver” to a service that is starting to look and feel a lot like urban mass transit.

Then today my good friend Evgeny sent me a post called, “ Public Transit Should Be Uber’s New Best Friend .” And it’s one of the best pieces I’ve read on Uber and its impact on urban mobility. I highly recommend you give it a read, particularly if you’re in the city building arena.

The article does a deep dive into how New Yorkers commute. Here’s how they broke it down.

It then talks about what it will take for a company like Uber to make a meaningful dent in car ownership (which is one of the company’s goals) and how the truly big opportunity for Uber is to go more mass market and tap into the public transit market – either by interfacing with or by building its own version of it.

Here’s their concluding paragraph:

But there’s a much wider potential audience if Uber can also reach middle-class customers who want to save money. Perhaps in the distant (or even the not-so-distant) future, Uber can build its own version of “public” transit , making rides so cheap that they cost less than the $4 or $5 that Americans now pay, on average, to make a trip in their personal cars. In the meantime, it might have more success among “ car-cutting ” customers who can use Uber along with public transit. That might mean Uber’s growth is concentrated more in cities like New York, San Francisco and Chicago — and in Europe and Asia — that already have reasonably strong public transit networks.

It’s definitely worth a full read . Thanks again for sending this over Evgeny.

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On Wednesday, August 28th, 2013 at 8:33am, I wrote and posted this .

And that started a 2 year tradition of writing something on this blog, every, single, day, no matter how long or short it might be and no matter how insightful or not insightful it might be. It kick started a discipline.

For the most part, I tend to write about city building and everything that feeds into that, whether it be design, planning, transportation, technology, or real estate. But I also write personal posts, especially when I go snowboarding . And the longer I write this blog, the more comfortable I feel writing those sorts of posts.

Sometimes I feel guilty about those posts though, since I assume most of you are here to learn and talk about city building things. I assume you don’t want to hear about me. But at the end of the day, ATC is a personal blog . It’s not a business or corporate blog, and I like to think that the personal touches help make the content more engaging over time.

Regardless, a big thank you to everyone who reads, subscribes, and follows Architect This City. There are few things more gratifying than hearing someone say they love this blog and that they read it every morning when they wake up. 

That’s a huge commitment on their/your part and I am grateful for that. Because my commitment (writing this blog) wouldn’t be nearly as fun if you weren’t all around to engage with and learn from. And in the early days of writing this blog, there truly was nobody around.

So for today’s 2 year anniversary post, I thought I would share some readership stats. Last Friday I posted a map of all of this blog’s email subscribers (in anticipation of today’s post). But today we’re going to get into some hard numbers (from Google Analytics).

Here are the high level stats from the past year.

Here are the number of visitors (users) over the last year. It feels great to see it increasing. The spikes are posts that, for whatever reason, really took off.

Here’s how people discovered this blog. Almost half of the visitors to this blog are just searching around online and stumble upon it.

And finally, here are the demographics. I only turned this feature on a few weeks ago, so the data set isn’t as large as above. Still, it’s probably pretty accurate. I need to work on correcting the gender imbalance here.

And there you have it. Thanks again for reading. If you have any suggestions for the third year of Architect This City, I would love to hear from you. Leave a comment below. Here’s to another year!