Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 618

Vancouver House is such a wonderful example of great city building. It’s an awkward site hugging the off ramps of the Granville Street bridge. It’s less than ideal.

And yet Westbank (developer) and Bjarke Ingels Group (architect) have turned it into something remarkable. The tower is incredibly unique, though it is not form for the sake of form. It is a direct result of the site’s setback constraints.

But perhaps more importantly, the project manages to activate the ground plane and underneath the off ramps through its architecture, a mix of uses (retail and office) and a giant chandelier.

So if you happen to find yourself in Vancouver, I would encourage you to visit the Beach District and do a walking tour of Vancouver House.

There’s also a great Italian restaurant in the base of the tower ( Autostrada Osteria ) that you should try once you’ve finished your tour.

Food was, not surprisingly, very resilient during this pandemic. In the case of Uber, food delivery became its biggest business (higher gross bookings than mobility). But mobility is coming back (first chart above) as our cities continue to reopen. In fact, Uber’s mobility business is probably a good proxy for our return to normal. Big and sudden drop in March 2020 and a longer climb back. You’ve seen this graphic before. We’re not fully back, yet, but we’re getting there. Based on this metric (mobility), it looks like we could get there by late summer or early fall in many cities.

The above slides were taken from Uber’s Q1-2021 earnings report .

This is an interesting study by Clio Andries (assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology) and Xiaofan Laing (city planning graduate student). It looks at restaurant “chaininess” across the United States.

To do this, they mapped over 800,000 restaurants and looked for, among other things, restaurants with the same name. If the same restaurant name shows up in multiple locations, it is considered to be a chain.

Looking at the above snapshot of San Francisco, a yellow dot represents what is thought to be an independent restaurant and a dark purple/maroon dot represents a chain.

San Francisco has a very high percentage of independent restaurants. In their study, the city receives a chainess score of 28, compared to the national average of 1,247. (Some cities in the southeastern US are in the 1,900s).

One of the interesting takeaways from this study is that there appears to be a correlation between chaininess and built form. Generally speaking, the study revealed that auto-centric communities tend to have more chain restaurants, versus more independent restaurants in pedestrian-centric communities.

This is perhaps intuitive if you’ve ever driven and traveled across the US, but it is interesting to consider what is actually leading to this food and beverage outcome. Density certainly plays a role.