Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 514

Toronto has a way of irreverently disregarding spring. Oftentimes we go from winter right into summer. And this past weekend was one of those magical times when summer just appeared and Torontonians far and wide decided to showcase their pasty bodies after a long and dark winter.

But now that the warm weather is upon us, it's important to keep in mind a few very important things. Don't ride an electric scooter . They're too dangerous. You might hit a car.

Make sure you use the washroom before leaving home. Most public washrooms aren't open yet because peeing season obviously hasn't started yet. I think it starts sometime in late May. Or maybe it's early June.

https://twitter.com/LadyScorcher/status/1525072458667130881?s=20&t=pGWoNjEHpGR1oRP0Kw77xA

Purchase all of your alcohol beverages from the liquor control board. That's the safest way to do it. And whatever you do, don't consume said alcohol beverages in any of the city's public spaces. That is strictly forbidden.

If you have a backyard, that is an acceptable place to drink responsibly, or irresponsibly. But if you don't have a backyard, you're out of luck. I would encourage you to simply crack a window and linger next to it. But of course, be mindful not to get too close to it.

I don't know why we're so uptight about shit .

Let's consider a scenario where we have a relatively affordable 20-unit apartment building in a rapidly growing global city. This particular building happens to be of an older vintage and so let's say that the in-place rents are about 40% below market.

Next let's assume that the zoning has just been updated for the land and it is now possible and economically feasible to build a total of 300 housing units in a new high-rise building. This would mean demolishing the existing 20 apartment units.

But because this global city has rental replacement policies in place, these 20 units would need to be rebuilt within the new high-rise and offered to the current residents at exactly the same rents. So same price, but new housing.

Compensation would also need to be provided to these residents to cover the cost of moving around. Because they would obviously need to move off site to allow for construction and then, if they'd like, move back once construction is complete.

How would such a scenario make you feel?

The typical objections usually involve, among other things, concerns around displacement, gentrification, and overall built form. There is a concern that investments of this magnitude might push people out of the area and also change the character of it.

But at the end of the day, these 20 existing homes are not disappearing from the market. They will remain part of the housing stock, but now with the addition of 280 new market rate homes.

I think it's important to remember that in a rapidly growing city, trying to maintain the status quo by limiting new development can actually have the opposite effect. Because what you end up doing is creating a scenario where more and more people are fighting for a relatively fixed supply homes. And that is certainly one way to encourage displacement and gentrification.

I haven't seen this sort of data before and it's an interesting way of looking at job access, transit connectivity, and overall built form:

The above is a table from New Geography (using data from the University of Minnesota). And what it shows is how many more jobs, across the US, can be accessed within a 30-minute commute by car versus by transit. For example, what this data tells us is that, on average across the US, there are about 56x more jobs that can be quickly accessed by car versus by transit.

But there is also huge variation across the 50 largest cities in the US. On the top end is Detroit, where there about 130x more jobs that can be accessed by car (again within 30 minutes). This isn't at all surprising. Also not surprising is the fact that New York is on the lowest end with only 5.6x as many car-versus-transit jobs. This is one of the reasons why I spoke yesterday about NYC being such an ideal candidate for something like NYC 25x25 .

What a lower number tells us is that the city is far less reliant on personal vehicles and almost certainly has a higher urban density. That's why you see cities like New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Chicago near the top of this list. And in my opinion, this is where you want to be. The goal should be to minimize this multiple.

I haven't seen a dataset like this before, but I'm now curious to see how it varies globally. It feels like something that more of us should be monitoring. Because we know that there are strong links between jobs access and the overall economic performance of a city.