Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 691

Architect Sheena Sharp, of Coolearth Architecture , tweeted something interesting out today:

https://twitter.com/sheenasharp/status/1332369424775409664?s=20

Improving this would be good. And it is the same gripe that I had with architecture school when I was there. Why is it taboo to talk about money and the market? Why must design exist, in many instances, within a vacuum?

I can appreciate the value in not always constraining yourself with the status quo. To innovate, you have to stretch. And sometimes, or perhaps oftentimes, the best ideas initially seem dumb. It's important to have room to experiment and tinker .

But eventually, reality does matter. Plans that look good on paper, may not be suitable for the market. Constraints are a big part of what makes the city building industry so rewarding. Planning is hard. Building is hard. Getting consensus is hard. It's all incredibly difficult and you have to be creative.

The really elegant solutions usually need to weave across and through many different objectives and stakeholders. And so in my view, the more you can empathize with those other constraints, the more elegant your solution will be. Knowing more is good.

This is an excellent article by Alex Bozikovic, Joe Castaldo and Danielle Webb about the 15-minute city. In it, they do a block-by-block analysis of how many Canadians actually live in what they are calling an "amenity dense" neighborhood.

Their definition of amenity dense:

• Grocery store, pharmacy, and public transit stop within one kilometer

• Childcare facility, primary school, and a library within 1.5 kilometers

• Healthcare facility within three kilometers

• Place of employment within 10 kilometers

Once you apply this filter to Canadian cities, it turns out that only about 23.3% of city dwellers live in this kind of amenity dense neighborhood. It's really only our three largest cities. For the most part, we have built environments that want you to have a car.

When it comes Toronto, and also Montreal, it is a tale of two almost equally divided cities. If you live in a central neighborhood, you're probably dense with amenities. But in the inner suburbs, it becomes pretty spotty. And though it can be done, this is not an easy change.

The full article has many more of these city maps and so I would encourage you to check it out . It's a great piece of journalism.

Photo by Chloe Evans on Unsplash

Airbnb's IPO documents recently went public.

Not surprisingly, their business as a travel company has been heavily impacted by COVID-19. Last year, the platform saw 326.9 million nights and experiences booked, with 251.1 million being booked in the first nine months of 2019. This year, nights and experiences are down to 146.9 million for this same nine month period. Revenue is correspondingly down from $3.7 billion for the first nine months of 2019, to $2.5 billion for the first nine months of this year.

But what is also clear from their data is that people still really want to travel and have new experiences. As soon as April passed and the Northern Hemisphere entered the normally busy Q3 travel season, domestic travel began to quickly ramp back up. For many, this likely took the place of international travel. See above chart.

Of greater concern might be all of the regulation that now surrounds short-term rentals. As of October 2019, about 70% of the platform's top 200 cities (by revenue) had some form of regulation impacting short-term rentals. But at the same time, no one city accounts for more than 2.5% of the platform's revenue. So there's strong geographic diversification.

If you'd like to take a look at the company's S-1, you can do that over here . And for those of you who might be curious, these are Airbnb's top 10 cities based on revenue:

1. London

2. New York City

3. Paris

4. Los Angeles

5. Rome

6. Barcelona

7. Tokyo

8. Toronto

9. San Diego

10. Lisbon