Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 83

September 2025 was a milestone month for Waymo in California: It reached 1,000,000 paid driverless rides. This represents a year-over-year increase of ~182%, which is a pretty good sign that the technology works and that customers like it.

(Note: The dramatic falloff in rides in June 2025 was because of anti-ICE protests and vandalism taking place in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The company decided to temporarily suspend operations.)

This is still a small fraction of the traditional ride-hailing market, though. According to the California Public Utilities Commission, Uber and Lyft combined complete somewhere around 300-320 million passenger trips per year in the state. That averages out to roughly 25-27 million trips per month for context.

Still, the writing is on the wall . AV usage is growing rapidly and I think it's only a matter of time until it supplants traditional ride-hailing, and perhaps even car ownership.

Chart via Charlie Bilello

There is a great quote in Shakespeare's Hamlet : "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

The point of this quote is to argue that the universe is fundamentally neutral. When an event happens, it is neither good nor bad; the label is determined by the judgment we ultimately bring to it.

Take snow, for instance.

Here in Toronto, I find that when it snows, people tend to look at it as a bad event. They think of the traffic that will ensue and the work that will be required to clear out walkways and driveways. But I love snow (maybe because I don't have a driveway). Snow is good. As an avid snowboarder, it gets me excited for the winter season.

And right now I can tell you that I'm praying to the snow gods for a dumping or two in Northern Utah. The entire Mountain West region is off to a slow start this season and has had to delay resort openings. My judgment tells me this is "bad."

Now, let's consider the real estate development market.

The prevailing narrative right now is that it's bad. But Hamlet would say that only thinking makes it so. An alternative way to think about the market is that it's presenting a generational buying opportunity .

Like snow, I would call that a good thing.

The Stahl House — also known as Case Study House #22 — is up for sale in Los Angeles.

Even if you don't know this house by name, I'm sure you've seen Julius Shulman's iconic photograph from 1960 showing two women sitting in a corner of the house. It is widely credited with turning the house into one of the city's most recognizable landmarks.

Buck and Carlotta Stahl are the original owners. They purchased the steep lot for US$13,000 in 1954 (equal to about $157,000 today). This was a large sum of money at the time, especially for a lot that was thought to be unbuildable by many architects.

Designed by architect Pierre Koenig, the house was built as part of Arts & Architecture magazine's Case Study program, hence the name. The intent of the program was to come up with templated responses for an expected housing shortage following the Great Depression and World War II.

When the program launched, it stated that "each house must be capable of duplication and in no sense be an individual performance," and that "the overall program will be general enough to be of practical assistance to the average American in search of a home in which he can afford to live."

Sound familiar?

The program also secured material donations from the building industry in an effort to make the prototypes as low-cost and repeatable as possible. Ironically, the house became the exact opposite: It became a singular icon of Los Angeles, used in movies, for fashion shoots, and as a general backdrop for a modernist city.

And today, after 65 years of stewardship under the original owners, the house is on the market for US$25,000,000 . This works out to nearly US$11,400 per square foot of interior space.

When I first saw the list price I immediately thought to myself, "Interesting, I wonder how much of this price is being attributed to the real estate and how much of it is being attributed to its status as an icon and piece of art."

I don't know the LA market very well, so I asked Gemini 3. What it told me is that comparable high-end homes in this area with pools and luxury views often trade for around $2,000 psf. That would put this real estate at around $4.4 million.

If this is accurate (correct me if I'm wrong, LA people), it means that something like 80% of its list price is being derived from its "brand." Not bad for a case study house built with low-cost subsidized materials.

The other possible consideration is that people really like to photograph and film this house. And so there's also a potential income stream associated with buying it. Assuming that continues (and AI doesn't replace the need for physical shoot locations), then we'd also have to capitalize this income.

In this case, the house would have three value components to it: real estate value, art/brand value, and rental income value derived from movies and shoots. Is that equal to $25 million? I don't know, but the market should tell us soon enough.

Cover photo by Julius Shulman