Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 373

This is the message that the mayor of Miami Beach, Dan Gelber, delivered this week as it moved to sell $97.6 million of new municipal debt. The proceeds are intended to help the city fund more cultural projects and move away from its "old economic model" of selling Bellinis on Ocean Drive. But it is also a case of Miami Beach flexing its rising property values.

According to Bloomberg :

• Residential property values across Miami Beach grew by about 125% over the past decade

• Between 2019 and 2022, the number of "million-dollar zip codes" more than doubled (presumably these are just zip codes with median home prices above $1 million)

• And from 2012 to 2022, the number of high-net-worth individuals in the city increased by about 75% (I wonder how many moved to the city versus just got richer while already living there)

All of this has been good for property tax revenues:

And now the city is leveraging them to invest in culture.

Chart: Bloomberg

Every now and then somebody comes forward and proposes an urban gondola. The most recent one that I have heard about here in Toronto was this one from 2016 called the "Don Valley Cable Car." But like many gondola proposals, it sort of just disappeared. Probably because it wasn't entirely necessary. (I just checked their website and it is now down.)

However, there are rare instances where a gondola makes a lot of sense. Medellin, for example, has a very successful urban gondola system that my friend Alex Feldman wrote about, here on the blog , after a visit to the city back in 2014. In this case, the gondola was instrumental in connecting hill-side communities that were previously disconnected from the rest of the city.

Another less urbanized example is the one that Utah (Salt Lake County) is planning to build in Little Cottonwood Canyon. I wrote about this project back in March when I was there and, today, the Utah Department of Transportation announced their preferred mobility option. It is called Gondola Alternative B and, as far as I can tell, it is still the longest and most expensive urban gondola ever proposed .

Here are the details in graphic form:

To summarize, though:

• The system is being designed to carry 1,050 passengers per hour, with cabins departing every 2 minutes.

• The gondola itself is expected to cost $370 million, but when you add in a new parking garage for 2,500 cars, tolling infrastructure on the existing State Route, and other improvements, the total all-in capital cost is projected to be $729 million. The route itself is somewhere around 10 miles, so let's call it $73 million per mile.

• At the same time, the projected operating costs are relatively low at $8 million per year, so this option actually has the lowest 30-year lifecycle cost out of all the ones that were studied. The other alternatives included widening the existing roadway, enhancing the bus service, and adding rail. There was also one other gondola option, which was presumably called Gondola Alternative A.

If you're wondering why this is likely a good idea, check out my post from this past winter .

There was once a time -- generally in the early 20th century -- when some people used to order their new home from a catalogue.

You would pick the model you wanted and then all of the required materials, along with assembly instructions, would get mailed to you.

Mind you, this was never the most popular way to make a new home. According to Brian Potter , mail-order homes, even at their peak, represented less than 10% of all yearly housing starts in the US.

So arguably, it was never entirely successful as a model. Building a home is tough work, especially without fancy power tools.

Still, it's interesting to think about its relative simplicity: "Here's a bunch of raw building materials and some instructions. Go figure it out. It's like an Ikea bookshelf, except it's your entire house."

Contrast this to what it takes to build new urban housing today. There is a litany of new barriers. It's nowhere near as simple as ordering a kit of parts; so it's no wonder housing is more expensive.

For more on "The Rise and Fall of the Mail-Order Home", check out this recent post from Brian Potter's Construction Physics newsletter.