Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 839

This September 25, 2019, the Bronx Museum of the Arts will be opening up a new exhibition called, Henry Chalfant: Art vs. Transit, 1977-1987 . Henry is a renowned photographer who is most known for his work on graffiti, breakdance, and overall street culture. This exhibition is about all of this, but there's a particular focus on the subway car art that was once ubiquitous in New York City.

There's also a Kickstarter campaign if you'd like to support this exhibition. What struck me as I watched the campaign video, was that the "urban street culture" of this era doesn't seem to exist in quite the same way today (or maybe I'm missing it). In the video, Henry talks about things like the birth of hip hop, which he documented outside, on the street.

We shouldn't forget that New York was also a scary place at this time. Removing the subway art that Henry fastidiously documented was one of the ways in which the city is thought to have broken its patterns of crime. But at the same time, there's something really special about new ideas forming out in the public realm.

It's also a uniquely urban phenomenon.

A few years ago I wrote a post talking about " depression babies ." In it, I cited a research paper that looked at the impact of macroeconomic shocks on people's willingness to take on financial risk in the future. The term "depression babies" stems from the Great Depression and how it is believed to have impacted risk taking, savings rates, and probably many other things.

I was reminded of this when I read this recent article in the WSJ talking about how the Chinese have started spending -- and taking on the debt -- like Americans, particularly among Chinese under 30. It is the inverse of the depression baby phenomenon. In this case, it is arguably years of economic expansion leading to greater comfort around financial risk.

Here are a couple of figures from the article:

JPMorgan estimates China’s ratio of household debt to gross domestic product will climb to 61% by 2020. That’s up from 26% in 2010 and higher than current levels in Italy and Greece.

The level in the U.S. is about 76%, after falling from 98% in 2006, according to the International Monetary Fund.

By another measure—the ratio of household debt to disposable income—China appears to have already surpassed the U.S. Its ratio reached 117.2% in 2018, up from 42.7% in 2008, according to calculations by Lei Ning, a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Research at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. The U.S. peaked at 135% in 2007 and dropped to 101% in 2018.

Not surprisingly, the article goes on to talk about how this dramatic increase in household debt might be something to worry about. Maybe. I'm not an economist. But I do think this is designed to boost the Chinese growth machine and I do think it makes them less reliant on other countries -- such as, maybe, the United States.

In March 2018, Statistics Canada launched the largest " wastewater-based epidemiology pilot test " ever conducted in North America. Over a 12 month period, it collected wastewater samples across the country in order to test for traces of cannabis and other drugs. The pilot captured 8.4 million people in Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto, Montréal, and Halifax. And it was allegedly timed to coincide with the legalization of cannabis in Canada on October 17, 2018.

This week Statistics Canada published its findings . While the study does cover over 8 million people, it was not intended to be representative of the entire Canadian population. Some sites, such as Vancouver, had nearly complete coverage of the metro area population. While others, such as the Halifax site, only covered about half of the metropolitan area. In any event, the findings are interesting.

Above is one example: methamphetamine load per capita for the five study cities. The y-axis is grams per million people per week. And the time period is, again, March 2018 to February 2019. Average levels for Edmonton and Vancouver were found to be about 3.7x higher than those in Montréal and Toronto. There was also no apparent seasonal/monthly variation, which is something else they looked at.

Here I learned that a large portion of this drug passes through the body unchanged. And so the concentrations they discovered in wastewater is likely a fairly direct indicator of consumption within the population. Stats Canada is still reviewing its findings and evaluating this approach to collecting large scale urban data. But I am certain we'll be seeing more of these kinds of urban studies.

Chart: Statistics Canada