Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 986

I just spent the last 7 minutes listening to  this brief historical overview of Seoul by The Urbanist , while I bounced around the city on Google Street View, admiring the coverage of their transit network and the density of their low-rise neighborhoods. 

I love Street View and I love using it to explore cities.

One of the things I liked about The Urbanist episode –  beyond it being a good soundtrack while I explored – is that it talks, albeit briefly, about why Seoul is located where it is today. 

I am always curious about this when it comes to cities. I mean, who was it that decided, yup, this is going to be the spot. Because it’s generally a pretty sticky decision once it is made.

You may also find this 2014 NASA photograph of the Korean Peninsula interesting. The nighttime sky renders up a pretty stark contrast between North Korea and South Korea.

According to NASA , per capita power consumption in North Korea and South Korea is 739 kilowatt hours and 10,161 kilowatt hours, respectively. That’s why the satellite photo looks the way it does.

“People get income for doing stuff, and they get income for owning stuff. Increasingly the latter. And the ownership share of income goes to a small slice of households that own almost all the stuff .”

This is a quote from a recent article by Steve Roth over at Evonomics, where he breaks down the share of US household income that is derived from “labor” vs. “capital.” In other words, how much money do households make from working (trading their time for money) and how much do they make from their existing wealth (that is, owning stuff)?

If I were to oversimplify how he calculates this (you can read all of the details, here ), it is: (Income - Labor Compensation) / Income. Take all of the household income. Subtract the money made from doing stuff. And then divide it by total income to get the percentage made from “unearned property income.” There are gray areas and others things to consider, but that’s the gist of it.

What he discovers and argues is that basically 50% of household income comes from simply being wealthy and owning stuff. He also reminds us that approximately 60% of US wealth is… “earned the old-fashioned away: it’s inherited.”

Earlier this month, Shane Dingman wrote a piece in the Globe and Mail talking about TAS’ proposed development for 2 Tecumseth Avenue here in Toronto – the former home of Quality Meat Packers, a slaughterhouse. In the article there’s a quote from Mazyar Mortazavi, which I posted to my Instagram (as a story), but that I have been meaning to also post to the blog. So here it is: 

“It’s not a conversation about towers good, towers bad: Mid-rise is the most expensive construction typology and it delivers effectively luxury housing, so it doesn’t respond to the needs of affordability,” he said. “We didn’t buy Tecumseth to build a bunch of condos and move on. We bought it because we wanted to pursue a vision around city building. You need density … the question is how do we actually deliver density that’s relevant today and relevant 50 years from now?”

He’s of course right about mid-rise construction costs. There are diseconomies of scale and other construction inefficiencies that we have talked about many times before on this blog. The result is one of the Catch-22s of city building. Mid-rise and small scale infill is often seen as desirable, but we also say that we need more affordable housing.

It’s doublethink .

Image: 2 Tecumseth by KPMB Architects for TAS