Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 303

About five years ago, a project in downtown Los Angeles, called Oceanwide Plaza, halted construction. I don't know exactly what happened, but the reports suggest corruption, financing problems, and the Chinese developer running out of money.

Under typical circumstances, once you secure your financing and start construction, it should mean that you have enough money to finish the project. That is unless there are significant cost overruns, you experience a cash crunch somewhere else, and/or somebody does something bad.

In fact, on some projects, the peak equity requirement occurs before construction commencement, meaning that once you do secure your construction facility, you should be able to reduce the amount of equity that you have remaining in the project (i.e. you can pull out some cash).

Here it sounds like a combination of things went sideways. And now today, Oceanwide Plaza looks like this :

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C272s1LpCsW/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

The towers have been tagged pretty much all the way up. And it kind of looks like each artist commandeered their own suite in the building. Not surprisingly, this has been attracting a lot of attention and debate. The project is also across the street from the Crypto.com Arena and so there are a lot of eyeballs on it.

On the one hand, you have artists being creative and doing something with an abandoned set of buildings -- ones that are beset with corruption charges and that people are generally upset about. But on the other hand, you have a busted project, and you have artists trespassing and creating what others see as another symbol for a spiralling downtown.

LA police are reporting that the site is going to be better secured and that all of the graffiti will be removed. But until then, this has got to be one of the tallest expressions of graffiti ever created.

My time in the mountains has come to an end. I’m on a flight back to Toronto and about to start watching old Bond movies (as one should). If you don’t ski or snowboard or do any other winter sports, it’s maybe hard to relate to this, but the mountains are a truly special place. I’m always sad to leave them. In my opinion, there’s no better place to disconnect and recalibrate.

And even though I've been mostly disconnected, it has been hard not to miss the hype around the new Apple Vision Pro, which was released into the wild this week. I haven't tried one yet, but every review that I have read or watched seems to come to the same general conclusion: "Wow, this thing is incredible. It feels like a glimpse into the future of computing."

If you're looking for a comprehensive technical overview of the device, you should check out Marques Brownlee's video, here . But if you're just looking to get a sense of what it might be like to, you know, wander around New York City wearing one, you should definitely check out Casey Neistat's video, here .

Now I think there's no question that there's a dystopian element to all of this. When Casey is standing around and watching a butterfly eat his donut, he looks pretty strange from the outside. Only he is seeing the butterfly. But then again, we all look pretty weird standing around staring down at our phones all the time. Maybe this will help us become less disconnected. I don't know.

Either way, it's hard not to imagine this changing -- a lot. I mean, here's just one small example. Already Zillow has an app for Vision Pro that allows you to tour homes for sale . Assuming it's as good as everyone says it is, I can't imagine anyone going to physically tour a home ever again, unless they're really serious and/or ready to put in an offer.

Of course, there's also no shortage of people saying that this device is simply too expensive. But I think that misses the point. This is version one. At this point, Apple just needs to be directionally right about what they are calling "spatial computing." (They don't want you to call it VR.) Because if they are right, the price will come down and then we'll all be watching old Bond movies on these devices.

This is the chalet that our group has been staying in for the last week:

• We've been calling it a tree house. It is 5 levels in total. And you circulate through the house using a spiral staircase in the center of it. It's space efficient, but there are a lot of stairs.

• The site is downhill from the road, which, as we have talked about before , creates a more challenging build than uphill from the road.

• You enter the chalet on the third level, which itself houses 2 bedrooms. One floor below and one floor above also have 2 bedrooms, meaning there are 6 bedrooms in total. On the lowest floor is an indoor hot tub, a shared parking garage, and a shared ski/snowboard room.

• Every mountain house needs, at a minimum, two things: a fireplace and a hot tub. Ideally the latter is outside.

• As is typical in the mountains, the main living space is on the top floor (level 5 in this case). You want this for the views. If you're building into a sloping site, the lowest floors are usually somewhat constrained.

• We did the same thing with Parkview Mountain House . But it does mean that you circulate through the more "private" spaces within the house before reaching the more "public" ones. This is the opposite of what happens in most homes.

• The underground parking garage is accessed by way of a small parking elevator that lowers you down two floors. Initially this seemed excessive, but it is a shared elevator/garage. The chalet is semi-detached chalet, if you will, and so this was probably the only way they could get enough parking on the site. Assuming our attached neighbor is of a similar size, that's 12 bedrooms.

• It also creates an important pathway so that people don't need to bring their skis and snowboards through the house.

Every site has its challenges and that is especially the case in the mountains.