Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 770

Most of us are using the internet and our phones a lot more these days. According to Cloudflare -- who recently published these stats on how the pandemic has impacted internet usage -- traffic is up about 36% in Toronto between early January and late March 2020. Here is a heatmap of the city:

Similar maps are available for other major cities across the world. The red areas are places where internet traffic has declined and the green areas are where internet traffic has increased. Looking at Toronto, you can see that usage in the financial core of the city has, not surprisingly, declined. This makes sense. Most people are now at home using the internet there.

It would be interesting to see some sort of split between residential and commercial usage, because my mind is associating these red areas with businesses. And when you do that, some cities, like Toronto and New York, appear very monocentric; whereas others, like Berlin, appear far more polycentric.

The other thing Cloudfare looked at was internet activity by category (as of March 2020). What is also not surprising is that kids content is way up, and leads by a wide margin. For you real estate folks, you should also note that apartment searches seem to be down and are not far off from air travel. Now would be a suboptimal time to move.

Much of this probably won't surprise you, but it is revealing nonetheless.

https://youtu.be/Xe8fIjxicoo

I just finished watching this TED talk with Bill Gates . For those of you who are up on their TED talks, this is not the one from five years ago where Bill predicted a pandemic and told us all that we were nowhere near ready. (We, of course, didn't listen.) This is one that was published a few days ago and talks about how we should be responding to the outbreak that we are currently living through. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been committing significant resources toward solving problems exactly like this one. So it's interesting to hear his thoughts. In case you're wondering, herd immunity isn't the answer. We need (1) widespread testing and (2) to be extremely disciplined about our social distancing. In his words: "But money, you know bringing the economy back and doing money, that's more of a reversible thing than bringing people back to life."

The Ontario Association of Architects recently announced its short-list of projects for their annual Design Excellence Award. (If you aren't familiar with the OAA, here's a bit of background .) There are so many excellent projects on their 2020 short-list, that I would encourage you to check them all out .

However, as a developer, it is my duty to shamelessly plug the architects that we are working with. superkül, the firm behind Junction House , was short-listed for two projects -- both of which are custom homes. One of them is in Toronto and the other is in Singhampton, Ontario, which is just south of Collingwood and the Georgian Bay.

The second home -- called Woodhouse -- is located on a 90-acre site. And I love everything about it. I love the "breezeway" that separates the living areas from the more private sleeping areas, and I love how they incorporated an existing 19th century log cabin into the build.

Here are a few photos:

Photos by Alex Fradkin and Kayla Rocca