Month: August 2023

• Income migration across the US between 2020-2021

  Between 2020 and 2021, so right when the pandemic hit, Manhattan alone lost $16 billion of federally-taxable income, according to this recent study by Economic Innovation Group. And San Francisco saw net migration that reduced its federal income tax base by more than $8 billion. At the time, this represented about a 20% decline.

  Now, I don’t know to what extent this maybe changed, slowed, or reversed from 2021 to today, but the IRS tax data is pretty clear: the pandemic accelerated a longstanding trend of Americans moving out of older coastal cities toward newer, sunnier, and more sprawling cities in the sun belt and in the Mountain West region.

  Here is a map from EIG showing the difference in incomes between households moving in and moving out of each US county. A dark blue county means that the people who moved in were richer than the people who left. (For an interactive version, click through to their website.)

  

  To give two examples. Here is San Francisco County, which lost nearly 20,000 people with average incomes of around $240,000 per year.

  

  And here is Summit County, Utah (home of Parkview Mountain House in the Mountain West region), which saw 81 new tax returns and an average newcomer income of $395,000 per year.

  

  This is an important reminder that people — especially people of means — vote with their feet. If they stop liking a place, they will leave, along with their incomes, to somewhere else. Indeed, in the case of this IRS data, the income flows to these growth regions seem to have been largely driven by upper-income households.

  2023.08.12

• Los Angeles and the automobile

  Oftentimes when I think about Los Angeles, I think about the fact that you generally have to drive everywhere. And since I have a personal preference for dense and walkable cities, this thought helps me feel slightly less envious about their perfect weather.

  Los Angeles is probably the original car city. Here is an excerpt from this excellent post by Brian Potter, where he summarizes a 1987 book by Scott Bottles called, “Los Angeles and the Automobile”:

  Los Angeles was especially quick to adopt the car. By 1920 Los Angeles had the highest per-capita rate of car ownership in the US, four times more automobiles per capita than the US average, and eight times more than the much-denser Chicago. In 1920, 9 times as many people entered downtown LA via streetcar as via automobile. By 1924, that had nearly equaled.

  And interestingly enough, people started using them, almost immediately, to create Uber-like services:

  A popular early use of the car for public transit was the jitney. Car owners would pick up passengers (often waiting at streetcar stops) and drive them to their destination for the same price as a streetcar ride (5 cents). Car owners would often simply put their destination in their windshields, and pick up anyone along the way who was headed in the same direction. Because jitney travel was much faster than streetcars, and wasn’t limited to the fixed streetcar routes, jitneys often had better service than streetcars.

  Jitney travel first appeared in Los Angeles in 1914, and by November of that year was being used for thousands of trips per day. The jitney quickly spread to other cities. By early 1915, an estimated 62,000 jitneys operated around the country in cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, and Birmingham. As jitney travel became more popular, electric rail companies found that they were losing significant ridership

  What this again underscores is just how disruptive the car was — right from the outset. It was quickly seen as being more convenient, especially in a city like Los Angeles, which wasn’t as dense as its counterparts on the east coast.

  Sadly, and as Potter suggests in his post, it is not clear that the headwinds facing public transit have changed all that much since the first jitneys started appearing on the streets of Los Angeles a century ago.

  2023.08.11

• Gardens that filter highway runoff

  

  Toronto’s elevated Gardiner Expressway is a topic that pops up periodically on this blog. We have talked about taking down a portion, realigning a portion, adding a congestion charge, lighting it like they have done in Shanghai, and of course we have talked about the good work that The Bentway team is doing.

  Their most recent project is something called Standing Grounds. It’s a collaboration with New York-based Tei Carpenter (Agency–Agency, NYC) and Toronto-based architect Reza Nik (SHEEEP, Toronto), and I think it’s really clever.

  If you look closely at the underside of the Gardiner Expressway, you’ll see that there are existing downspouts in place that take rainwater, snowmelt, and whatever else from the highway above, down to the ground. What Standing Grounds is going to do (by next month) is take this existing infrastructure and add natural filtration chambers that can remediate this excess water.

  I learned today that plants like milkweed, agastache, and yarrow are actually able to absorb road salts and heavy metals like lead, cadmium, and hydrocarbons. So instead of this dirty water flowing from the highway and into the ground, it will soon be filtered by a seemingly simple garden system that looks like this:

  

  This is an obviously positive thing for the city and I love that it is leveraging infrastructure that already exists. As I said: really clever.

  Renderings: SHEEEP

  2023.08.10

• Urban families

  We are getting ready for first occupancies at Junction House and it is exciting to see how many young families — with children — are looking forward to moving into the building’s larger 2-storey suites. (These are the suites that gave the project its name — Junction House.)

  From the outset, this was always a part of our development thesis. You can’t, or at least it’s very difficult, to pre-sell an entire building of larger suites in Toronto. But we figured that in a submarket like the Junction, which is very popular with young families, that there had to be some buyers who would want a house-like residence.

  Meaning, two floors of living spaces, upstairs bedrooms (better acoustic separation), larger living spaces, and a terrace for BBQing and gardening, among other things.

  We are now seeing this play out with the wonderful people coming in for their pre-delivery inspections, and it’s a really nice thing to see. Not only as a developer, but as a dedicated urbanite and lover of Toronto. I am not suggesting that it’s for everyone. But clearly there is a segment of the market that wants this.

  For a list of available homes at Junction House, including floor plans and pricing, click here.

  2023.08.09

• [Video] IQON by BIG

  This is an incredibly well done video by Pablo Casals Aguirre of BIG’s recently completed IQON tower in Quito, Ecuador. What’s great is that it both showcases the building’s architecture and gives you a sense of what it might be like to live in a tower like this. And it does this beautifully.

  If you can’t see the embedded video above, click here.

  2023.08.08

• The Tour Montparnasse just turned 50 and people still hate it

  

  We have spoken about Paris’ Tour Montparnasse before on the blog, and spoken more broadly about the city’s discomfort with tall buildings. The Tour Montparnasse is the only skyscraper within the city limits of Paris. If you include the Eiffel Tower, it is one of only two really tall things, though this will soon increase to three with the addition of Herzog and de Meuron’s new trapezoidal-shaped tower (now under construction).

  The Tour Montparnasse turned 50 this year and so people are now writing about it again. In my opinion, this recent piece in the New Yorker, by Colin Marshall, is particularly thoughtful. Here are two important points that he makes. The first has to do with the fact that kind of old usually isn’t enough when it comes to architecture. You need buildings to be really old before they get fully appreciated:

  Architectural fashion treasures hundred-and-fifty-year-old structures but derides fifty-year-old ones; hence the works of brutalism that have faced the wrecking ball in recent years. “The destruction of brutalist buildings is more than the destruction of a particular mode of architecture,” Jonathan Meades says, in his television documentary “Bunkers, Brutalism and Bloodymindedness: Concrete Poetry.” “It is like burning books. It’s a form of censorship of the past, a discomfiting past, by the present. It’s the revenge of a mediocre age on an age of epic grandeur.”

  The second point is maybe an obvious one:

  Aberrations like the Tour Montparnasse only underscore how much Paris remains Haussman’s city, its core frozen in a nineteenth century whose built environment can be restored, and in some cases discreetly renovated, but which—so the severity of the restrictions implies—can never fundamentally be improved upon.

  This is, however, a crucial point. Because it directs to why the Tour Montparnasse is so jarring to many, or perhaps most. It is jarring because it is so obviously different from its surrounding 19th century context. It is clearly not that. But as Marshall points out, one way to address this would be to simply add more 21st century context throughout the city.

  Of course, this is easier said than done. It would require a new mental model — one that accepts that the built form of Paris is not static and can be allowed to evolve. We’re not there yet. But maybe the current renovation of Tour Montparnasse, or the city’s new triangle tower, will give people a fresh set of eyes when it comes to buildings taller than 37 meters.

  Photo by Maeva Hemon on Unsplash

  2023.08.07

• I finally got a road bike

  

  I did it. I finally got (well, ordered) a new and more serious road bike.

  I have been planning to do this since last year. I almost bought a friend’s Cervelo a few weeks ago, but I took it to Gears on King Street and they immediately told me it was too small for me. The frame was 58cm and apparently I need 60cm.

  So I instead ordered a new Cannondale CAAD13. It’s one that my serious cycling friends — people like Jeremiah Shamess — tell me is a good “starter bike.”

  I’m excited to get going. In the winter, I am, as most of you know, all about snowboarding. But I need something active/challenging for the summer that I can be equally fanatical about. Maybe that thing will be cycling.

  The one thing I do need to give some more thought to is cycling to the office. I know a bunch of people who do this, but they tend to go to the gym and then shower before heading to their desk. I’m not sure I want to make this my morning routine.

  Either way, I guess it’s time to dust off my Strava. If any of you are into cycling, hit me up on Twitter/X.

  Photo: Cannondale

  2023.08.06

• People tend to prefer independent restaurants over chains

  

  I just came across the above chart from City Observatory showing the percentage of restaurants in each city that are part of a chain. (The data is taken from Yelp.) On the top is New York City, where only about 13% of restaurants in the city are a chain. And on the other end is Louisville, where more than 35% belong to a chain.

  The article also observes that there appears to be a correlation between restaurants per capita and the percentage of independents. In other words, the more restaurants you have, the higher the likelihood that more of them will be independents. New York City is once again at the top with 22 restaurants per 10,000 people.

  What is perhaps most interesting about this data is that Yelp ratings show a pretty clear preference for independent restaurants. Meaning that, on average, independent restaurants receive a higher rating compared to chain restaurants. At the same time, this spread seems to be widening. Here’s data from 2012 to 2017:

  

  This is maybe obvious; but it’s worth reiterating. As city builders, it’s good practice to encourage independent and small businesses. They are a competitive advantage. People, at least based on this Yelp data, seem to clearly like them more. So I guess Jane Jacobs was right: “The greatest asset a city can have is something that is different from every other place.”

  Charts: City Observatory

  2023.08.05

• Thoughts on Dupont Street in Toronto

  

  This morning I spoke to the Globe and Mail about the evolving nature of Dupont Street here in Toronto. The impetus for the discussion was this: Dupont Street is now seeing a lot of residential intensification, but the street itself remains a bit of a crosstown highway. It’s not yet a “complete street.” And since Junction House is effectively on the west end of this midtown artery, John Lorinc asked to get my thoughts.

  The point I tried to make is that, in my opinion, this is first and foremost a zoning issue. Dupont Street is seeing intensification, but it is largely happening on the north side of the street, abutting the rail corridor (purple and red in the above Official Plan map). The south side of the street is, for the most part, a low-rise neighborhood (yellow in the above map).

  This kind of edge condition is somewhat unique in the city: low-rise on one side of the street; higher density housing, retail, and office on the other. But it is particularly problematic if you’re trying to create a great main street, because single-sided retail streets generally don’t work very well.

  We could certainly have a discussion about sidewalk widths, bike lanes, and other streetscape improvements; but in my mind, there is nothing inherently bad about the cross section of this street. The right-of-way width is 20 meters, meaning there are generally two lanes going in each direction. This is a dimension you’ll find all over the city, including on beloved streets like Queen Street.

  The problem here is what is abutting the street, and it is something that is systemic across the city: we have too many arterial roads that only allow for low-rise housing. So if you were to ask me what to do next, and I was asked this morning, the first thing I would do is up-zone the south side of Dupont and allow for non-residential uses at grade.

  And once this is done, I am certain it will snowball many other positive improvements.

  2023.08.04

• Cream-colored walls and light-oak tables

  

  I don’t normally write about food on this blog. But hear me out. Yesterday was Bianca’s birthday and we had an incredible experience at Osteria Giulia. We sat at the bar, as we like to do, and everything was perfect: the food, the service, and the interiors.

  First, let’s talk about the food.

  Anchovies, grilled sourdough, and a lot of delicious butter:

  

  Endive, pear, burnt honey vinaigrette, toasted almonds, and ricotta:

  

  Ricotta filled pasta, mushrooms, and artichokes:

  

  Sea bass, leeks, artichokes, fava beans, and charred tomatoes:

  

  Now, let’s talk about the interiors. They were designed by Guido Costantino Projects. And to get a good feel for their approach, I suggest you first check out their Instagram and then move onto their website. They do really beautiful and calming work.

  Design always matters.

  And I’m pretty sure that the cream-colored stones and light-oak details made everything taste that much better last night. If you haven’t been and you get a chance, I would highly recommend you try Osteria Giulia. It’s now one of our favorites in the city.

  Happy birthday, Bianca!

  2023.08.03