Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 475

Here is an interesting chart from the New York Times explaining the disproportionate impact that highway and urban renewal projects have had on non-white families in the US. The x-axis is the non-white population share in 1950. And the y-axis is the percentage of displaced families that were non-white. What this means is that the diagonal dotted line through the middle represents a kind of racially balanced displacement.

However, as you can tell from the graph, displacement from 1950 to 1966 was not balanced. In Providence, for example, only 3% of families were non-white in 1950. But these families represented 31% of the ones displaced for renewal projects. In Philadelphia, about 18% of families were non-white, but here they represented 71% of those displaced.

I don't think that this will be news to a lot of you. "Urban renewal" is a loaded term in American urbanism. But the article does do a great job of taking you back through time in cities like Houston, Chicago, and New York. The article is also by Adam Paul Susaneck, who is the founder of Segregation by Design. If you're interested in this topic, I would encourage you to check out his website .

Utah is beautiful. See here .

People in SLC are really nice. Strangers greet you on the street. Motorists are also more polite and patient. I had no idea how to respond. I suspect it might have something to do with there being less traffic and, in turn, less frustration. But again, even if you ignore what happens on the road, people are nice.

You will need a serious utility vehicle to navigate the topography of this region. Venturing into the surrounding canyons requires 4-wheel drive or chains during snowstorms. I was only there for a week and already I have visions of a classic Defender in my mind. Do they come in electric versions?

The streets are too wide for proper enjoyment as a pedestrian. This is a challenging problem to fix, as I have mentioned before. That said -- and this is going to be an unpopular opinion -- the city felt void of any sort of real traffic. The distances travelled are great, but the highways actually flow freely. You also never really need to worry about parking.

Electric scooters are popular in SLC. As is cycling -- both for getting around and as a reason to wear tight-fitting bright clothes.

SLC feels as if it is both under the radar and also rapidly emerging. My new favorite restaurant in SLC is a place called Post Office Place . We walked in without a reservation on a Friday night and they gladly took us. I couldn't understand why the place wasn't rammed. I mean, they have Marseille-style panisse on the menu!

The Granary District is an area to watch. It is a former industrial area to the southwest of downtown. It is already home to breweries, food halls, and creative offices . But it needs some more time to properly fill in. We stayed at the Evo Hotel in Granary (highly recommend). The campus amenities include a rock climbing facility, an indoor skatepark, and plenty of places to work and Zoom.

Most of the new infill housing appears to be mid-rise in scale and most of it is wood-frame construction on top of concrete.

By my estimation (and by estimation I mean that I have a spreadsheet for this), the ski and snowboard communities surrounding SLC are some of the most accessible in North America. Land at SLC airport and you're in the mountains in 20-30 minutes.

Park City-Canyons is the most well-known ski destination. But if you're a more aggressive skier -- the kind that keeps your gloves together with duct tape and counts the number of ski days per season -- you'll want to head over to the Cottonwood canyons and places like Snowbird and Brighton.

Snowbird remains one of my all-time favorite ski destinations for two reasons: the mountain itself and the brutalist architecture at the bottom of it. There's none of that faux alpine crap over here -- just exposed and unabashed concrete and wood. And who doesn't love brutalism, right ? (I haven't been to Brighton yet but one of my local friends told me that it's a great snowboarders mountain.)

The Canyons Village at Park City is developing really nicely. As I understand it, it's only about 30-40% built out at this stage. The Pendry Hotel just recently opened ( announcement here ) and I can tell you that the restaurants were generally busy every night of the week (summer experience). The project team did a wonderful job creating a place and a new anchor in the village.

What did I miss in this list?

Despite having somewhere around 4,000 employees and being valued at upwards of $15 billion (2021 figure), CloudKitchens remains an incredibly secretive company. In 2020, it was reported that they had spent over $130 million in the preceding two years on properties in about two dozen cities, and this week the Financial Times reported that they have been quietly building "dark kitchens" across Latin America, alongside a new food and convenience goods business called Pik N' Pak.

The way this all supposedly works is that the "dark kitchens" prepare the food for delivery and pick-up takeaway, and any excess space within these buildings is used to store convenience goods like over-the-counter medicines and pet foods. I guess it is literally about picking and packing various items that you can then attach to takeout orders. In both cases, the food and goods are delivered to customers using local app companies such as Uber Eats.

All of this appears to represent a shift in the supply chain for takeout food and various convenience goods. But what I am really curious about right now is what the real estate footprint of this network looks like within our cities. What is the optimal square footage of a ghost kitchen? What radius do they serve? And how does this ultimately change the landscape of our cities? I don't know the answers to these questions, but change appears to be underway. Here's an excerpt from the above FT article:

"...the growth of dark kitchens across Latin America has caused controversy in certain cities. The proliferation in São Paulo, the largest city in the Americas, sparked objections from residents living nearby, with banners against new facilities appearing in well-heeled neighbourhoods. The town hall has proposed local regulation of dark kitchens and earlier this year placed a temporary ban on the issue of new licences. People have complained about noise, smells, smoke and motorcycle drivers — known colloquially as motoboys — waiting outside to collect orders. One unhappy local said his son had been nicknamed “bacon” and bullied in school because of the odour on his clothes, according to Cris Monteiro, a city councilwoman."

Travis Kalanick seems to have a knack for upsetting people and changing the way our cities operate. Although, the same could be said about a lot of other startups.