Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 653

I just discovered the work of artist and photographer Federico Winer. More specifically, I just discovered his ongoing art project called ULTRADISTANCIA , which uses Google Earth satellite imagery as a starting point for beautiful map art.

Above is a piece from his "Mines" collection. What you are seeing is the Ekati Diamond Mine in Canada's Northwest Territories. It is located about 310 km northeast of Yellowknife, 200 km south of the Article Circle, and apparently it's Canada's first surface and underground diamond mine.

In addition to using images of mines, Federico has transformed airports, ports, and other urban landscapes. Here is a link to his "Selected" gallery, which includes places ranging from Venice to Minas Gerais, Brazil. I think his work is amazing.

If you're interested in learning more about his workflow, you can also check out this short video .

Image: ULTRADISTANCIA

Real estate brokerage firm Redfin recently did an analysis of "mortgage-rate lock data" taken from the analytics firm Optimal Blue. A mortgage-rate lock is an agreement between a lender and a borrower guaranteeing a particular interest rate for a particular period of time.

What's potentially interesting about this data is that (1) approximately 80% of mortgage-rate locks apparently result in an actual home purchase and (2) buyers must specify whether they're applying to secure a rate for a primary home, a second home, or an investment property. So there's a high degree of intent that goes along with these applications.

What Redfin found when they looked at the data is that the growth in demand for second homes is exceeding that of primary homes by quite a wide margin. They argue that this is largely a result of people now working remotely.

But this rise in demand -- at least according to the above data -- appears to have started in the second half of 2019. So I think a few more data points would be helpful in understanding what's really going on. Is what we're seeing more about acceleration than about causation ? And what does this look like a year from now?

Chart: Redfin

Here's some food for thought around electrical vehicles. In this recent article in The American Conservative, Jordan McGillis argues that, "the electric vehicle is the climate idol of the unimaginative."

Rather than simply changing what's under the hood of our cars, we should be reexamining the broader impacts that the car has had on the urban landscape. Here's an excerpt that speaks to this:

" All of the effort directed towards EV adoption would be better expended on improving our development patterns, bringing them to human-scale and reducing the necessity of the automobile. The obvious reform candidate is zoning.  According to the New York Times , it is illegal to build anything other than a single-family home on 75 percent of land zoned for residential use in the United States. Zoning exclusively for single-family homes artificially flattens our cities, necessitates daily automobile commutes, and increases our greenhouse gas emissions.  As Istvan Bart has documented for the Climate Strategy Institute , suburban sprawl bears more responsibility for increased emissions from transportation than either population or GDP. "

There is no question that electric vehicles are helpful to addressing climate change. But Jordan is also not wrong. We can't ignore that built form is crucial to this discussion, and likely even more important.