Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 966

This is a language map of Toronto showing the most commonly spoken non-official languages at home. (It only counts individuals who reported speaking a single non-official language most commonly at home, as opposed to multiple ones.) The map you see below is based on 2016 census data, but if you’d like to check out the previous census years, as well as an interactive version, you can do that  here  at Social Planning Toronto.

The top languages are also listed on the right of the map, with the exception of the gray areas. These areas indicate census tracts where English > 90%. I don’t know why French shows up as #13, since this map is supposed to be non-official languages.

In any event, green represents Chinese (includes Cantonese, Mandarin, and so on). Sky blue is Tagalog. And yellow is Tamil. I’ll let you play around with the map to explore the others. There shouldn’t be many surprises if you know Toronto well, but it’s still interesting to explore the clustering and the percentages. Some of the census tracts have a single non-official language representing 90%+ of the responses.

The biggest gains over the last decade – following the same methodology as the above mapping – were Tagalog, Farsi, Bengali, Arabic, and Pashto. And the biggest declines over this same time period were Italian, Tamil, Urdu, Punjabi, and Polish. But this data is only for the City of Toronto and so I suppose that a decline could also be because of people relocating to other parts of the region.

A big part of Toronto’s strength comes from exactly what you see in this map: the world in a city.

Jason Segedy , who is the Director of Planning and Urban Development for the city of Akron, Ohio, recently penned a two-part series in the American Conservative about urban revitalization in the Rust Belt. Part two is specifically about the importance of new housing in “cities left for dead.”

As I was reading through the piece, my first thought was that it would be a good follow-up to yesterday’s post on “winner-take-all-urbanism.” The contrast between alpha cities like San Francisco and Rust Belt cities like Akron is stark.

The former city can’t build housing fast enough. And the latter city was forced to implement a citywide, 15 year, 100% residential property tax abatement program just to induce new investment. Any and all new housing is eligible.

But as I got further down the article, I was struck by something else. I was surprised to hear Segedy say that, rather than market forces, community opposition is “perhaps the biggest challenge of all” when it comes to delivering new housing in these markets.

Here is a longish excerpt that I would encourage you to read:

Although you might think that people living in neighborhoods with a large number of abandoned houses and vacant lots would be thrilled to see new houses being built, you might be surprised to learn how often this is not the case. Sometimes neighbors prefer to have the vacant lot remain as green space. Sometimes they worry that the new housing will not be expensive enough, and will bring their property values down. Other times, they worry that the new housing will be too expensive, and will bring their property values (and taxes) up.

When it comes to new housing, everyone is a critic. I have heard people complain that housing which they will never live in is too dense; that housing which they will never purchase is too expensive; that housing which they will never be inconvenienced by will generate too much traffic; and that housing which they will never look at is not architecturally appealing.

After 23 years as an urban planner, I can honestly report to you that, contrary to popular belief, most people are strongly in favor of heavy-handed and draconian government regulation of private property—as long as it is someone else’s private property, and not their own.

Residents and community activists who are opposed to new housing often demonize the real estate development profession as being “greedy”, overlooking the fact that their own home was developed by a developer, built by a builder, and sold by a realtor—most likely for a profit. This isn’t to argue that every development professional is a white knight, but it is important to remember that the vast majority of people who work in the real estate and construction sectors are not the enemy of neighborhoods. Without them, there would be no neighborhoods.

According to Segedy, Akron has lost 32% of its peak population. Cleveland has lost 58%. And Detroit has lost 64%, leaving almost 1/3 of its land parcels vacant. (These are 2017 figures.) Surprisingly, this doesn’t appear to change how many people feel about new development. 

No more new housing. We’re full. Unless, of course, that housing is for me.

Photo by Nolan Issac on Unsplash

We have talked a lot on this blog about the concentration of economic activity in global cities. Here is an old post about a paper called “winner-take-all-cities”, which documents the overrepresentation of talent, economic activity, innovation, and wealth creation in a select number of alpha cities.

But this same phenomenon is playing out in a myriad of different ways. Aaron Renn calls this the “superstar effect” and has been writing about it for years . Another more recent example is this post by Richard Kerby called: Where did you go to school?

Kerby looked at where venture capitalists in the US went to school and discovered that around 40% of them have gone to one of two schools: Stanford or Harvard. His argument is that not only is the venture capital industry lacking in gender and racial diversity, but it’s also lacking in cognitive diversity.

My point with this post, though, is one of hyper-concentration. Tech is a dominant force in today’s economy. And in 2017, nearly 45% of all venture capital investment in the US went to companies located in the Bay Area – meaning San Francisco and San Jose.

So here is an example of a select number of schools training a select number of minds that then go on to invest in a select number of cities. Fred Wilson, who is a venture capitalist, has a good response to this problem of diversity in the VC industry.

But, of course, this is bigger than just the VC business.