Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 154

I like thinking about new things, and so I like this recent post by Vitalik (the Ethereum crypto guy) talking about what he calls "the tree ring model of culture and politics." The basic insight of the model is the following:

How a culture treats new things is a product of the attitudes and incentives prevalent in that culture at that particular time.

How a culture treats old things is primarily driven by status quo bias.

To explain why the world seems to work like this, he uses the analogy of tree rings, which are also called annual rings or growth rings. Trees grow in diameter each year and the result is a set of successive rings.

Importantly, each tree ring is a result of the conditions that the tree experienced during its growing season. A wide ring typically suggests a favorable growing season and a narrow ring suggests a stressful growing season.

Once the growing season is over, the ring becomes set, which is why dendrochronology is a thing, and why tree rings can be used to tell us about what happened in the past.

The parallel with culture and politics is that it's far easier to shape new things during their initial growth cycle, then to try and do it later. Because once the growth cycle is over and it becomes an old thing, attitudes are then guided by the status quo. They become set.

To quote Vitalik: "What is easier is to invent new patterns of behavior that outcompete the old, and work to maximize the chance that we get good norms around those." This makes a lot of sense to me and it's a reminder to stay open to new things.

Cover photo by Aleksandar Radovanovic on Unsplash

Aaron Gordon , who is a data reporter at Bloomberg News, has been working on his coding skills. And so for absolutely no reason whatsoever, he decided to map out the life of one of New York's Citi Bikes, specifically Citi Bike #32606. The dataset is pre-pandemic because Citi Bike stopped publishing unique bike identifiers for each trip around 2020. But based on historical data and far as we know, #32606 is the most-used traditional bike (i.e. not an e-bike) in the history of the Citi Bike network.

It began its life on October 15, 2017 at 11:08am in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and then went on to accomplish 7,060 miles (~11,361 kilometers) and 8,624 trips over a period of 806 days. This works out to an average of just over 10 trips per day. In total, this bike traveled the equivalent of a return trip from New York to Los Angeles, and then a short trip up to Burlington, Vermont. And it was all done with only leg power.

Here's the visual mapping that Aaron created:

https://bsky.app/profile/agordon.me/post/3lkqsdctfys2k

What I love about this passion project is that it starts to show just how impactful something as simple as a single shared bicycle can be for a city. These bike networks are relatively new, but they're already doing a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to urban mobility. Earlier this week, we learned that in the City of London, cyclists now make up 2x the number of people in cars. And that of the people cycling, 17% of them do so using a shared bicycle.

In the case of New York, the Citi Bike network had ~128,000 active members and ~34,000 bikes as of February 2025 . What you're seeing above is the story of just one them.

Cover photo by Spenser Sembrat on Unsplash

Longtime readers of this blog might remember a post that I published back in 2016 where I talked about the genesis story of Toronto-based developer David Wex and his company Urban Capital Property Group . In it, I wrote about his first project at 29 Camden Street in the Fashion District. It had a total of 55 condominium suites and an average price per square foot of ~$195. And it took somewhere around 2 years to pre-sell enough of the suites for construction financing.

The reason I bring this up today is because when I originally wrote the post, it seemed so far from reality. In 2016, I said that these same 55 suites could be sold within 2 hours at $800 psf! But now things have changed once again. The market realities that David was facing in the mid-90s with Camden Lofts feel remarkably similar to today . Selling even 55 suites might not be a sure thing. And this is the first time in over 2 decades that the market has been like this.

So for fun, let's consider what happened in the late 80s and 90s. The Toronto housing market peaked in 1989 at an average price of approximately $273,698 (according to the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board). It then went on to decline 27% over the next 7 years, finally bottoming out at approximately $198,150 in 1996. So it took around 8 years for the market to stabilize.

Of course, the market took even longer to return to its 1989 peak. The average home price crossed $275,000 in 2002, which means it took 13 years in nominal dollars. However, $275k in 1989 is the equivalent of around $610k in today's dollars . So in real dollars, it actually took until 2011 for the market to return to its prior peak, which is some 22 years later!

I'm not arguing that the exact same thing will play out with this cycle. Who knows, Toronto is a different city. But I have suggested that 2028 could be the year where we're on the other side of this downturn. The average home price peaked, most recently, in 2022 at ~$1,194,600. Since then, it has come down by around 8.5% (as a broad average). If the market does turn positive in 2028, that'll be 6 years after the peak.

Only time will tell.

Chart from the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board ; cover photo by Melvin Lai on Unsplash