Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 419

In other New York City news, they apparently have the most expensive new subway line in the world :

At $2.5 billion per mile, construction costs for the 1.8-mile Phase 1 of the Second Avenue Subway were 8 to 12 times more expensive than similar subway projects in Italy, Istanbul, Sweden, Paris, Berlin and Spain, according to a  report  from New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management.

This is an important problem because public transit is good for cities :

It is not possible to outdo the subway in capacity per amount of land consumed— and in a high-demand city, 12-lane freeways are prohibitively land-intensive. Hook (1994) argued that Japan focused on rail transportation in its largest cities because it had high land values in the postwar era and such strong property rights that widespread land condemnation for freeways based on the American model was impossible.

If this is a topic that interests you, I would encourage you to check out the report , as well as their Transit Costs Project website. It allows you to compare transit project costs for 159 different cities.

This could be a good idea:

New York City Mayor Eric Adams today appointed Ya-Ting Liu as the city’s first-ever chief public realm officer, delivering on a key promise from his  State of the City address . In this newly created role, Liu will coordinate across city government, community organizations, and the private sector to create extraordinary public spaces across the entire city and continue to drive the city’s economic recovery.

As chief public realm officer, Liu will focus on delivering two components of Mayor Adams’ “Working People’s Agenda.” She will execute on a plan to invest $375 million to create and expand high-quality public spaces in all five boroughs, which includes the Broadway Vision plan, a full reconstruction of Jamaica Avenue from Sutphin Boulevard to Merrick Boulevard, and permanent upgrades to Open Streets in the Bronx and on Staten Island. At the same time, she will lead the administration’s work to deliver a permanent outdoor dining program in partnership with the City Council that works for businesses and residents, building on the massive success of the pandemic-era temporary Open Restaurants program, with clear design guidelines and accessible tools for restaurant owners and communities.

When done right, public spaces have been proven to promote economic development. Perhaps the most obvious example in New York is the High Line. The first two phases cost around $153 million to construct, and as of 2014 it was already attracting some 5 million visitors a year and thought to be responsible for over $2 billion of economic activity . As of 2019, the number of annual visitors had increased to 8 million.

So if New York ends up with more of these spaces -- you know, enjoyable spaces that attract lots of humans and investment -- this could be a good idea.

We were having pizza at Davanza's the other night and I started flipping through one of those real estate magazines that you find scattered around places like Park City.

Now, more often than not, when I come across a house listed for tens of millions of dollars, I usually look at it and think to myself, "okay, I know this is a really expensive home and it is likely that someone will want to buy it, but I objectively don't like it."

However, as I was flipping through the magazine, I came across this listing and instead thought, "hey, this is actually a really cool house."

Designed by Wallace Cunningham , the 8,000 sf home features a cascading roof line that looks like an "S" in plan. (It also seems like all of the interior spaces were laid out in service of this plan design, which, depending on your own architectural proclivities, could be considered either a perfectly fine thing or an arbitrary thing.)

It's an interesting house. So here's a video tour .

https://youtu.be/c6JI1rmvqdU