Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 561

I tweeted this out last night:

https://twitter.com/donnelly_b/status/1473880198256934918?s=20

blogTO then picked it up and it got quite a bit of engagement.

Some people, okay a lot of people, used it as an opportunity to be tongue in cheek and respond with things like: cheaply built condos, boarded up Starbuckses, Hooker Harvey's, Drake's house in the Bridle Path, the crumbling Gardiner Expressway, and that McDonald's at the northwest corner of Queen and Spadina (this one is no longer a contender for me now that they've gotten rid of their walk-up window).

Of course, there were also a lot of the usual suspects: The Sky Dome, The Gooderham Building (our miniature Flatiron Building ), Casa Loma, The Royal Ontario Museum (specifically the expansion by Studio Libeskind ), "New City Hall", The Royal York Hotel, Honest Ed's, The St. Lawrence Market, Robarts Library (University of Toronto), and a bunch of others that you might find displayed on the seat screen on your next Air Canada flight.

But I'd like to unpack the initial question a bit more. Because what does it really mean for something to be a symbol of a city? And is there an important distinction between the symbols that resonate with locals on a personal level and the symbols that get exported around the world as a city's brand and identity? Indeed, one of the criteria in most global city rankings is a prominent and recognizable skyline. Icons are important.

Let's consider an example. I agree entirely with Sean Marshall that " New City Hall " is a deeply symbolic building. Built in the early 1960s after decades of work, New City Hall was the outcome of an international design competition. And it was decidedly modern at a time when Toronto really wasn't that modern. Montréal was the biggest and most global city in the country and multiculturalism hadn't yet become a federal mandate . And so New City Hall symbolized our genuine ambitions to becoming something more.

But does the rest of the world care? If you were to ask somebody my question on the streets of Rio de Janeiro or Tokyo, what would they say? What would they remember? The thing about most tall buildings or other city symbols is that they become abstractions . They turn into pictures on social media -- like logos of a company. But maybe that's all we can reasonably ask of the world. Maybe all that really matters is that a symbol has local significance; it's then up to us to export it and tell that story to the rest of the world.

Last night as I was walking home, I came across the recently completed Yonge + Rich condominiums at Richmond and Victoria (I think they won awards for this name back in the day). I stopped to look up because I was curious about one particular detail -- the elbows.

This tower is, in effect, two towers that are attached in middle. And the differing facade treatments are meant to reinforce this: two towers, not one.

But because they are in fact connected, there are some unavoidable 90 degree angles in the floor plates. These spaces can be extremely tricky when it comes to laying out residential suites because they skew your ratio of square footage to vision glass. Usually you get too much of the former relative to the latter. You can also get awkward facing / privacy conditions.

And so these spaces are often referred to in the industry as the "elbow" suites or sometimes the "armpit" suites. Though I think elbows are a lot nicer than armpits.

Here's the Yonge + Rich example to illustrate what I'm talking about:

In this case, the entire stack is comprised of frosted translucent glass. So it is pretty clear that these spaces are not residential suites. Here's the floor plate:

What was done here was to make it circulation/corridor space. This solves the elbow suite problem and adds a nice feature to each floor. These days, very few corridors have natural light. Vision glass is too precious of a commodity. You could argue that it should have been clear glass, but presumably frosted glass was used to avoid privacy concerns.

The other trade-off that needs to be considered is that of efficiency. What is the ratio of saleable/rentable area to gross construction area? Adding circulation space lowers this number. So it can come down to whether it is better to have a higher efficiency with some elbows, or a lower efficiency with no elbows.

Every building is a prototype, isn't it ?

On January 1st of this year, I wrote a post called, " My 2021 predictions ." It was part of a new practice that I have adopted where I try to forecast the year (I will be wrong) and then evaluate how I did at the end of it (the focus of today's post). This year was, of course, a tricky year with lots of uncertainty. But here's where my head was at in January and here's what ultimately happened.

Life will feel a lot more normal by spring/summer.

This more or less happened. Cases, at least here in Ontario, were way down by the summer. Those who wanted to be fully vaccinated had the option to be. Cities reopened and summer felt pretty good after a long winter of lockdowns. As soon as it was possible to do so, we reopened our office and many/most people came back. I ended up being in the office this year more than I wasn't. Of course, I had no idea that Omicron was going to be a thing back in January.

Working from home/the office.

I think the jury remains out on this one. It's still too early to draw conclusions. I have been in the office full-time for most of this year, but I recognize that that hasn't been the case for everyone. I know from the super scientific " Jimmy the Greek Reopening Index " that I developed that office utilization rates are not yet back. When I wrote about this topic back in October , the US average was thought to be just below 40%. Still, I remain bullish on office.

An explosion of global travel.

Well, Airbnb's stock isn't maybe as sky high as I suggested in my predictions post. But it is still up over 19% YTD:

Marriott is also up nearly 27% YTD:

The reality is that travel was/is rebounding. I managed to take two weeks off at the end of the summer, which is something I hadn't done in at least several years. But Omicron has certainly impacted the recovery:

Urban/downtown real estate will strongly rebound.

I would argue that we saw this play out in the residential sector. Here in Toronto, Q3-2021 saw condo rents in the core increase 11.4% quarter-over-quarter . This was a fairly significant snapback. It was the largest increase in the region, outpacing both the inner suburbs and the outer suburbs. On the for-sale side, we saw evidence of the condo market returning as early as Q1. We were also able to successfully launch One Delisle and are now preparing to start construction .

Trends accelerating.

In some cases, what we saw was a reaction to short-term dislocation. Peloton's stock is down about 73% YTD at the time of writing this. In other cases, what we saw was just a " pulling forward ." (Link to post by Fred Wilson.) The pandemic led to greater consumption of certain products and services, but now those companies could be headed for a period of slower growth. At the same time, there's evidence that certain things, like buying more groceries online , may actually be sticking.

Return of restaurants.

What seems pretty clear is that people are quicker to return to bars & restaurants than they are to return to the office. As we know, getting together in person is fundamental to urban life. Here's a chart from OpenTable :

However, this is not to say that many restaurants didn't have a tough go during this uncertain time.

Public transit ridership will return to pre-pandemic levels by the fall.

I was dead wrong and way too optimistic about this one. Office utilization rates remain lower than expected and so people aren't commuting in nearly the same way. Those who are, seem to be driving more. As of August , Canada's urban transit networks were operating, on average, at just over 40% of where they were pre-pandemic (August 2019). This is obviously a serious problem for operating shortfalls.

Migration from high tax states to (warmer) low tax states.

This is an established trend in the US and so it was certainly not a bold prediction. There are many other factors at play here beyond simply the pandemic. However, as I mentioned in my original post, what is perhaps more interesting right now is the heightened tension between centralization (urbanity) and decentralization. I'll see what data I can uncover in the coming weeks, but we likely need to get to the other side of this pandemic before drawing any firm conclusions.

In reviewing this year's predictions it is clear that I was perhaps overly optimistic (which is far better than being overly pessimistic) and that missed a lot of important stuff. Some of it was unknowable, such as a new variant, and some of it I just missed, which is bound to happen. I could also be more precise and bolder in my predictions, and so I will endeavor to do that in my upcoming predictions for 2022. Stay tuned.

If you're not already an email subscriber to this blog, consider making that happen over here . And for those of you who have been reading all year, thank you. I truly appreciate it.

Photo by Jamie Curd on Unsplash