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

I’m a big proponent of urban kiosks for two reasons: 1) they can animate and anchor public life without a big footprint ( see Lisbon ) and 2) they can offer a low-cost option for small entrepreneurs to start something up. It can be a form of fast, low-friction real estate in an industry where most interventions are anything but fast and low-friction.

For example, when we were in Paris last month, we were walking back to our hotel one evening after dinner and I naturally thought to myself, “We need crêpes.” So, I checked what was on our route home and I found a little kiosk aptly called Le Kiosque . They had crêpes, and the place was busy with lots of people speaking French.

It’s located between the Grand Palais and a park on the Champs-Élysées, so if it were not for this kiosk, there wouldn’t have been anything available to us in this area, and we would have risked returning crêpe-less!

These kiosks, as we have seen in Lisbon and other places, can also be downright beautiful. Here’s a fruit stand in Stockholm designed by DinellJohansson architects. It’s green, it has an awning and lights, and a nice yellow sign on the top. I’d share a photo here, but I don’t want the photographer to get mad at me, which sometimes happens. So click the link.

Stockholm, like Toronto, also experiences snow and winter. It shows you that these urban interventions are weather-agnostic. Cities are missing a big opportunity by not allowing and/or encouraging more urban kiosks.

Spain has one of the lowest homebuilding rates in Europe. Over the last decade, it has barely expanded its housing supply, according to this recent FT article by John Burn-Murdoch.

When you layer on increased immigration, rising tourism, and growing housing demand from digital nomads and others, you naturally get an environment where rents outstrip income growth. According to the same article, more than 50% of young Spanish adults (aged 18-34) now live with their parents!

The knee-jerk reaction to all of this by most governments is stronger rent controls. Rents are growing too quickly, so let’s just block them from doing that, right? While this certainly does help the already housed, study after study shows that it has negative consequences for the broader housing market.

Non-controlled rents go up, overall housing quality drops, and, perhaps most importantly, new housing supply goes down, further exacerbating the initial problem it’s trying to solve.

You can’t intervene in the market and not expect there to be second- and third-order consequences. In this case, it’s akin to telling a group of kids there’s an ice cream shortage, fixing the price below the cost of production for the few who do have access, and then wondering why other ice cream trucks don’t show up to service the unmet demand.

Spain doesn’t seem to get this, but other markets appear to. According to Burn-Murdoch, Ireland recently “watered down rent controls over concerns they were contributing to weak rates of new construction in the rental sector.”

It needs to be understood that there are no shortcuts to solving housing crises. You need to start from first principles and do the hard work of building housing.

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Diagram by John Burn-Murdoch via the FT

Okay, so this dataset isn’t the most recent, but it’s interesting nonetheless. At the end of 2023, Le Monde reported that Paris had seen a doubling of cycling traffic compared to the year before. For a typical week and based on 128 sensor locations across the city, this is what that increase looked like between October 2022 and 2023:

But the data gets even more interesting when you compare it to vehicular traffic. Here’s vehicular traffic vs. cycling traffic for three principal boulevards in the city, namely l’avenue de Flandre, le boulevard Voltaire and le boulevard Magenta:

These three boulevards were chosen because they all have bi-directional lanes for both cars and bikes, meaning they roughly privilege both forms of mobility equally. And what you are seeing in the above chart is that bike traffic exceeds car traffic by fairly large margins during peak weekday periods.

This is a mobility accomplishment that benefits both cyclists and drivers.

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Charts via Le Monde