Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1424

Earlier this week I stumbled upon this entertaining article from the Guardian talking about how expensive housing is in London. The author’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion was to setup a new miniature London in the middle of nowhere where everyone could flock for affordable housing, but where many of London’s attributes could be exported: “We can all refuse to wear socks and sell each other overpriced cocktails in jam jars.”

All joking aside, the article is yet another reminder that big global cities are expensive places to live. And in these cities, one of the most precious commodities is, quite simply, personal space. That’s why a garage in London can sell for £550,000 and why a 35 square foot storage cage in New York can sell for $75,000 . 

But affordable housing is not the reason why people want to live in places like London and New York. If it were, they wouldn’t be coming. Instead, they come for lifestyle, wealth creation, and the dating market – among other things. However, at a certain point, usually when they form families and start to need/want more space, they start looking around.

Here’s an infographic via the Atlantic showing how relationship status impacts where people tend to live in London. The purple areas indicate an “above average concentration” of a particular relationship status. As you can see, single people tend to live in the core of the city, and when they get married, they move out to the periphery. Intuitively, this probably makes sense to you.

However, I’m always curious as to whether this trend happens more because of consumer preference (people don’t want to raise kids downtown) or because of economic necessity (they can’t afford anything beyond a shoe box apartment). Because if it is largely out of economic necessity (and the Guardian article would suggest it is), then we’re not creating the inclusive cities and neighborhoods that all city builders like to talk about.

So how do we get better at this?

In my view, and I’ve argued this before, the first step should be about improving supply. That is: get more housing built. And the way to start doing that is to make land available and improve the approvals process for new developments. In a recent McKinsey report , they referred to my first point as “unlocking land.”

“Land cost often is the single biggest factor in improving the economics of affordable housing development. It is not uncommon for land costs to exceed 40 percent of total property prices, and in some large cities, land can be as much as 80 percent of property cost.”

The reason this is important is because most big cities operate with massive supply deficits. There simply isn’t enough housing. And so if you can address that at a fundamental level, you can actually do a lot to start improving affordability.

Last month I wrote about an upcoming city building event in Toronto called called Engaging In-Between Spaces . It’s being hosted by a non-profit group called The Laneway Project and it’s going to be this city’s “first summit on laneways.”

While many people associate the potential of Toronto’s laneways with laneway housing, the focus of this event will be on laneways in a much broader context. Laneway housing will certainly be a part of it, but the event will also look at our laneways as public spaces, gathering spaces, and so on.

I’m going to be giving a short presentation that looks at Toronto’s laneways from a real estate development perspective, and so I hope that you’ll be able to attend. The event is only $10 and the money will help support the group’s mission of transforming our laneways into vibrant, safe, and people-friendly spaces. 

Click here to reserve your spot . And if you are attending, please tweet me so that we can connect at the event!

In 2010, Toronto voted for its new mayor, Rob Ford, like so:

It was basically the core of the city (old Toronto) versus all of the boroughs. And it was perfect ammunition for anyone who believed that Toronto’s amalgamation was a mistake. (I personally don’t think it was.)

Yesterday, Toronto did better.

While we’re still a divided city — with Etobicoke and Scarborough largely remaining loyal to Ford Nation — we’re not quite as divided as we were 4 years ago:

However, there is one thing that Torontonians did largely agree on last night: the next mayor should be white and male. And this got the  Guardian Cities out of the UK  asking why one of the most multicultural cities on the planet (apparently we’re third behind Luxembourg City and Dubai), continues to elect middle-aged white guys.

Now, I’m not a fan of  the article . And I take offence to the way Toronto is portrayed. But it did get me thinking. And I thought it would be interesting to see how some of Toronto’s demographic data overlays on top of these election maps.

Looking at 2006 census data (2011 isn’t available in map form yet), here is a map showing the total number of visible minorities broken down by census tract. The darker the red the more visible minorities.

And here is a map showing immigrants as a percentage of the population. Again, the darker the red, the higher the percentage.

What should be apparent from these maps is that Ford Nation is actually, in some ways, immigrant and visible minority nation. In the above map, the darkest red areas indicate that immigrants represent anywhere from 65-80% of the population. That’s a significant number.

So why didn’t this group vote for the Hong Kong-born  Olivia Chow ? It’s because she wasn’t telling them the right story. Rob and Doug Ford, on the other hand, were.