Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 873

People move to cities for a whole host of reasons, whether it be for more money, more affordable housing, and/or better weather. The fastest growing cities in the US , for example, tend to be in the south where it's warmer and where housing supply is more elastic. However, we also know that "consumer leisure amenities" increasingly factor into this decision. A new research paper by Gerald A. Carlino (Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia) and Albert Saiz (MIT) has tried to quantify this relationship by looking at the perceived beauty of a place. To do this, they analyzed the number of tourist visits and the number of "crowdsourced picturesque locations" in a metro area. Read: Instagrammable moments. What they found was that beauty, not surprisingly, matters (much like it does in other facets of life). Between 1990-2010, metro areas that were perceived as being "twice as picturesque" experienced greater population growth -- about 10 percentage points higher. These metro areas also attracted a higher percentage of educated individuals and experienced greater housing appreciation. If you'd like to download a copy of Beautiful city: Leisure amenities and urban growth , click here .

Architect I.M. Pei died this week in New York City. He was 102. Being a centenarian is noteworthy enough. He was born in Hong Kong in 1917. I would love to join that club. Imagine how much change he experienced throughout his life. But, of course, Pei was also a celebrated Pritzker Prize winning architect. For those of you in Toronto, you can look to Commerce Court West to see an example of his work (Page & Steele was the local architect). Completed in 1972, it was the tallest building in Canada until 1976. But perhaps his most well known project is the Louvre Pyramid in Paris (pictured above). In reading some of his obituaries , I was intrigued -- but in no way surprised -- to learn that the Louvre Pyramid was deeply hated by Parisians at the time it was being proposed and built. Supposedly, for the first few years after completion, Pei couldn't walk the streets of Paris without people berating him. However, if you surveyed Parisians today, I would bet you that the approval rating of the Pyramid would be extremely high. And I would also argue that it has since become one of Paris' most globally recognizable symbols. (Parisians, please weigh in below in the comments.) All of this, once again, suggests to me that we're often not very good at evaluating the merits of things that are new to us. Pei's Pyramid, beyond being a new circulation strategy for the broader complex, was a radically different style of architecture. Appreciating that sometimes requires a bit of time. Photo by  Uriel Soberanes  on  Unsplash

On February 1, 2017, an inclusionary zoning ordinance came into effect in Portland, mandating that all new residential projects with 20 or more units dedicate a portion of the building to affordable housing. For the first year, the requirement was 8% of all units for households earning 60% of the Area Median Income or 16% of all units for households earning 80% of the AMI. I'm not sure if it was or is possible to do a blend of the two income levels. After the first year, the requirement was supposed to step up to 10% and 20% of all units, respectively. But that step up was never enacted, which had many industry analysts arguing that it was a clear signal the ordinance was not performing as intended. According to Joe Cortright of City Observatory (which is based in Portland), the new ordinance largely resulted in 3 things happening: (1) Developers rushed to get new applications in during the transition period so that they would not be subjected to the new IZ rules; (2) applications increased for projects with less than 20 units (avoid the rules by building smaller); and (3), following the initial transition surge, building permit applications, as a whole, dropped off. This last point is what usually comes up in debates around inclusionary zoning. Does the requirement to build affordable housing actually reduce overall housing supply? I've written about this before, but the math is pretty simple. Inclusionary zoning policies are a drag on revenue and a direct cost to the project. What that means is that something else will need to give in order for the numbers to balance. That could come in the form of lower costs (such as an impact fee abatement) or in higher rents on the balance of the units. But this latter approach is easier said than done. Sometimes you need to wait for the market to "catch up", which could be what some developers in Portland are doing. They're waiting for housing to get more expensive -- overall -- so they can then offset the pro forma drag from the affordable units.