Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 453

Japanese Metabolism was a post-war architectural movement that was based around the idea that cities and buildings should be able to grow and transform just like other organisms. There are other elements to the movement, but this was at its core. And perhaps the best example of the Metabolism movement was the Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo (pictured above).

Constructed between 1970 and 1972, the 13-storey tower consisted of two structural elements and 140 self-contained / prefabricated capsules that were hung off the building's cores.

The original intent was that these capsules could be removed and replaced over time and that the building could evolve just like any other organism might. But that never really happened and, coming on the end, only about 30 of the 140 capsules were apparently still being lived in, with the others being used for various purposes, such as storage, or not at all.

And so after a whole lot of debate, the building was disassembled earlier this year, which isn't quite the same as a straight demolition. The pods were removed and then the core came down.

But a number of the pods have been salvaged. The architect's family took 4 pods and created an Airbnb retreat a few hours outside of Tokyo . And a longtime resident in the building decided to quit his job, acquire 23 of the capsules , and dedicate his life to now getting these things into museums and other commercial settings.

I don't feel like it's my place to comment on whether disassembling the tower was a good idea or not. But I do think there's something poetic about an icon of Metabolism having its capsules removed, restored, and then sprinkled around various places. Wasn't that always kind of the intent?

Photo by  Roman Davydko  on  Unsplash

I have been reading Fred Wilson's blog for over a decade now (and he has been blogging for almost two decades). A lot of the time it is about venture capital and tech, but similar to what I do here, it can be about almost anything. Today he wrote about the two weeks that he just spent in Paris with his wife (the Gotham Gal ). And the post covers everything from real estate to relationship advice. But here are two points that will be particularly relevant to what we usually talk about around here:

• Paris has done an excellent job of prioritizing cycling and building a ton of new lanes over the last number of years. We know this . But another good point that Fred makes is that Paris has allowed competition in their micro-mobility ecosystem. It started with Velib, but now you can also use Dott and Lime. The last time I was in Paris I used Lime bikes and scooters, mostly because I already had the app and because they were everywhere. Competition is good and Toronto should probably allow the same. Our bike share system -- specifically the mobile app -- is incredibly cumbersome to use, and the last time I checked most of the e-bikes were consistently out of service. Let's see if someone else can do a better job. We should, of course, also add scooters to the mix while we're at it.

• Next, Fred describes Paris' real estate market as being more "stable." And by this he means that, for whatever reason, values and rents seem to be more moderated. This has some benefits. Restaurants and other retail businesses seem to stick around for decades, whereas according to Fred, "it's hard to find a shopping street in Manhattan that doesn't have multiple vacant stores". I'm not exactly sure why this is the case in Paris (assuming it is). I don't believe that they have any sort of vacant store tax . Though they do have a tax on unoccupied homes. Maybe this is just what happens when you're a little less capitalistic. (This is me deliberately avoiding the term socialism.)

If any of you have more insight into the real estate market in Paris, I would love to hear from you in the comment section below.

Here is an interesting chart, from Mike Moffat , that looks at housing completions -- both ownership and rental -- in the province of Ontario. The way to read this chart is that, for each date, you are looking at completions for the previous 10 years. (It says 12, but that seems to be a mistake.) For example, Q4-1964, which is the start of this chart, equals all homes built between Q1-1955 and Q4-1964.

Three things will probably immediately stand out to you:

1. We built a lot of multi-family housing in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, we built more than we're building right now and that wasn't just the case in Toronto and Ontario. In Canada as a whole, the majority of building permits (60%) issued between 1962 and 1973 were for multi-family buildings. More specifically though, this was a rental apartment boom, as opposed to a condominium boom.

2. We then said: "Nah, let's not build so many apartments anymore. Let's go back to building more single-family houses."

3. And that's what we did -- by a fairly wide margin -- until the early 2000s when the next great multi-family boom started to take hold. This time, though, it developed into a condominium boom.

Both multi-family booms have mirrored periods of overall economic expansion. But you also need to look at what government was doing. In the 1960s and 1970s we made it attractive to build rental housing (whereas today it's a very challenging asset class to underwrite). And then more recently, we decided that much of our growth should happen in existing built-up urban areas. That generally means more multi.

But multi-family is a fairly broad term. Are we talking about 4-storey walk-ups or are we talking about 40-storey tall buildings? For those of you who are able to look through this chart to what's happening in the market, you'll know that we are far more effective at the latter. We have a lot of work to do when it comes to the in-between housing scales.