Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 295

This morning I toured 1151 Queen East (here in Toronto). It is a new 47-suite apartment building that is being developed by Hullmark and that was designed by Superkül (the same architects as Junction House ). It's not quite finished yet, but it is looking terrific. The interiors feel, to me, like Berlin meets classic Miami Beach (if you can picture whatever this means). So a big congrats to the entire team. I'm sure it will be well-loved once people start moving in this year.

At the same time, it's hard not to see small and beautiful infill projects like this and wonder, "why do we make it so difficult to build this kind of new housing? This is a 6-storey rental building that, according to Urban Toronto , was first proposed in 2018. It then had to go through the typical rezoning process, which, in this case, seems to have taken two years. Now we're in 2024. Uh, why?

We should be looking at this kind of infill housing and saying, "Yes! You should go ahead and build this right now. Let us help you with that." Instead, we erect barriers, which only force developers toward ever larger projects. If you're going to spend two years in rezoning, no matter the scale of the development, why not build 470 homes instead of 47? And this has only been exacerbated with higher interest rates, because now time costs you that much more.

I say all of this because this is an objectively great infill project. Our city would be a better place with a lot more of these.

It is fairly well documented that communicating to transit riders how long they need to wait for the next train helps them feel like they're actually waiting less. The problem, it would seem, is the unknown.

This is akin to the pre-Uber days when you'd call for a taxi and then have no idea when it would actually show up. That used to feel like forever.

But what about if you communicate a schedule to riders and then it turns out to be a total lie? Well this is probably worse, because eventually, people will catch on to this. Also, you've just maximized the unknown.

Here is an interesting example of community activism. In 2021, Fabio Göttlicher -- a software engineer in Chicago -- started noticing that service levels on Chicago's Transit Authority (CTA) seemed to be declining.

So he did this :

I wrote a program that runs 24 hours a day that keeps tracking the live trains as they come into stations.

And then he discovered this:

What I found, when I first started in December 2021, was that the CTA was running only about 55 to 60 percent of the trains their schedule said they should be running. I started publishing the data in local Facebook groups for transit enthusiasts, on Reddit and other social media. That’s how Commuters Take Action started.

It's hard to think of a more frustrating scenario for transit riders.

I admire Warren Buffet's humility:

In the physical world, great buildings are linked to their architect while those who had poured the concrete or installed the windows are soon forgotten. Berkshire has become a great company. Though I have long been in charge of the construction crew;  Charlie  [Munger] should  forever  be credited with being the architect.

This is an excerpt from his recent letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, which, this year, he opens up with an obituary to his late partner, Charlie Munger.

I don't agree with everything Warren says and writes. He, for instance, doesn't seem to like crypto and streetcars . Though, surely, he'd really dig my CryptoParisian .

That said, I never miss his letters and his thinking has been broadly instrumental in how I tend to think about real estate .

If you take his description (same letter) of what Berkshire does, and replace businesses with properties, this is what you get:

Our goal at Berkshire is simple: We want to own either all or a portion of [properties] that enjoy good economics that are fundamental and enduring. Within capitalism, some [properties] will flourish for a very long time while others will prove to be sinkholes. It’s harder than you would think to predict which will be the winners and losers.

This is a good way to think about real estate.