Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 872

In 1937, New York created taxi medallions as a way of dealing with the sheer volume of unlicensed cabs in the city. About 12,000 were initially sold. They cost $10. And you needed one, fastened to your car, in order to operate a taxi service.

In 2002, the price of a medallion had risen to about $200,000, though its value had been fairly stable since about 1995. Below is a graph from a recent NY Times investigation on taxi medallions . At their peak, in and around 2014, they were worth over $1 million.

The common narrative is that ride sharing services simply killed the value of medallions. They disrupted the taxi business. While it is certainly true that mobile apps have forever changed the way we navigate our cities, the above investigation by the NY Times has revealed something potentially more impactful:

The medallion bubble burst in late 2014. Uber and Lyft may have hastened the crisis, but virtually all of the hundreds of industry veterans interviewed for this article, including many lenders, said inflated prices and risky lending practices would have caused a collapse even if ride-hailing had never been invented.

At the market’s height, medallion buyers were typically earning about $5,000 a month and paying about $4,500 to their loans, according to an analysis by The Times of city data and loan documents. Many owners could make their payments only by refinancing when medallion values increased, which was unsustainable, some loan officers said.

So at the same time that Uber was being vilified in the media for destroying the taxi business, the industry itself was working to manipulate medallion prices and shill unaffordable debt onto new immigrants. An interesting read from the NY Times.

This past weekend I toured my friend's purpose-built rental project in Wynwood, called Midtown 29 . It was completed last year and has already been stabilized.

Real estate development is very much a local business. It is that way because so much of it is driven by relationships, but also because every market has its own little idiosyncrasies.

This is always valuable to see. Sometimes we do things in our home market because it makes perfect sense to do so and sometimes we do it just because it's, "the way we've always done it."

One of the most obvious things about development in South Florida is that the parking is always above-grade. No basements. That has the result of bringing down construction costs; though I understand that, with sea level rise, insurance costs are on the rise.

If (or when ) this whole autonomous vehicle thing does in fact take hold, it's going to be a hell of lot easier to convert all of that excess parking in Miami than it will be in Toronto.

Image: Midtown 29 (Art by Peter Gronquist)

Below is a list of the 44 cities found in the 2018 Global Power City Index by the Mori Memorial Foundation's Institute for Urban Strategies.

The index ranks the major cities of the world according to their "magnetism", which they generally define as a city's ability to attract people, capital, and businesses from around the world.

As with all rankings, the output depends entirely on the methodology that you use. The GPCI seems to have the right executive committee in place. It includes global city authorities like Saskia Sassen. But that's not really the point of today's post.

Beside each city, I have added the average highs and lows (in celsius) for both the coldest and hottest months of the year. For cities in the northern hemisphere, these are typically January and July/August, respectively.

I have also added the spread between the hottest and coldest months to get a sense of variability. I always find it interesting to see how cities like Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, and Mumbai basically stay the same temperature all year round.

When you look at this list, remember that you can ski in Dubai.

All weather data taken from the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).