Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 62

Whistler is out, the Interior of BC is in. Huge real estate deals are out , powder chasing is in. If you're a long-time reader of this blog, you'll know that I do a ski and snowboard trip with a group of friends each year around this time.

Our last three trips were to Park City (where it snowed so much we lost power); Trois Vallées (which also served as my bachelor party and which involved equal parts snowboarding and dancing on tables); and Hokkaido (where it looked like Toronto looks right now).

This year — for annual number fifteen — we're headed to Revelstoke and Kicking Horse in the Selkirk and Purcell Mountains.

On some trips we like to combine an urban trip with the mountains, so that we can also gawk at architecture and urbanism. That's what we did in Japan last year. But this year's trip is not about that. It's about unadulterated time in the mountains.

It has been a weird season for snow. The west coast has been too warm with not enough of it, and the east coast has been too cold with unusual amounts of it. I have no idea what's in store for us this week, but here's to hoping it looks like the cover photo of this post.

---

In some related real estate news, Extell Development Company and Hilton just announced that they'll be opening a Waldorf Astoria Resort and Residences in the new Deer Valley East Village.

It's going to have 132 hotel keys and 105 one- to six-bedroom branded residences ranging from 1,099 to 5,155 square feet. Of the 105 branded residences, 56 will be "hotel residences" located above the hotel, and the remaining 49 residences will be in a more exclusive standalone residential building.

Architecture for the project is by KPF and the interiors are by AvroKO .

If you missed my recent post about the East Village and the new Four Seasons that is also currently under construction, click here .

---

Cover photo by Zach Wear on Unsplash

This month, Amazon announced that it will be opening a new 230,000 sf big box store in the suburbs of Chicago. Half of the store will be consumer-facing, where customers can browse aisles for groceries, household items, and general merchandise, and the other half will serve as a kind of micro-fulfillment center.

Supposedly, the municipality applied a restriction to the lands requiring it to be a consumer-facing store; it can't just be for fulfillment. But it seems that some kinds are allowed.

My understanding is that the "fulfillment" component of the project will allow customers to order (on kiosks throughout the store) certain items "from the back" and have them delivered to the front of the store for checkout. Importantly, it also decouples inventory management and optimizes the back-of-house for online grocery.

This is a big store; bigger than even a Walmart Supercenter. It also sits on a 35-acre site, which means the lot coverage is only around 15%. However, there's also a large stormwater management pond and room for additional pad buildings based on this site plan :

A store this massive is a fascinating signal because it's a clear admission from Amazon that it needs to get its brick-and-mortar strategy right if it wants to compete in grocery. Even after its Whole Foods acquisition, it's only about 3% of the US grocery market , whereas Walmart is sitting at over 20%.

Ten years ago, it did not feel like this would be where we would end up. Retail as a real estate asset class was out of favor. Brick-and-mortar retail seemed destined to be disrupted by e-commerce and drone delivery . But retail evolved and grocery proved to be a unique facet of retail. At least so far.

Cover photo by Brittani Burns on Unsplash

Creating anything from scratch is more difficult than working from an established base. This is absolutely true when it comes to starting new neighborhoods and communities. What do you build first? What will be the anchors? And how do you balance hard and soft infrastructure to make it an attractive place before a critical mass is achieved?

I was thinking about this over the weekend while walking around Whistler Village, so I tweeted this out . If you've been before, you know it's packed with people all throughout the day. I would characterize it as a successful place.

But the responses I got on Twitter were along the lines of: "Are you joking? It's a fake utopia. It may be busy, but staff are forced to live on the outskirts of the village in dorms."

These comments are not entirely wrong. Resort villages are typically a kind of Disneyland. Attainable workforce housing is a major challenge for resorts, and it's typical to make the building of it a precondition to development. You can't run a resort without staff.

But none of this changes the fact that it is still very difficult to create successful places from scratch. There are lots of ski resorts that don't have the energy of Whistler, and lots of new planned communities that don't have the foot traffic of older neighborhoods. The Canary District in Toronto comes to mind as a place that is still settling in. That is how you know it's challenging.

Creating successful places from scratch requires the right strategy, careful design and programming, patience, and probably the ability to subsidize the right tenants to seed activity early on. It's also helpful if you can avoid going broke before the neighborhood comes alive.

Cover photo by Peter Robbins on Unsplash