Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 856

The State of New York just enacted a new law (on June 14, 2019) requiring that 51% of existing tenants agree to buy their apartments before a building can be converted into a condominium or a cooperative. There was previously no requirement for anyone to buy in order for a conversion to take place. Tenants who chose not to buy, could simply remain in the building as a renter.

Supposedly , the real estate industry believes this new requirement will be a largely impossible threshold to meet, meaning that condo/co-op conversions could now be dead in NYC. There's also an argument that conversions have historically helped many middle class New Yorkers buy a home since they sometimes (usually?) had the chance to buy their apartment below market at the time of a conversion.

I'm not familiar enough with this space to be able to opine on the merits of these arguments, so I won't. Perhaps some of you will in the comment section below. Instead, I will leave you all with a chart showing the median condo sale price in Manhattan over the last ~30 years (taken from the same WSJ article ). I like seeing long(er) term charts. Maybe you do too.

Lately it has been in the news that a growing number of people in Tokyo are using car-sharing services for reasons other than to drive places. It started when companies began noticing that " several percent of their rented vehicles " were not being driven at all. What they ended up discovering, largely through customer surveys, is that car-sharing services have become an affordable option for people looking to nap, work, eat, store things, charge their phone, practice rapping, and probably a bunch of other things.

This immediately struck me as being quintessentially Japanese, partially because one of my experiences of Tokyo is that Tokyoites are often cool to sleep all throughout the city, including at the bar and on my shoulder on the metro. But I also think this finding tells you something about Tokyo's urban fabric and, in particular, how much of a precious commodity that space is within the capital. This guy once rented a car because he couldn't find a place to sit down and eat his boxed lunch.

This may also be a case of mispriced private space. Cities should, of course, have well-designed public spaces that accommodate people wanting to eat their boxed lunches. But for those looking for a little quiet time, a few hundred yen for 30 minutes has proven to be a competitive, and in some cases a more affordable, offering compared to, say, internet cafes. From the sounds of it, none of the car share companies ever anticipated this use case. Pricing is interesting.

Photo by  Louie Martinez  on  Unsplash

Using data from MarineTraffic (which is definitely worth a click through), the New York Times has created this terrific animation showing the flow of oil tankers from the Persian Gulf to the rest of the world from May 15 to June 15, 2019.

Here's a screenshot:

About 20% of the world's supply of oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, a tiny passage located between Iran (north) and the UAE (south). See above.

The article also has a number of other charts that speak to changing supply and demand patterns. Note the US, China, and Iran.

Here are the top oil producers (total petroleum liquids) and the top crude oil exporters in 2018 (both are measured in millions of barrels a day):

And here are the top oil consumers ranked by 2016 data (total consumption of petroleum and other liquids):

Images/Charts: New York Times