I dislike the term residential unit. It makes a home sound like some sort of widget. When have you ever heard someone say, “unit sweet unit”? Never. And yet this is generally what we use to refer to housing that comes in an apartment form… Read More
Monthly archives of “January 2023”
What rich people plan to do with their money in 2023
Each year in March, Knight Frank publishes something called, The Wealth Report, which typically includes things like its Prime International Residential Index (PIRI) and a general overview of what ultra high-net-worth individuals (UHNWIs) are up to with their money. (An UHNWI is typically defined as… Read More
Our current public transit problem/opportunity
Over the past few years, I have been writing about the fall off in public transit ridership that we have seen as a result of the pandemic. Most recently, I mentioned it in my predictions for 2023. This topic doesn’t seem to get a lot… Read More
2 storeys not 12
I came across this poster — related to this development application — over the weekend: And I think it raises a number of important questions: For more context, here’s the proposal and its immediate surroundings: I fully appreciate that there’s little incentive to support new… Read More
Single-exit housing in Paris
Lloyd Alter of Treehugger recently wrote about this infill housing project in Paris. Designed by Mobile Architectural Office (MAO), it is a 6-storey building with 6 residential suites (two of which are 3-storey triplex suites) and 1 ground floor non-residential space. Building section: But here’s… Read More
An interactive map of industrial space in southern California
Here is an interactive map, created by the Robert Redford Conservancy for Southern California Sustainability, showing the approximately 1,573,777,062 square feet of industrial space that can be found in Los Angeles, Riverside, and San Bernardino. The map allows you to zoom in on specific parcels… Read More
No more foreign buyers
Here’s the thing about housing: The delegates insisted on one hand that “housing is for living not speculation”, but on the other, emphasised the critical importance of real estate to China’s economic growth. In other words, things are complicated. We want housing to be affordable… Read More
Japan pays people to leave Tokyo
We have spoken over the years — here, here, and here — about the centralizing and decentralizing forces that play out within our cities. Agglomeration economies, for example, are a centralizing force. There are real economic benefits to people and firms clustering together in cities.… Read More
Road salt vs. gravel
It has been mild and wet in Toronto over the last week, but normally at this time of the year, the entire city looks like as if it was just hit by some sort of apocalyptic chalk storm. Everything is white. And that’s because we… Read More
Where the rich don’t drive — is density the new luxury?
This data is from 2019, but I imagine that things would look pretty similar today and that it might even be a little more pronounced. The dataset from the above article looked at how many people have cars in a given area (a darker dot… Read More