Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 454

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.

Here is an excellent reason for why you may want to spend more time walking:

People have noted that walking seems to have a special relation to creativity. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1889) wrote, “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking” (Aphorism 34). The current research puts such observations on solid footing. Four studies demonstrate that walking increases creative ideation. The effect is not simply due to the increased perceptual stimulation of moving through an environment, but rather it is due to walking. Whether one is outdoors or on a treadmill, walking improves the generation of novel yet appropriate ideas, and the effect even extends to when people sit down to do their creative work shortly after.

The results were a bit inconclusive as to whether outdoor walking is better than other forms of walking, so for now we will just say that walking -- in general -- is good for creative thinking. But where my mind immediately goes is: Does this finding scale up?

In other words, if you were to take two different cities -- City A where everybody, for the most part drives, and City B where everybody, for the most part, walks -- could you find any evidence that City B was on average more creative than City A?

I guess one way you could measure this is through patents. And if you were to look at patents per capita in the US , you'd likely find cities like Princeton (NJ), Redmond (WA), and cities in Silicon Valley near the top of the list. I'm not sure there's an obvious correlation here.

But it is kind of interesting to think about a possible relationship between urban form and creativity.

There is an ongoing debate about the value of cities hosting the Olympic Games. And that's because this is usually how it works: You, the host, spend a lot of money (Tokyo 2021 was over $25 billion ), it feels really good during the games while the world is watching you on TV, and then everyone leaves and you have a big bill to pay.

As I understand it, this has generally been the case for almost all of the games. One rare exception is Los Angeles in 1984, which supposedly managed to make over $230 million from hosting. In pretty much every other case, the rough value was, at least in theory, things like exposure, ego, and hopefully a bunch of assets that will remain useful to other people once the games are done.

But as I have argued a few times before, perhaps the most important hard-to-quantify benefit is this: Hosting the Olympics creates an immutable city-building deadline. Because, what could be worse than not being ready when your global guests show up?

A perfect example of this is what Paris is now trying to do with the Seine ahead of the 2024 Olympics. The goal is to clean up the Seine so that it's actually safe enough for the athletes to compete in it. That would obviously be really cool for the games, but it would also be a wonderful legacy for Paris.

Would Paris still be doing this if it weren't hosting the games? Perhaps. Paris has a habit of doing some obviously good things . But I bet it wouldn't be moving nearly as quickly.