Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 436

Here is an interactive map , created by the Robert Redford Conservancy for Southern California Sustainability, showing the approximately 1,573,777,062 square feet of industrial space that can be found in Los Angeles, Riverside, and San Bernardino.

The map allows you to zoom in on specific parcels to see things like site area, warehouse size, and year built. You can also play around with different map radii to create a rollup of warehouse space within a specific area, which includes an estimate of daily truck traffic and CO2 produced.

The Guardian also used this data to create the following chart, which is helpful in showing the dominance of certain cities, as well as how much of this industrial space has been built since 2010:

The point of this interactive map, this data, and the accompanying articles is to highlight just how disruptive all of this new industrial space is to these southern California communities and to the environment in general. But I think it is also an important reminder that, whether we like it or not, our online activities have real-world physical implications.

Online shopping requires warehouses and logistics. Online food delivery requires (ghost) kitchens . And online activity, in general, requires the storage of unprecedented amounts of data. All of these "back-end spaces" take up room, even if they're mostly easy to ignore when we're just looking at our phones.

This is our new " phygital " world and, yes, it is changing the landscape of our cities. Now our task is to figure out how to do this in a way that respects communities and respects the environment.

Here's the thing about housing:

The delegates insisted on one hand that “housing is for living not speculation”, but on the other, emphasised the critical importance of real estate to China’s economic growth.

In other words, things are complicated. We want housing to be affordable to more people, but at the same time, we recognize that housing appreciation is kind of useful for overall economic growth. So we're a bit conflicted. And that may be why we tend to take contradictory actions.

Broadly speaking, the current playbook in Canada seems to be as follows: heavily tax new housing , force those who can afford new market-rate housing to subsidize those who can't , and then tax/ban foreign buyers .

https://twitter.com/donnelly_b/status/1611177601220968449?s=20&t=6fy7zjUvjlQEEEhYKURIGQ

Canada's new foreign buyer ban came into effect on January 1 of this year. And for the next 2 years, it prohibits companies and people who are not Canadian citizens or permanent residents from acquiring non-recreational, residential property in Canada. (What is the definition of non-recreational?)

While this may sound good to some -- finally, more homes for Canadians -- we're talking about a relatively small portion of the market, which is likely why there's also little evidence that any of our foreign buyer taxes have been all that effective.

It's really hard to imagine this one working much better. But it certainly sounds like something.

We have spoken over the years -- here , here , and here -- about the centralizing and decentralizing forces that play out within our cities. Agglomeration economies, for example, are a centralizing force. There are real economic benefits to people and firms clustering together in cities.

However, there are also many decentralizing forces. Traffic congestion is one. And of course, the pandemic also proved to be a powerful one for many cities.

But the fact that we even have cities in the first place should tell you that the centralizing forces do tend to win out over the decentralizing ones. And a perfect example of this is Tokyo. Usually considered to be the largest metropolitan area in the world, Tokyo has about the population of Canada in one city region.

And here, the centralizing forces are so great -- even for families -- that the government actually pays people to relocate to places outside of Tokyo's 23 wards (and its immediately surrounding areas). Previously the maximum figure was ¥300,000 per child (~CA$3,056), but this has now been increased to ¥1 million per child (~CA$10,188).

A key driver of this is surely Japan's demographic problem (namely a shrinking and aging population base). But it doesn't change the fact that lots of people appear drawn to the world's largest city.