Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1552

In light of Bill de Blasio being elected yesterday as the new mayor of New York City, I thought I would post this interesting graphic I found on Atlantic Cities :

What it shows is a clear split.

If you live in Manhattan or nearby areas in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, you most likely saw your property values rise from 2008 to 2012. However, if you live on the outskirts of the city, you may have seen your property values fall as much as 20% (the darkest red areas).

This shift back to city centers has been well documented and labeled, by some, as The Great Inversion . But in many ways it’s a symptom of a greater phenomenon at work: rising income inequality.

It’s happening in New York. It’s happening in Toronto. And in many other global cities. New York VC Fred Wilson believes that the solution lies in the three Es : education, empowerment and entrepreneurship. That sounds like a great start to me.

Richard Florida recently gave a talk at the Rotman School as part of Toronto's  “Big City, Big Ideas”  lecture series. It was called: Why Creativity Is the New Economy. You can  watch it here via Rotman . It’s about an hour long.

If you’re familiar with the work of Richard Florida, you’ll find much of what he talks about familiar. But there is one point that I think is absolutely worth reiterating again, and again: The new economic unit of our time is the city . It used to be nations but, in today’s world, cities trump nations, provinces and states in terms economic importance.

Florida has long stressed this point in his work and I think he’s absolutely right. The problem, however, is that our governance structures are ill-suited to deal with this shift. There are too many layers of government and our cities do not have nearly enough autonomy. 

Toronto is also facing a profound leadership deficit at the municipal level, to say the least (See Rob Ford ). This cannot continue. Strong municipal leaders are critical to our sustained global economic competitiveness. It’s every global city for themselves and I, for one, want to win.

To give you an example of the dramatic rise of cities, take a look at this recent TechCrunch article on billion dollar startups . If you take a look at learning number 9, you’ll see an incredible interesting fact: San Francisco– not “the Valley”–is now home to the most billion dollar startups. Startups are eschewing the suburbs for the city.

I’ve written a lot on this trend , but I still don’t think that our governments have truly woken up to the fact that, in the new economy, our cities are our most important asset.

A lot of people love New York. They love it for the culture, the nightlife, the shopping, the opportunities, as well as for many other reasons. And these are all great reasons. But being the city geek that I am, there’s another reason I think New York is great: express trains .

Broadly speaking express trains are simply trains that run faster than other trains on a network. In the case of New York, there are express trains and local trains. The latter stop at every station and the former typically just stop at major transfer points.

To make this all work, the New York system uses a 4 track system . There are 2 tracks headed in each direction with the local train on the outside track and the express train on the inner track. On stations where the express trains stop, the 2 tracks split from each other and the platform sits in the middle so that you can switch across the platform from express to local (and vice versa).

The benefit of express trains is obvious. It makes it significantly faster to travel long distances. And it makes, in a lot of cases, taking the subway the fastest alternative. That’s how transit should be.