Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 507

Apple has been working on new virtual reality and/or augmented reality headsets for at least 6 years. This has been widely reported . But in typical Apple fashion, nobody knows anything about them, even though something is set to be revealed as early as this fall . I also don't know anything about them, but I already want one. I am sure Tim Cook will get up on stage at some point and convince me that I need it immediately, so I'm trying to get ahead of that moment.

VR/AR headsets are, of course, not new. Google tried and failed. Nobody wanted to wear them besides nerds. I had a pair of Focals by North but they were far too cumbersome to use and about as comfortable as having a smartphone duct-taped to your face. Meta's headsets currently control the market. They have about 78% market share . But the overall market remains small. It's mostly gamers. But the same could have been said about tablets before Apple did its thing.

The promise is that these AR headsets might replace our phones as the dominant personal device. AR > VR. And that feels to me like a reasonable assumption once the requisite tech arrives. But even before that, there are a ton of great use cases for highly-functioning AR -- everything from online shopping and digital fashion to finally fulfilling the dream of walking around a construction site and visualizing the design and coordination clashes.

Technically these things are already possible, but the technology remains fairly niche. I hope Apple changes that.

Full disclosure: I am long Apple.

This is not all that surprising:

https://twitter.com/daniel_foch/status/1532345443082027008?s=20&t=YxCyb6JcFaC0q3izbzIIEA

It is not surprising for at least two reasons:

• We knew that central banks would tighten the money supply at some point and that it would have a negative impact on asset prices.

• Many of us believed that a lot of people were making a somewhat long-term decision (flee the city) because of something that would ultimately prove to be short-term dislocation (a ~2 year health crisis).

So one of the things I think you can glean from Daniel's tweet is that our best urban centers are resilient. Notwithstanding the fact that we have things like Zoom and previous pandemic-suffering generations did not, the core value propositions associated with centralizing in cities hasn't gone away.

In yesterday's post I wrote about happiness vs. satisfaction (among a bunch of other things). And I mentioned that I derive deep satisfaction from the work that I do, which is real estate development. On the back of this post, I received a question from a reader this morning that more or less asked me if I think about the impact of my work on other people's happiness / satisfaction. Part of the point that was being made was that while it may be a positive endeavor for me, I may be completely destroying the satisfaction, happiness, and lives of others. Do I give this any thought? Lastly, a point was made that very few developers seem to live in their own housing projects, which should tell you something.

I thought these were all very good points/questions and so I'd like to respond to them publicly:

• I do think carefully about the happiness and satisfaction of others. In fact, part of the reason this work is satisfying is that, in my opinion, it is both challenging and important work. Growing cities require new housing and the reality is that almost all of this housing comes from private developers.

• This may sound cheesy, but I also care deeply about beauty. This is something that is of course in the eye of the beholder. But I do want things to be beautiful. I want our cities to be more beautiful. And I don't think we talk about this enough. I mean, just look at the garbage bins we have in Toronto .

• Some people may not like or appreciate the form that development usually takes in cities such as Toronto, but the housing needs to go somewhere. As a result of restricting development in most areas of the city, we are now forced to highly concentrate development in relatively few areas. Many are reacting to this.

• There will almost certainly be tensions between incumbents and new entrants when it comes to city building. That's part of what makes this work so challenging and rewarding. Everyone involved in the building of our cities has to constantly problem solve and manage competing interests. It's not easy.

• I am in fact moving into one of our projects ( Junction House ). I am doing this because (1) I think our team is creating an awesome and beautiful project and (2) I believe that living in multi-family buildings in walkable neighborhoods is a more sustainable (and enjoyable) way to live. I want to practice what I preach.