Tim Hortons is a popular coffee chain in Canada (and elsewhere in the world). And every year, similar to other coffee chains, they adopt special Christmas/holiday cups. In the early 2000s, the designs they used were from an illustrator by the name of Gary Alphonso. His work can be found, over here. Today, his cups and other packaging designs are considered vintage. And so if you search online, I'm sure you can find someone reselling them.

Here's what the cups look liked:

And here's what this illustration looks like unrolled:

It's a romantic notion of winter. There's kids making a snowman. People skiing and walking with snowboards. People drinking beverages (presumably from the nearby Tim Hortons) while being pulled on horse-drawn sleighs in a large public space. And in the background, there's a mixed-used main street with Tim Hortons naturally at the center of it. It's a kind of ideal winter moment. But to what extent is this a fantasy?

According to the 2021 Canadian Census, approximately 78.4% of the Canadian population living in our 11 largest CMAs (census metropolitan areas) lived in a suburb. Only about 21.6% lived in an urban core (either a downtown or an inner ring). So for the majority of Canadians, it is statistically probable that this an uncommon winter scene (never mind, for a second, the horses and stuff). A more likely scenario might be a suburban Tim Hortons with a drive-thru window.

I find this ironic. I find it ironic that the places we yearn to visit on vacation and the places we romanticize on coffee cups tend to be different than the ones that the majority of Canadians choose to live in. In fact, if you ask people across North America (this is a survey covering the US), the majority often say that they would prefer to live in a community where the houses are further apart and where you need to travel/drive to things.

Is it because we all just like fantasies on our coffee cups, or could it be that we've simply forgotten how to build walkable mixed-use communities?

Images by Gary Alphonso via i2i Art

The years seem to only go by faster. December, in particular, is always a hectic month with social commitments. There never seems to be enough time. Then, all of a sudden, everything stops. Billions of people around the world slow down and unplug for the holidays. I'm the kind of person who is allergic to free time. I always want to be doing and accomplishing something, and that has consequences every now and then where I run out of steam. So Christmas is a good time for me in multiple ways.

It's been an eventful year. I left Slate to focus 100% on Globizen. Bianca and I got married in the summer, and then travelled around the mediterranean for a few weeks in August. One Delisle progressed substantially (we poured the level 10 slab right before the holidays). Project Bench received its zoning approvals. We completed Parkview Mountain House in Park City (bookings are now open). And we also laid the groundwork for a bunch of new projects and real estate strategies that I'm really excited about for 2025.

But until then, I'm going to enjoy celebrating Christmas and the holiday season. I'm highly suspect of any religion created by people (I guess that's all of them), but I do love celebrating Christmas and I do appreciate my upbringing more and more the older I get. Bianca and I went to church when we were in Mallorca in the summer and, even though we understood exactly 0% of the mass and it was a sauna inside the cathedral, we both enjoyed it. Later today, I'll be going to church with my mom.

I don't love the shopping part of Christmas -- it can be stressful. A simpler Christmas is probably better. I come back to something that Justin Welsh recently said about modern luxury. He defined it as the ability to "think clearly, sleep deeply, move slowly, and live quietly in a world designed to prevent all four." These are likely good things to focus on at this time of year with your closest family and friends. Merry Christmas and happy holidays, everyone.

For the last few weeks, I've been playing around with a new social platform called Rodeo. It runs on the Base blockchain (which is an Ethereum Layer 2 chain), but you don't really need to be aware of this or understand how it works behind the scenes. If you've ever used Instagram, then you will already know how to use this platform. You can upload photos, scroll through photos, and heart photos.

But what's unique is that you can also "collect" photos. This requires a very small amount of Ether (0.0001 ETH), which works out to somewhere around ~$0.33 today. But there's also the option of just buying credits with your credit card and bypassing the need for an external crypto wallet. Whichever option you choose, you are minting an NFT to your wallet every time you "collect" a post. This is whether you are aware of it or not.

What this then does is send the creator reward money. Every time someone collects/mints a post, the creator of that post earns 0.00005 ETH (~$0.16 today). And already, there are users on the platform who have collected thousands of dollars in rewards as a result of their posts. It is also possible to earn referral rewards. If I collect a post and someone sees that I did it and then collects it, I earn a percentage. I can also send direct referral links (similar to how people on IG share posts via DM).

So despite looking a lot like Instagram, this is a fundamentally different platform under the hood. There is an embedded economy where artists and creators can get paid directly by collectors. At the same time, the platform itself collects a fee from interactions and transactions and so, in theory, there's no need for them to turn to advertising and selling our personal information.

There's also no reason that any user needs to remain wed to Rodeo. When you collect a post, an NFT is minted and it goes directly into your crypto wallet (assuming you've connected your external wallet). That crypto wallet is yours and you can do whatever you want with its contents, including selling the NFTs on some other marketplace or gifting them to a friend or family member for Christmas.

So other than the fact that the biggest audiences are on platforms like Instagram and X, I'd much rather share my photos on a platform like Rodeo, where I have full control. This is also why I switched my blogging platform from Wordpress to Paragraph and why I've started using Warpcast alongside X. It's the same idea. This has always been the promise of blockchains, but it's amazing to see it playing out with all of these new platforms.

I have no idea if Rodeo will ever surpass Instagram as the dominant photo sharing platform. But I have a high degree of conviction that our online lives will eventually migrate onchain. It's for this reason that I largely don't care about the daily fluctuations of ETH or BTC; I'm far more interested in the software that is getting built out on top of these chains. That is what will generate the demand for these cryptocurrencies long-term.

We've spoken before about Saudi Arabia's "The Line" project. At first, I wasn't sure if it was real, but it is, and it's now under construction. We then spoke about whether a 170-kilometer line is an optimal urban form for a city, and the answer, according to this study, is that it's not. The problem with a line is that it actually maximizes the average distance between inhabitants. This makes sense because you could have two people living and working 170 kilometers apart.

On the other hand, if you maintain the same built-up area and take the opposite kind of geometry -- a circle -- you actually minimize the average distance between inhabitants. It's for this reason that older cities (the ones that weren't masterplanned) have tended to grow radially and not linearly (unless there were geographic features forcing it to grow in a certain way). So there is a strong argument to be made that The Line is a suboptimal plan for a new city.

But here's what's interesting: many cities already follow a somewhat similar approach. They don't do it as absolutely as The Line, but they do it in the way that they zone for higher densities and a mix of uses only on their main corridors. Example:

Mark R. Brown, AICP

@CompletedStreet

America vs Europe.

Concentrating density on just one street creates less livable neighborhoods.

Medium density projects should be spread over a bigger area.

163

7:52 AM • Dec 22, 2024

This creates a similar kind of effect when it comes to walkability, ability to support higher-order transit, and overall agglomeration economies. All of the urban activity gets concentrated along one corridor, maximizing the distance between people. In extreme examples, you also get inhabitants that are forced into different mobility options. The corridor is supposed to be transit-oriented, but all of the surrounding areas are really only conducive to driving. This creates a mismatch that is less an ideal for everyone.

So this post is our regular reminder that, when it comes to planning cities and bringing people together, circles tend to be better than lines. This doesn't necessarily mean that you need to adopt some sort of radial street network, à la French model. (Although I'm now thinking about the effects of this vs. an orthogonal grid.) It just means that urban density works a lot better when it's clustered, especially around transit. And generally, circles make for better clusters.

David Sax is not wrong in this recent opinion piece in the Globe and Mail:

Adults suck at winter. We see it as a long, dark, cold, uncomfortable season that we have to endure and survive. The older you get, the harder winter is. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

There are some cities that do better at winter. For whatever reason, Montreal has always felt to me like a city that embraces it more than say Toronto. Maybe it's because it's generally colder and snowier. Maybe it's because they have mountains nearby. Or maybe I'm wrong. It has just always seemed that way to me.

The trick, as David points out, is to find something you love that you can only do in the winter. For me, and many others, that thing is skiing and snowboarding. Here is a photo from yesterday afternoon taken from within the trees at Brighton Resort in Utah:

One of the things I love about Salt Lake City / Park City is how much ski and snowboard culture permeates everything. Drive around and you'll see people waiting at bus stops with all of their gear on and their skis in hand. The locals also tell me that if there's an epic storm, you can expect a lot of people to show up in the office around lunchtime.

This is one way to love winter. Admittedly, it's harder in a city without mountains and snow accumulation, and only cold winter weather. (Cities like Toronto.) So what are your options then? If you have any ideas or things you love to do, please share them in the comment section below. Us adults should suck less at winter.

One school of thought is that if you're not in the real estate business, and you're in some other business like fashion, then you probably shouldn't own a lot of your real estate. The general idea is that the opportunity cost of doing so is too great; it ties up a lot of capital, taking it away from the core business.

But then there's LVMH.

In 2023, the company spent €2.45 billion on real estate across the world, mostly for its retail stores. And then this week it was announced that, earlier this year, the company closed on the Villa Bagatelle in Cannes for €46.5 million. Supposedly this is one of the most expensive homes ever sold in the city.

LVMH plans to use the 12-suite villa for brand activations during events like the Cannes Film Festival, and then rent it out when they don't need it.

So clearly they are of a different school of thought. They are blending experiential marketing and real estate investing, which is an interesting approach. It also makes me wonder if this has something to do with the fact that Bernard Arnault started his career in real estate.

For more information on the Villa Bagatelle or to inquire about renting it for your next family vacation, go here.

Our team has been spending a lot of time underwriting sites that would fit within the City of Toronto's new Major Streets Study. The last time I checked these policies were still under appeal, but the expectation is that they will eventually come into force and start encouraging small-scale apartments up to 6-storeys on all "Major Streets" across the city. This is meaningful progress for our city, and we're excited to be working on projects in this space.

At face value, 6 storeys on all major streets sounds like every great European city you've ever been to. But after studying countless sites, what I will say is that these policies are not designed to recreate Paris or Barcelona or Berlin. Instead, they are intended to be deferential to single-family houses. You see this in the required setbacks and in the maximum building depth, among other things. We all know why this is the case, and it was probably needed as a first step, but I think it's important to point out this subtlety.

Because there are at least two effects to this: one, the end future state will not be a uniform urban street wall, like what you'd find in Europe. That is not the goal of the current policies. And two, it unnecessarily makes the smallest sites more challenging to develop. That's a real shame, because more granularity is often a positive thing for cities. So we still have work to do. But I'm optimistic we'll get there, eventually. City planning typically works in increments.

Before 2022, being a land developer was a perfectly reasonable business to be in. In fact, it was a lucrative business to be in. What this business entailed was buying development land, getting it rezoned for some higher-and-better use (which here in Toronto usually takes a few years), and then selling it to another developer who would then build the thing that you got approved (or something close to it).

This kind of business practice is sometimes looked down upon by the general public, presumably because it feels like a speculative endeavor that doesn't actually result in anything physical. But another way to look at it is that it's just dividing up the same required work across multiple firms. Projects can take a long time and sometimes investors want their money back.

It is also good practice to look at this option even if you aren't a land developer, per se. One way you do this is by plugging in the market value of your land in your pro forma (not book cost). This way you can tell if your development margin is coming from your land uplift or from the build out. If most of your margin is coming from the former, then it may not be worth taking on the risk of construction.

In any event, the problem with this business is that it no longer works. (At least not in Toronto.) Land prices are moving in the opposite direction. Without a clear understanding of potential revenues (such as condo sales), it's very difficult to value development land. And if you can't accurately value land, then it's pretty challenging to run a business predicated on selling it.

What this means is that the development margin, if any, has shifted away from land toward the full build out (or whatever else your strategy may be). It's not enough to just entitle land. There's lots of entitled land out there right now. That is not the constraint. The constraint is figuring out how to actually make sites feasible. And to do that, you have to roll up your sleeves and really work each project and each asset.

Those who know how to do that will be the ones who come out ahead in the next cycle.

This is a beautiful house:

Designed by Johnsen Schmaling Architects and located in Milwaukee's Lower East Side neighborhood, the home sits on a long 24-foot wide parcel that backs onto the Milwaukee River.

When I first saw where it was located I immediately assumed that it was a coveted location. I mean, the backyard terraces down and has direct access to the water. But one of the things that's interesting about this lot is that it had been sitting vacant for over two decades!

According to the architect, the city had condemned and demolished the previous house, and so the current owners purchased the vacant lot directly from the Milwaukee Department of City Development. Every market is different.

I don't know Milwaukee, like at all. But I did spend a good 15 minutes street viewing the area. And I have come to the informed conclusion that this is the kind of first home you build for yourself when you're a resolute urbanist.

This is where you live when you don't want to have to drive everywhere and when you want to be able to walk down to Brady Street for dinner. I respect this. So as much as I enjoy the architecture (I love a good courtyard), I think the context surrounding this build is equally interesting.

Here is a forgotten urban lot, directly on the water, that was vacant and overlooked for over twenty years. Obviously, nobody saw any value in it. Then one day, some people came along and said "let's create something incredible." And that's exactly what they did.

This is one of the things that makes cities so wonderful. They are always evolving. And there are always opportunities that others are overlooking.

Photos via Johnsen Schmaling Architects

A friend recently asked me, "so, are you bullish on Miami yet, or are you still worried about the water?" And my response was that I love Miami, but that I do think about the risk of climate change.

Then today, another friend sent me this study by scientists at the University of Miami showing that 35 buildings along the Miami Beach to Sunny Isles Beach coastline experienced some degree of subsidence between 2016 to 2023. In other words, they sunk into the ground a little.

Here's how they measured this:

The study published December 13, 2024, in the open-access journal Earth and Space Science, of the American Geophysical Union, employed a satellite-based technique known as Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR). By combining 222 SAR images from the European Sentinel-1 satellites, the research team created a surface displacement time series. The technique utilizes "persistent radar scatterers" as reference points for measurement. These scatterers include fixed elements on a structure such as building balconies, rooftop air conditioning units, and boardwalks, which reflect the radar signal back to the satellite antenna. Satellites flying at 700 kilometers above Earth can measure millimeter-scale displacements.

Now, some degree of subsidence is normal. But apparently, not this much:

“The discovery of the extent of subsidence hotspots along the South Florida coastline was unexpected,” said Farzaneh Aziz Zanjani, the study’s lead author, a former post-doctoral researcher and alumna of the Rosenstiel School. “The study underscores the need for ongoing monitoring and a deeper understanding of the long-term implications for these structures.”

So yeah, I'm still worried about the water. It's something I would need to get a lot smarter on in order to feel comfortable.