Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 368

Here is a company that I just discovered called, The Lagoon Development Company. What they do is develop, operate, and own large-scale lagoons for both swimming and water sports.

From what I can glean from their website, they make money by selling access tickets to these lagoons and/or by partnering with other developers on master-planned communities.

In this latter scenario, I would imagine this means fee revenue upfront, with the ongoing operations then getting funded, at least partially, by the communities where they are housed.

From the videos they have online, these lagoons look very impressive. I think they're some of the largest ever developed. But at the end of the day, these are artificial lagoons, and so I'm expecting there to be mixed opinions.

Would you want to see something like this developed in your city? And if it did exist, would you pay to go? I would.

Last month we spoke about how our current economic environment is going to negatively impact housing supply in the short-term. Now here's some further evidence for this argument (via Bloomberg ):

“As rates started ticking up, the faucet started to turn off,” says Jonathan Gertman, senior vice president for development at the NRP Group, one of the largest multifamily housing developers in the country. “The number of projects starting this year already has been cut significantly. Anything that started in 2022, in most of the country, comes online 18 to 24 months later. So by the middle of 2025, you see that new supply start to go down significantly.”

This is also being reflected in Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loan applications for new multi-family housing:

Or put another way: FHA multifamily loan applications are on track to total as much as $18 billion for FY 2023, compared with $29 billion for FY 2022, $51 billion for FY 2021 and $45 billion for FY 2020.

The above article is specifically talking about a looming affordable housing shortage. But these exact same headwinds are also impacting new market-rate housing. Of course, there's always a lag when it comes to development. So it'll likely be a few years until we really feel the impacts.

I had an interesting meeting today talking about the structural approach behind this OMA-designed project in Brooklyn (pictured above).

I have always found structural engineering fascinating. Structures, along with physics, were some of my favorite classes from high school all the way to grad school. So even though I don't think my personality is ideally suited to engineering, if I were ever to become an engineer, I'm fairly certain that I would need to be a structural one.

For this project the big structural challenge was the large cantilevers that you see above in the tower on the left. As I understand it, there a number of ways to deal with this. One way would be to just design large transfer slabs and/or beams. But given the size of this tower, these would end up being very deep, and so you'd be really compromising the spaces where these structural transfers occur.

How they actually dealt with it is through sloping columns (which you can see in the above photo if you look closely). What these columns do is gradually transfer the loads across multiple floors in the building, until they reach structure that runs all the way down the tower.

At the same time, the spaces underneath the sloping columns are essentially "hung" from above. Meaning the columns are in tension, instead of being in compression, which is typically how columns work. The result is that you get some sloping columns in the suites. But I think that's kind of cool. If you're nerdy enough to care, it tells you how the structure of the building is working.

Obvious disclaimer: I am not a structural engineer. You probably want to consult one if you're looking to do a cantilevered tower with sloping columns.

Photo: Elevated Angles via Highbury Concrete