Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 698

“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” -Georg Hegel

Back in March, I was reading everything I could find about COVID-19 and about pandemics. Eventually that tapered off. But this week I decided that it was time to go back and learn a lot more about the 1918 Spanish Flu.

I've just ordered John M. Barry's 2004 book called The Great Influenza . Bill Gates wrote about it over the summer -- after he reread it -- and said that it will teach you almost everything you need to know about the influenza. He also said that it's never been more relevant.

Despite happening over 100 years ago, there are no doubt lessons that we can learn from this great influenza. The most important being that leadership and honesty, of course, matter a great deal during a time of crisis.

Barry also argues that the 1918 influenza was responsible for altering the flow of history. He makes the claim (convincingly according to Bill) that it was a contributing factor in the rise of Hitler and the start of World War II.

So I'm looking forward to receiving my copy later this week. If you'd like to purchase your own, you can do that over here . And if you've already read it, please let me know what you thought in the comment section below.

The New York Times recently published this interesting piece about Culdesac and the completely car-free community that they are building just east of Phoenix in Tempe, Arizona (a place that is not generally known for its walkability). Culdesac calls itself the first " post-car real estate developer in the United States ." And so their Culdesac Tempe project has been designed to house 1,000 residents and exactly 0 cars.

When the first phase is completed next year, residents will be restricted from having a car within the community and they'll also be restricted from parking on any nearby streets. (This second stipulation was done to assuage concerns that a zero parking community would create a spillover effect in the surrounding area.) Instead, residents of Culdesac Tempe will rely on their local amenities, as well as on transit (it's on a light rail line), biking, ride-sharing, and other forms of urban mobility.

While this may seem kind of crazy for sprawling Arizona, the company's thesis is both clear and clever. The future of American cities needs to be the kind of walkable urbanism that you find in places like the northeast. But at the same time, the fastest growing cities in the United States are generally in the Sun Belt . What they are doing is building walkable urbanism in the places where people clearly want to live.

Shane Dingman's recent piece in the Globe and Mail about shrinking lot sizes raises two interesting points.

One, new low-rise lot sizes seem to be shrinking and that's probably a normal market outcome. Similar to the way in which average unit sizes have been generally coming down for mid-rise and high-rise product, it is a way to maintain some semblance of affordability in the face of ever-rising costs.

The average price of a new condo in the City of Toronto last quarter was nearly $1,300 psf . That means that if you had an average unit size of 1,000 square feet, you'd have an average selling price of $1.3 million (to state the obvious). Not everyone can afford this ticket price, and so there's downward pressure on unit sizes in order to get the face prices down.

Two, developer margins aren't increasing just because home prices have been going up. At best, they've remained constant (Shane provides a quantitative example in his article). But there are also many cases where margins are getting squeezed as a result of rising costs.

All of this to say that I think we can continue to expect downward pressure on lot sizes and unit sizes as the Toronto region continues to grow.