Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 886

Curbed has a section on their website dedicated to "deep dives on cities, architecture, design, real estate, and urban planning." It is called Longform . And they have some great stories, including this one on " the female powerhouse [ Florence Casler ] who developed 1920s Downtown LA ."

Florence was born in 1869 in Welland, Ontario, about 25 kilometers south of Niagara Falls. She married an American -- a plumber -- and eventually settled in Buffalo, New York. After her husband left to pursue riches in the gold mines, she became a licensed plumber and took over the business.

Eventually this love of plumbing grew into a love of building, and somehow she found herself, with her daughters, in Los Angeles at the beginning of the 20th century.

By the 1920s, she had become a dominant force in the real estate business. Some 60 buildings are credited to Florence and she is thought to be largely responsible for ushering in a new era of multifamily apartments in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, many of her buildings have since been demolished.

As one of the first women in Los Angeles to head a development and/or construction business, I think this is a wonderful story worth telling. For the full Curbed article, click here .

Over the weekend I stumbled upon this illustrated Medium post by Alfred Twu comparing sloped and flat roofs. The argument is that these two roof types are coded. In this part of the world, at least, sloped roofs signal low-rise "house" and flat roofs signal big city "high-rise."

I'm not yet convinced of this association with height, or of all the claims made in the article. Did New York City really make the flat roof commonplace in our cities? But the idea that a roofline can trigger certain associations -- or even become divisive -- is a fascinating one.

Take, for example, Am Fischtal in Berlin. On one side of the street you have, still to this day, homes with flat roofs. And on the other side you have homes with sloped roofs. This clean divide is the result of a supposed "roof war" that took place during the Weimar Republic.

At this moment in time in the suburbs of Berlin, the kind of roof you chose to live under was a proclamation of your political orientation. I'm not sure roofs have as much gravitas as they did in the 1920's on Am Fischtal, but they still do say something.

Image: Alfred Twu

River Davis' recent article in the Wall Street Journal about Tokyo's generally flat home prices had me, again, wondering about demographics. I mean, aren't their demographics working in reverse ? They have an aging population, low immigration, and a low birthrate. But Tokyo, which represents about 11% of Japan's total population , is still growing. And their home price index looks like this compared to San Francisco and New York:

Davis' argument, which of course has been made by others before, is that deregulation has allowed housing supply to actually keep up with demand. Land use policies were relaxed to allow taller and denser buildings to be built and some degree of decision making (I'm not sure how much) was moved to the central government in order to counteract the NIMBY problem that invariably attaches itself to local politics.

The result is housing numbers that look and compare like this:

In Tokyo last year, housing starts came in around 145,000, according to Japan’s land ministry. This figure is on par with the total number of new housing units authorized last year in New York, Los Angeles, Boston and Houston combined, based on the U.S. Census Bureau data. The same feat was achieved in 2017.

If we are to normalize against New York, it looks like this:

And the belief seems to be that it is working:

“A reason why housing prices in Japan are not rising as fast as in New York, for example, is the large number of housing starts,” says Masahiro Kobayashi, a director general at the Japan Housing Finance Agency, a state-run entity which supports the housing market by purchasing home loans.

One sentence that really stood out for me in the article is this one here: "Private consultants were given permission to issue building permits to speed up construction." If any of you have tried to pull a building permit for a large project in Toronto, you'll know that it can take a very long time (understatement). Maybe it is the same in your city. Should we be looking at this?

Charts: WSJ