Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1443

Last week I tweeted out a Tweetstorm with some of the key facts from this City of Toronto study on the downtown core . Here are two of those tweets:

1/ Since 2006, downtown Toronto ’s population has been growing at 18%. That’s 4x the growth rate of the entire city. #athiscity

— Brandon G. Donnelly (@donnelly_b)

August 29, 2014

12/ Over 40% of downtown Toronto residents walk or cycle to work. 34% take transit. And 25% drive. #athiscity

— Brandon G. Donnelly (@donnelly_b)

August 29, 2014

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While I realize that reading city reports is probably not everyone’s idea of fun, it is a good one if you want to understand the massive change that is taking place in Toronto right now and also the importance of the downtown core for this region.

To put things into perspective, consider that the downtown core (including King West, King East, and the Portlands) is estimated to be responsible for 51% of the entire wealth generated in this city. And yet its physical area is easily less than 10% of the entire city (which is about 630 square kilometers).

That’s fascinating to me.

The following chart represents births in the United States per 1,000 people. The segment in red demarcates the birth years between 1946 and 1964, which is generally considered to represent the Post-World War II population spike known as the Baby Boom . Besides this jump, we have for the most part been seeing declining birth rates.

“ US Birth Rates ” by Saiarcot895 . Licensed under CC0 via Wikimedia Commons .

Given the magnitude of this population segment, demographers and others love to talk about the impact that this generation has had and will continue to have on society, particularly as many Baby Boomers now start to enter retirement.

But arguably one of the most significant areas of impact could be the housing market. Today, I stumbled upon an interesting CityLab article from last year talking about “ The Great Senior Sell-Off .” And it raises an important question: As Baby Boomers begin to sell off their large single-family homes in the suburbs, will there be enough people to buy them?

For the most part, the next generation seems to still want a nice detached house in order to raise a family. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the numbers will match up. Because if you factor in generation size, buying power, and even small shifts in consumer preference (towards, say, urban centers), the equation may not balance.

If this ends up being the case, I don’t think it’ll impact large, growing cities as much. I mean, most are operating today with severe supply deficits. Instead it’ll probably be the smaller, perhaps already declining cities, that feel it the most. And this will ultimately serve to reinforce the “spiky” world that we’re already seeing today.

At least that’s my hunch.

A good friend of mine recently launched a new project called DSCRBD (pronounced ‘described’). The goal is to “curate interesting minds” through short social video clips. Think Humans of New York but only creative types and only short videos.

I think it’s a great idea. And I was fortunate enough to be one of the first test subjects. It was conducted as an interview between he and I, and we spoke for probably about 45 minutes on the sun deck of my building.

He then took that entire interview and distilled it down to only a few seconds, extracting what he found most interesting. Perfect for social media consumption.

Click the image above for my video. What I’m talking about is my approach to architecture, and how I ended up not becoming an architect, but instead becoming a real estate developer .

I think he’s on to something here and I would love to see it develop further. He’s using the right mediums and format to get the message out in today’s noisy social world. But there’s also no reason that it couldn’t grow to include more content or simply feed to other content, such as what he did with Architect This City.

If you’re somebody that you think he should profile or know of someone that would be a good fit, drop him a line at hello@dscrbd.com .