Month: August 2018

• How Singapore fixed its housing problem

  There are a number of affordable housing plans being thrown around in Toronto right now given that we have a municipal election coming up this fall. 

  From what I have read, the plans are largely centered around surplus and/or available public land and possibly some subsidies. 

  These subsidies are very important because the money has to come from somewhere. This is often overlooked.

  In light of these debates, I thought I would share a short Bloomberg video that my friend Evgeny shared with me this morning all the way from Tokyo.

  The video is about how Singapore fixed its housing problem. If you can’t see it embedded below, click here.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cjPgNBNeLU?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

  It strikes me as being very Singaporean.

  2018.08.31

• Public access at Martin’s Beach

  I just learned about the ongoing legal dispute on Martin’s Beach (south of San Francisco) through this New York Times article. 

  To briefly sum it up, tech billionaire Vinod Khosla bought a 53-acre beachside village known as Martin’s Beach in 2008. On the land is about 47 beach houses, a shop that sold ice cream at one point in its life, and a road that provides the only access to the beach. The road is private, but over the years and before Khosla purchased the property, it provided both parking for and access to the beach. 

  After acquiring the property, the county told Khosla that he had 2 options with respect to the road:

  (1) Keep it open (there’s a gate that controls access). And charge no more than $2 a car for parking, which was the rate charged in 1972.

  (2) Apply for a Coastal Development Permit to change how the access works.

  Khosla opted to do neither and in turn the residents of Martin’s Beach sued him. He’s been in a legal battle ever since. But according to the New York Times, he has about $3 billion sitting in his war chest. For him it is both a matter of principle and a matter of protecting property rights.

  Not surprisingly, tech billionaire fighting to keep people off a public beach makes for a sensational headline in the media. The NY Times argued that every generation has some sort of rich Californian fighting to privatize the waterfront. Khosla is this generation’s “beach villain”.

  But beneath the headlines lies a fascinating legal debate that you can read more about through a blog post that Khosla published earlier this year. For you property lawyers out there, I would be curious to hear your thoughts in the comment section below.

  2018.08.31

• Downward pressure on parking supply

  

  There’s a significant amount of downward pressure on parking supply in most major cities. Part of this has to do with the push toward more sustainable forms of transport, which is, of course, a good thing. But it also has to do with rising construction costs, the fear of obsolescence in the wake of autonomous vehicles, and probably many other factors.

  Developers, ourselves included, have responded by being cautious about the amount of parking being provided and by considering alternative future uses for the parking that is being built. I think it is also obvious that we will continue to see more, rather than less, parking stackers and other more efficient parking solutions.

  So far the cost of parking in dense urban centers has continued to rise. A new parking spot in the core of Toronto priced at $100,000 would not surprise me. And Hong Kong recently set a record for what is allegedly the most expensive parking spot in the world: USD 765,000 or CAD 1 million.

  But what is going to happen going forward?

  Researchers at the Singapore – MIT Alliance for Research and Technology and MIT Senseable City Lab, along with Allianz, have recently tried to quantify what the impact of autonomous vehicles will mean on required parking, and on traffic, in Singapore. The study is called Unparking.

  Today, they estimate the total number of parking spots in Singapore to be around 1,370,000. This is based on minimum parking requirements from the Housing Development Board and on the idea that home-work commuting consumes two parking spots: one at home and one at the office.

  They model four different scenarios, but the last one is based on fully autonomous vehicles and on shared parking spaces. Holding current mobility demands and traffic volumes constant, the demand for parking in this scenario drops by 70%.

  It is possible to reduce the number of parking spaces even further to 85%, but this has a negative impact on traffic congestion in their model. Fewer parking spaces means the autonomous vehicles have to drive around more picking people up. 

  I also don’t know if there was any consideration given to induced demand as a result of the more affordable autonomous vehicles. Demand for transportation services is generally thought to be fairly elastic.

  Whatever the case may be, numbers are made to be questioned. And Singapore is a unique city-state. But ¼ the amount of parking does not seem that far fetched to me.

  Photo by Tobias Jussen on Unsplash

  2018.08.30

• The real reason people oppose new development

  

  A good friend of mine just sent me this fascinating research paper called: Opposition to Development or Opposition to Developers? Survey Evidence from Los Angeles County on Attitudes towards New Housing. It is a study out of UCLA that was published earlier this year by Paavo Monkkonen and Michael Manville.

  For the paper, they conducted a survey-framing experiment with over 1,300 people in Los Angeles County to test how strongly they felt about a number of common anti-housing sentiments; arguments such as traffic congestion, neighborhood character, and strain on local services. 

  However, they also introduced another argument: large developer profits. And interestingly enough, they discovered that respondents were 20 percentage points more likely to oppose a new hypothetical housing development when the survey was framed around the developer making a lot of money.

  Here is a table from the paper showing the various frames, as well as the percentage of people who supported, had no opinion, and who opposed. Note that under the “developer” frame, the opposition number is 48%.

  

  So their “takeaway for practice” is as follows: “Housing opposition is often framed as a form of risk aversion. Our findings, however, suggest that at least some opposition to housing might be motivated not by residents’ fears of their own losses, but resentment of others’ gains.”

  Photo by Cameron Stow on Unsplash
  

  2018.08.29

• Five year anniversary

  Today is the five year anniversary of this daily blog. That’s over 1800 posts. 

  It’s almost hard to believe that it has been that long. It seems like just yesterday I was on year 2 or 3. But at the same time, it’s almost hard for me to remember a time when I didn’t blog every day. I guess we’re calling it a habit at this point.

  One of the most common questions I get regarding this blog is: “Do you pre-write posts?” The answer is never. Okay, almost never. Sometimes I’ll pre-write a post if I know I’m going to be on a plane for 12 hours and I won’t make the timezone cutoff. But generally as a rule I don’t.

  Part of the reason I don’t is because it breaks the habit. This is something I do every day. And I like that routine. I also want the posts to be timely and I want to be able to write about things that may be on my mind that day.

  Momentum is a powerful thing. And when you’ve been doing something for a number of years, and especially something as public as this daily blog, there’s a powerful incentive to keep doing it. That’s how streaks work.

  However, in the world of development, five years is perhaps not that long. It’s maybe one project. Streaks take a lot longer to establish.

  This summer One Delisle by Studio Gang went public and you’re now starting to see (bright neon) teasers for Junction House. Both of these projects are many years in the making. The Junction House story started in early 2016.

  So I reckon that this blog needs at least another five years so that there’s enough time for the really juicy stories to surface. I’ll endeavor to do exactly that. 

  Thanks for reading and making this community what it is. See you tomorrow.

  2018.08.28

• Supreme Court dismisses TREB appeal

  Last Thursday the Supreme Court of Canada announced it would not hear an appeal from the Toronto Real Estate Board regarding a 2016 Competition Bureau decision aimed at giving consumers greater online access to information, such as historical (home) sale prices.

  I am not at all surprised by the Supreme Court’s decision and I have said pretty much all I want to say on this topic – over here. But since I believe this is a positive outcome for real estate consumers, I wanted to mention it on the blog because it appears to be a final decision.

  Some sites, such as Zoocasa, have already started publishing sold prices. Good.

  2018.08.26

• The Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889

  

  One of our partners sent me a terrific article last week by Sam Anderson on the founding of Oklahoma City. 

  I have said this before on the blog, but I am deeply fascinated by the origins of cities because, oftentimes, the story isn’t all that lucid. Why right here? As Anderson points out in his article, usually cities “creep into existence.” 

  But not Oklahoma City:

  Oklahoma City was born in an event called, with extreme dramatic understatement, the Land Run. The Land Run should be called something like “Chaos Explosion Apocalypse Town” or “Reckoning of the DoomSettlers: Clusterfuck on the Prairie.” It should be one of the major events in American history. Dramatizations of it should be projected onto IMAX screens with 3-D explosions, in endless loops, forever. Every time you walk into a mall, you should be accosted by fuzzy-headed Land Run characters shouting, “What is America?!” “What does America even mean?!” Because the Land Run was, even by the standards of this very weird nation, absurd. It was a very bad idea, executed very badly. It would be hard to think of a worse way to start a city. Harper’s Weekly, which had a reporter on the ground, called it “one of the most bizarre and chaotic episodes of town founding in world history.” A century later, the scholar John William Reps reviewed the evidence and concurred. The founding of Oklahoma City, he wrote, was “the most disorderly episode of urban settlement this country, and perhaps the world, has ever witnessed.”

  To learn how Oklahoma City went from a population of 0 to 10,000 in about half a day, check out the full article.

  Photo by Gerson Repreza on Unsplash

  2018.08.25

• Street-level intelligence and analytics

  

  I discovered a company yesterday called CARMERA, which just raised a $20 million Series B funding round. They call themselves a “real-time, street-level intelligence platform” and their flagship product, called Autonomous Map, provides HD maps and real-time navigation data to autonomous vehicles. That’s the way AVs work. They need maps like CARMERA’s to function. Here is an overview of what is supposedly the largest AV taxi service in the world. It is a partnership between CARMERA and Voyage.

  One of the interesting things about this product is that it is cleverly powered through another one of their products: a free fleet monitoring tool for commercial operators. So fleet managers use this service to keep track of their actual human drivers and, at the same time, CARMERA uses the vehicles to collect the data it needs for its Autonomous Map. They call it “pro-sourcing” the data (a play on crowdsourcing).

  It is perhaps a good example of “single user utility.” The product you’re making often has to be valuable to a single user before scale is reached. In this case, Autonomous Map would be a hard sell without a critical mass of pro-sourced data. It solves the perennial chicken-and-egg problem when creating new marketplaces.

  Finally, I think many of you will be interested to know that CARMERA has also announced a partnership with the New York City Department of Transportation. As part of this, the company will be handing over the data they have on pedestrian density analytics and real-time construction detection events. Part of their mission is to “automate cities” and better street analytics will certainly help to open up a new world of city building possibilities.

  Photo by Yeshi Kangrang on Unsplash

  2018.08.25

• Photogenic neon in the Junction

  We just finished putting up some additional signage at the future sales office for Junction House. Clean and minimal, but fun. I am pretty pumped with the way everything turned out. Creative and photos by Vanderbrand. Instagram story mashup and failed neon photo by me.

  

  This week I learned that properly photographing neon takes a bit of work. The neon “Junction House” sign is actually all white when you see it in person. Apparently it has something to do with the frequency. 

  I’m going to go back one evening with my tripod and Fuji and see if I can do better.

  2018.08.23

• Detroit. Move here. Move the world.

  As part of the Amazon HQ2 bid process, a number of cities produced videos. I only discovered them today and so maybe some of you also missed them when they were released last fall. There are videos from Detroit, Boston, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Dallas-Fort Worth, Las Vegas, Louisville, Atlanta, and maybe others that I am still missing. 

  Some of the videos are bad. (I’ll let you make your own judgement calls.) I like the idea behind Atlanta’s video, which is the journey of someone named Georgia physically delivering their bid to Seattle. And Philadelphia’s video made me feel really nostalgic about my time there. Those were some great years. 

  But my favorite video is Detroit’s video. It feels authentic. The footage is outstanding. And it feels powerful. Though it is probably too long. It was a good reminder that I’m overdue for a visit. So here is Detroit’s video. If you can’t see it below, click over to YouTube.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO4J_PC1b5M&w=560&h=315]

  2018.08.23