Month: November 2016

• Local rail-driven agglomeration economies

  This morning I came across the below graph in a Medium article by Eric Jaffe of Sidewalk Labs. It is taken from a research paper by Elisabeth Ruth Perlman called, Dense Enough To Be Brilliant: Patents, Urbanization, and Transportation in Nineteenth Century America.

  

  What this chart shows is patents issued – a proxy for innovation – in all U.S. counties between 1790 and 1900. This data is then compared against access to transport, such as rail. The discovery is a statistically significant relationship between innovation (patents issued) and rail (transport) access.

  The spike in the 1850s (shown above) is as a result of increased rail access.

  But Perlman takes it a step further and asks: what is causing this spike in innovation? Is it because inventors and creators started responding to the larger market now accessible to them because of rail connectivity? Or did transportation somehow improve productivity and the flow of information?

  To answer this question, she dug into the patents themselves (over 700,000 of them) to try and identify how ideas and key words were spreading. What she found is that rail access alone doesn’t encourage innovation. References to new technologies did not increase.

  What mattered was what happened locally. Transportation improvements promoted urbanization and density during her study period, and that’s what drove innovation. Connectivity created agglomeration economies at the local level.

  Obviously a lot has changed since the 19th century. But whether it’s rail connectivity or internet connectivity, have the rules really changed? Place still matters. What happens locally still matters. Perhaps even more. 

  This is an important lesson to consider as we build our cities and invest in transportation. Rail alone isn’t enough. What matters more is what we build around it. Are we dense enough to be brilliant?

  2016.11.30

• Thoughts on public meetings

  A few weeks ago I received a community meeting notice in the mail for a new development happening in my neighborhood. I am excited about the project and so I immediately put it in my calendar and told myself: “I’m going to this.”

  But then a work commitment came up and I skipped the event. I always do this. I put these public meetings in my calendar with every intention of going, but then as soon as something else comes up, it gets bumped. So in the end, my voice will not be heard.

  I say this not because I think my singular voice is all that important, but because I suspect I’m not alone when it comes to these community meetings. I live and breathe city building and if I struggle to attend these things, what does that mean for the average resident?

  As soon as you create friction – such as having to go somewhere, physically – you’re going to lose a large segment of people. This also means that only those who are highly motivated will attend.

  I saw this phenomenon play out in my condo building. At our first annual general meeting – when the building still had a bunch of deficiencies and the elevators were spotty – we had a sold out and lively crowd. 

  But as soon as things started humming along in year two (we are now a well-oiled machine), we then struggled to reach quorum. Why show up unless you’ve got a bone to pick, right?

  What was the last public meeting that you attended in your city?

  2016.11.30

• Flood-prone areas see dip in real estate sales

  

  The New York Times has an interesting article up talking about the possible impacts of climate change on coastal real estate in the United States. In it they make the argument that sales velocity is declining in flood-prone areas. Here are two snippets:

  Over the past five years, home sales in flood-prone areas grew about 25 percent less quickly than in counties that do not typically flood, according to county-by-county data from Attom Data Solutions, the parent company of RealtyTrac. Many coastal residents are rethinking their investments and heading for safer ground.
  

  In the past year, home sales have increased 2.6 percent nationally, but have dropped about 7.6 percent in high-risk flood zones in Miami-Dade County, according to housing data. Many coastal cities are taking steps toward mitigation, digging runoff tunnels, elevating roads and building detention ponds.

  I would like to see more data supporting this argument, but I can’t say I’m surprised. Flood risk is certainly something I would think about – particularly in high-risk areas such as South Florida. Florida has 6 of the 10 most vulnerable urban centers in the US.

  The other piece that caught my attention is this:

  Flood risks are easily overlooked because past flood damage often goes unreported and, as in Virginia, the burden of discovering it falls to the buyer. LexisNexis, a news and legal research company, can supply sellers a report with the history of flood claims on the property, but buyers usually do not know to ask for it. FEMA collects information on federal insurance claims for homes nationally, but the agency has been reluctant to make it public for privacy reasons.

  It is yet another example of how opaque the real estate industry is. A lot of the information – assuming it’s even available – is fragmented across a number of different sources. If you’re playing hot potato, this obviously works to your benefit. But I don’t believe it’s the best thing for the overall market.

  2016.11.28

• High resolution population maps

  

  Facebook, as part of their internet.org initiative, is working on bringing internet access to people in rural areas all across the world. For obvious socioeconomic reasons, this is an important initiative. From a business standpoint, it also grows the base of potential Facebook users at a time where that top line number is starting to plateau.

  In order to understand how people are settling and aggregating throughout the world, Facebook has been using high-resolution population maps and then creating models to drill down and analyze individual buildings. 

  This is interesting because: how else could you track informal settlements? So far this seems to be the most effective method. In fact, in architecture school I worked on a project in Dhaka, Bangladesh and I remember relying heavily on aerial photography because I simply couldn’t find the data I was looking for.

  Here’s an excerpt from a recent World Bank post. They, along with Columbia University, are collaborating with Facebook.

  Facebook’s computer vision approach is a very fast method to produce spatially-explicit country-wide population estimates. Using their method, Facebook successfully generated at-scale, high-resolution insights on the distribution of buildings, unmatched by any other remote sensing effort to date. These maps demonstrate the value of artificial intelligence for filling data gaps and creating new datasets, and they could provide a promising complement to household surveys and censuses.

  And here’s an excerpt from a recent Facebook post on the same topic:

  From this preliminary analysis, we’ve determined that slightly less than 50% of the population lives in cities. However, 99% of the population lives within 63 km of the nearest city. Hence, if we are able to develop communication technologies that can bridge 63 km with sufficiently high data rates, we should be able to connect 99% of the population in these 23 countries. [”These 23 countries” represents about 1/3 of the world’s population.]

  I would imagine that this type of model works better in sparsely populated / low-rise areas. Still, I am very interested in thinking about ways in which our current survey and census methods could be improved. Here in Canada we conduct our national census every 5 years. In today’s world that feels like eons. One day, I am sure, it will be real-time.

  Image: World Bank

  2016.11.27

• Show some laneway love

  

  I just want to do a quick follow-up to my recent post about the momentum currently developing around laneway housing here in Toronto. 

  In the post, I mentioned that two councillors have come out in support of this housing typology. However, I neglected to mention that Evergreen CityWorks is also at the table, as well as a housing advocacy group called Lanescape. It was mentioned in the comments, but I know that not everyone checks that part of the blog.

  I say this for two reasons:

  1) I thought about starting a similar initiative to Lanescape. (I’ve had lanewaylove.com registered for many years. Brand identity shown above.) But after meeting one of the Lanescape founders this past week, I think it only makes sense for me to instead throw my support behind them. They are accomplishing a lot in this space.

  2) Lanescape has a survey up on their website and the results will be used to guide a laneway suite planning framework that will (hopefully) be implemented by the City of Toronto. So I wanted to encourage you all to complete it. Even if you don’t live in Toronto, still fill it out. It’s important for cities to learn from each other.

  Your support will go a long way in making laneway housing a reality in the city.

  2016.11.26

• Yellow trees

  I took this picture on a recent trip to New York:

  

  I liked the mid-block building and so I wanted to document it. That’s what I do when I walk around a city.

  When I went back to research the project later on, I then discovered that it was developed by DDG Partners, which I have been following for years. I think they do terrific work and I love their vertically-integrated approach to real estate development. Two years ago I mentioned them in a post called: 3 architects operating as developers.

  If you’d like to learn more about the project, you can do that here. It’s called 345MEATPACKING. 

  What I want to talk about today is how they wrapped the building during construction. Working with the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama – who at the time had an exhibition going on at the Whitney – they created a 120-foot reproduction of her painting Yellow Trees.

  Here’s a video of what that looked like (c. 2012). If you can’t see the video below, click here.

  [vimeo 79792779 w=640 h=360]

  What a great idea. But don’t tell anyone. I want to steal the idea for one of my projects.

  2016.11.26

• Toronto mayor proposes road tolls, finally

  When I wrote yesterday’s post about road tolls, it hadn’t been announced that Toronto Mayor John Tory was going to call for road tolls on both of the highways coming into downtown. That didn’t leak until late in the evening. So I was just writing another post on a topic that I care about.

  Today, however, that announcement was made and the proposal is a flat $2 toll on both the Gardiner Expressway and the Don Valley Parkway. It is expected that this could bring in close to $200 million a year in new revenue for the city – all of which would be dedicated towards transit and roads. Good.

  First, I want to applaud the mayor for coming out in support of road pricing. I didn’t agree with him on the Gardiner East, but I agree with him on this – mostly. It is a bold move.

  The reason I say mostly is because I hope that we don’t simply default to a fixed and blunt road toll. There are more sophisticated options out there, such as variable pricing models that change based on demand/congestion levels.

  Here’s a post that explains how that works and why I think it’s a good model.

  With this approach, it becomes more of a congestion charge rather than a toll. It also gives commuters the option of driving during off-peak times to save money. And if we implemented something like this, I am sure that we would see employers and office hours adapt. More on this in the above post.

  Still, I absolutely believe that it’s a step in the right direction for this great city. So thank you Mayor Tory.

  2016.11.24

• Revisiting road pricing

  Following the Toronto Transit Commission’s approval of a 10-cent fare hike, Cherise Burda of the Ryerson City Building Institute penned an article titled: It’s time for Toronto to consider road tolls.

  I am a big supporter of road pricing and I have written a lot on this topic over the years. There’s even a guest post by Darren Davis on this blog – he is a transport planner with Auckland Transport. 

  I don’t have much to add right now, but I did want to help promote Cherise’s post and I did want to link back to all of my previous posts (including Darren’s). Click here for a list of posts tagged with “road pricing.”

  There’s a mental model in Toronto, and many other cities, that remains centered around subsidized roads and artificially low residential property taxes. Because, well, that’s the dream.

  Nobody wants to pay more for anything – I get it. But I think we can all agree that this region has not solved the traffic/mobility problem. In fact, it’s one of our biggest weaknesses. 

  So what are we going to do about it? I reckon the answer is something other than the status quo.

  2016.11.23

• Carriage house disruption

  The Spaces has a post up called: 7 carriage houses on the market in New York City. They’re all quite expensive. The house on East 63rd designed by Paul Rudolph is particularly interesting. But that’s not what I want to talk about.

  As I was going through the photos – that’s what The Spaces does best – I thought of two things.

  First, there’s a segment of the market that is obsessed with living in spaces that were not originally intended to be used as residences. That’s what (hard) lofts are. That’s what carriage houses are. And that’s partially why I would love to live in a laneway house (Toronto vernacular).

  Backhouses, as they are also called, were initially designed to hold horse and carriage. But as horses disappeared from New York City, the structures got repurposed.

  Here’s one theory for how that went about:

  Barry Lewis, an architectural historian, theorizes that rear buildings became residences to accommodate the 19th-century immigrant population that moved into middle-class areas in Lower Manhattan in the 1830’s and into the Village and Brooklyn after the Civil War. “Backhouses seem to belong to the era of houses in Manhattan, not the era of apartments,” Mr. Lewis said. “The property owner probably shoved more immigrant families into the stable or workshed in the back. Other owners may have built a new backhouse just to get the lucrative immigrant rents.

  The second thing I thought about is the potential parallel between this story and the one being written right now. It feels like a transportation revolution is upon us and changes in mobility always seem to rewrite the landscape of the city.

  Hopefully that will mean more laneway houses in Toronto.

  2016.11.23

• European cities by rail connectivity

  This is a terrific set of maps published by The Washington Post (2015) using data originally collected and published by Peter Kerpedjiev:

  

  What they show is how far you can travel in a 24 hour period using only trains and brisk walking from a collection of 28 European cities. In a few cases, such as from London to Dublin, a ferry ride is also included.

  Here’s a zoom in on London:

  

  The obvious takeaway is that Western Europe is very well connected, whereas many parts of Eastern Europe are not. Some cities, such as Tallinn (Estonia) and Podgorica (Montenegro) are almost completely disconnected.

  Of course today there’s stiff competition from air travel.

  2016.11.21