Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 76

It's fun to examine projects that I could never underwrite or build in Toronto. Here's another one from Tokyo — a 10-storey, single-stair apartment building on a busy street, next to a metro station.

The site itself is only 59.49 m2 (~640 ft2), and the building footprint is 47.97 m2 (~516 sf), for a total of 388.28 m2 (~4,179 ft2). There's retail on the first and second floors, one home per floor on levels 3 through 8, and then a two-storey home on levels 9 and 10. All of this is serviced by a single elevator, and a single open-air egress stair off the back.

The building itself uses a simple structural system involving 6 columns (which you can see evenly placed on the plans). According to the architect's notes , they started with a simple 4-column design, but apparently the columns were too large and compromised the suite layouts.

Tokyo is a unique city and this kind of housing wouldn't work everywhere. But there's a universal lesson here: removing barriers and allowing small infill projects is a good thing for cities. Until these projects are feasible, we won't know exactly what the market actually wants and could support.

Photos from Hiroyuki Ito Architects

I sometimes joke that one of my part-time jobs is charging devices, and so I love that the world has shifted to USB-C as the standard for wired charging. It's trendy to criticize the EU for over-regulating things, but this is one area where I'm glad they stepped in and forced everyone, including Apple, to get on board.

Phones, tablets, and laptops basically have 100% adoption at this point, and adoption is similarly high for other small appliances, electronics, and even airplane seats. All of this means having to carry around fewer cables, which is especially helpful when traveling.

At Parkview Mountain House , we equipped the main workspace area and kitchen with USB-C outlets, though we also included USB-A for legacy reasons. It's good for that electric toothbrush. But I know we're going to need many more USB-C outlets in the coming years.

On that note, I just discovered a cool Swedish company called Cords that makes beautiful, high-quality cables, chargers, and extenders. They also have a partnership program for architects, interior designers, and retailers if any of you are interested .

Sadly, though, they're a Swedish company and I think all of their devices use a Type C European wall plug. Otherwise, I'd be getting one of the cylindrical chargers shown above.

There are about 15 electrical plug types currently in use around the world. I can't see these being standardized anytime soon, but I do think that we'll see household outlets reach something close to a 50/50 split between standard and USB-C outlets. Already, I feel we should have installed more at PMH.

USB-C doesn't allow for enough power for bigger appliances, so it's not going to be for everything. But for any device that could run off a USB-C port, I don't know why it wouldn't eventually switch. If you aren't already thinking about this in your new-build projects, it wouldn't be a bad idea to start planning for it.

That is, until we've figured out a viable wireless charging solution. This is why USB-C is sometimes referred to as the "final connector." It's probably the last wired connector before we get rid of wired altogether.

Photos from Cords

There are now over 2,300 cities and towns across the US where Amazon offers free same-day grocery delivery for Prime members. This means a 2-hour delivery from an Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods Market. And apparently, 90% of what people buy this way is perishable, namely, fruit. Perishable food purchases also increased 30x this year, according to the company .

When it comes to online grocery shopping, this falls under what is typically referred to as the "delivery" bucket. There are three main shopping categories. The delivery bucket, which is now the largest category, gets fulfilled through a local grocery store. It's an Instacart worker or someone else collecting your food and delivering it to your home.

The next largest bucket is pickup, or click-and-collect. This is where a consumer buys what they want online and then picks it up in person. Lastly, there's the ship-to-home category. This is typically for non-perishable products, and the difference here is that the goods are coming from a distribution center, as opposed to a local grocery store. Think of it like a typical purchase from Amazon.

The grocery model continues to evolve rapidly. But local stores — and the real estate that houses them — seem to be remaining central to it. In Toronto, I don't normally shop at Whole Foods Market, but there is one very close to Parkview Mountain House that I like shopping at when I'm in Park City. And every time I go, it feels more like an Amazon store.

There's special pricing and deals for Prime members. The Amazon One palm scanning technology is at every register. And there's an Amazon return facility in the store to deal with that thing you erroneously ordered from China. It's all becoming seamlessly integrated with the broader Amazon ecosystem.

So from a real estate standpoint, the brick-and-mortar store is not being supplanted in the way that people once speculated. The physical store is just continuing to evolve to meet a changing omnichannel landscape, acting as a grocery store, distribution center, physical customer service center, casual restaurant, and more.

If anything, this makes the real estate more, rather than less, valuable.

Cover photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash