Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 495

A super-entrepreneur, according to the common definition, is a rich person who has amassed a net worth of at least US$1 billion dollars by either starting a company or taking a small company and growing it into a big one. A super-entrepreneur is, by definition, not someone who inherited their wealth. Though I'm not sure what the cut off is. If you inherited $1 million and then started a massive company, does that still make you a super-entrepreneur? What about if you inherited $100 million?

In any event, here is a chart from New Geography showing super-entrepreneurs by region:

The USA is in the lead in this chart at about 3.1 super-entrepreneurs per one million inhabitants. But the highest rate in the world, at least according to this data set, actually belongs to Singapore at 4.7 per million. Europe, as a whole, doesn't look all that great here. But again, if you get more specific, some European countries are actually doing quite well. Sweden, for instance, is sitting at around 2 per million, which is higher than Canada's figure.

Why this data is potentially interesting is that it tells you a bit about these countries. It tells you whether they have strong property rights, whether it's easy to conduct business, and whether it's supportive of new ideas, among, of course, many other things. There also appears to be a clear link between the presence of super-entrepreneurs and unemployment. Turns out that the more people you have starting wildly successful businesses, the lower unemployment tends to be.

For the full New Geography article, click here . In addition to what I just wrote about, it talks about Europe's "entrepreneurial paradox" and issues of gender equality.

Here is an interesting chart from the WSJ showing how much net income migrated to the state of Florida between 2019 and 2020:

I'm not sure what the exact dates are for this dataset, but it seems to again suggest that this migration was already a trend before the pandemic happened.

Either way, Miami is red hot and the continues to lead the US in residential rental rate growth . But all of this growth is now apparently starting to catch up to the city. Here is just one example from the same article (though developers here in Toronto would gladly take this sort of timeline):

Right before the pandemic, when he moved to Miami, he said it took no more than four months from when he submitted development plans to when he got city approval. Now, with the number of projects swamping Miami Beach’s staff and resources, that same process takes nearly a year, Mr. Curnin said.

This frenetic run-up is also causing some in the city, including Barry Sternlicht of Starwood Capital Group, to pause:

“Everyone and their cousins are looking to build a building here,” he said. “I’m getting nervous.”

Miami has historically always been a boom and bust kind of market. I don't know if this is one of those times, but there's clearly no denying the allure of palm trees, warm winter weather, and no state income tax.

This is a lovely little infill rental project in Tokyo by ETHNOS (architect) for Real Partners (developer):

https://youtu.be/zXRlxh237Bo

The building is 4 storeys plus a rooftop terrace. From the plans, it looks like there are 8 units, all of which are two-storey suites.

The A and B suites are accessible from the ground floor. For the A suites, you enter at grade, and then go down into the first basement level. And for the B suites, you enter at grade and then go up to your second level. One of the entrances (suite B-3) is via an exterior walkway.

The middle of the ground floor is the lobby entrance and there's a single elevator that services the second and third floors (it then drops off for the fourth floor). On the second level is a co-working space, and so the upper C suites (these sound fancy) are all accessible from the third floor.

The fourth floor and fifth floor terraces are all accessible from within the C suites, which means that the only real common area corridors in this building are on the third level. And it looks like they wanted this particular corridor to have a view to the street, because they could have easily reduced it even further to increase the building's overall efficiency.

What is also interesting to look at this building's dimensions. Based on the above section, the floor-to-floor heights are 2500mm, which is low compared to the 2950/3000mm that is typically used here in Toronto for new reinforced concrete builds.

In terms of the overall building, it is only about 10m deep and it is less than 10m tall if you exclude the stair popups on the rooftop terraces. For context here, our Junction House lot is about 30m deep and the build is about 30m tall, so actually a similar kind of box proportion.

But let's scan more of Toronto.

If you move away from designated "Avenues" (which is where Junction House sits) and look at some of our other major streets (which is something the City of Toronto is in fact doing ), you can sometimes/oftentimes find even deeper lots.

Below is a random area that I quickly panned too on Dufferin Street -- these single-family house lots are around 36m deep:

Now obviously Toronto is not Tokyo and Tokyo is not Toronto. But my point with all of this was to demonstrate just how much space we actually have within our existing boundaries, should we ever feel the need to increase our overall housing supply.

As I have argued many times before , I think one of the greatest opportunities to quickly do this sits along our majors streets.

Architectural drawings: ETHNOS