A draft version of the new London Plan was released today for public consultation. It is “the spatial development strategy for Greater London”. And you can download all 524 pages of it, here. A final copy of the Plan is expected to be published by fall 2019.
Here is what mayor Sadiq Khan had to say about the Plan (quote from The Guardian):
“I am using all of the powers at my disposal to tackle the housing crisis head on, removing ineffective constraints on homebuilders so we make the most of precious land in our capital.”
And that tone comes through in the document. Here is an excerpt from the “optimising housing density” policy section:
“For London to accommodate growth in an inclusive and responsible way every new development needs to make the most efficient use of land. This will mean developing at densities above those of the surrounding area on most sites. The design of the development must optimise housing density.” (Section 3.6.1)
The Plan also contains a set of clear performance indicators. They cover things like the supply of new homes, the supply of affordable homes, modal share in the capital, and so on.
The ambition is 66,000 net additional homes each year. And by 2041, the goal is that 80% of all trips in London will be by foot, cycle, or public transport. There simply isn’t road the capacity.
Which is why the plan also specifies parking maximums, as opposed to parking minimums. The Plan wants the starting point for any development that is well-connected to transit – or to future transit – to be “car-free”.
If you have a chance, the new London Plan is worth a scan. Maybe you don’t want to print it though.
Right now, there’s an apartment building in San Francisco that is trying to encourage car-free living by offering residents a $100 per month credit that can be used for Uber and/or for public transit. Prospective residents can even get a $20 credit to go check out the community. (The program is a partnership with Uber.)
The reason this leasing strategy caught my attention is because we’re at a point where city builders are now trying to recalibrate themselves to this new emerging world.
When I was at the Land & Development conference earlier this month, one developer brought up this exact point. He more or less asked: If you’re starting development on a new building today and you’re expecting approvals in 2 or so years and completion in another 3 or 4 years, what do you think the state of cars/driving will be at that point? Should you really be building all that underground parking?
These are great question. And they highlight one of the challenges of development. It takes a long time to bring new supply to the market and a lot can change during that time period. My sense is that we are pretty clearly seeing downward pressure on driving and car ownership.
That said, this isn’t the case in every city or in all parts of a particular city. I just got back from a trip to a Detroit where it’s pretty hard to imagine the city being oriented around anything but the car. But in cities like San Francisco and Toronto, car-free living is already a reality for many people and so we need to respond to that.
How do you see yourself driving, or not driving, in the next 5 to 10 years?
It feels really good to have shared the details about my laneway project yesterday. It’s a project I’ve been working on for a few years now, and – though I’ve spoken to architects, engineers, and city staff about the project – I hadn’t really gone public with it. And I’m happy I did.
I got a lot of great feedback from the twittersphere. In fact, I didn’t receive one negative comment about the idea of a laneway house in Toronto. Everyone seemed to think it was a great idea and many expressed their dismay with the city’s reticence to formally support them.
I also received a number of encouraging emails, one of which was from a resident of the Toronto Islands. And he raised a really great point: Toronto already has a very successful community of laneway-like houses and it’s called the Toronto Islands.
The streets are no wider than the laneways we have here on the mainland (and even smaller in some cases) and yet there are about 250 houses serving a population of roughly 750. He went on to mention that they even have “downsized garbage trucks”, which are used to navigate the small, car-free streets of the Toronto Islands.
What this reinforces is that our aversion to laneway housing is not because we can’t figure out the logistics of how to service them. We can and are already doing that. If we can figure out how to do that on the islands, I’m pretty sure that we could also figure out how to do it on the mainland.
So what this really comes down is that there isn’t the political will to make this happen. And there isn’t that will, I’m guessing, because there’s a fear of upsetting the established neighborhoods. That’s why Ontario’s Places to Grow Act (2005) was deliberate in concentrating growth in specific areas of the city – it meant that we could say that the rest of the city would receive little to no growth.
We’ve since revised that position with the push to intensify our Avenues with mid-rise buildings. But just as we went from high-rise to mid-rise intensification, I think it’s only a matter of time before low-rise intensification starts to also happen.
I firmly believe that the demand is already there for laneway housing (the Lanehouse on Bartlett pretty much sold out in one evening). It’s simply a matter of now figuring out the supply side of this equation.
Image: Ward’s Island (Toronto Islands)
A draft version of the new London Plan was released today for public consultation. It is “the spatial development strategy for Greater London”. And you can download all 524 pages of it, here. A final copy of the Plan is expected to be published by fall 2019.
Here is what mayor Sadiq Khan had to say about the Plan (quote from The Guardian):
“I am using all of the powers at my disposal to tackle the housing crisis head on, removing ineffective constraints on homebuilders so we make the most of precious land in our capital.”
And that tone comes through in the document. Here is an excerpt from the “optimising housing density” policy section:
“For London to accommodate growth in an inclusive and responsible way every new development needs to make the most efficient use of land. This will mean developing at densities above those of the surrounding area on most sites. The design of the development must optimise housing density.” (Section 3.6.1)
The Plan also contains a set of clear performance indicators. They cover things like the supply of new homes, the supply of affordable homes, modal share in the capital, and so on.
The ambition is 66,000 net additional homes each year. And by 2041, the goal is that 80% of all trips in London will be by foot, cycle, or public transport. There simply isn’t road the capacity.
Which is why the plan also specifies parking maximums, as opposed to parking minimums. The Plan wants the starting point for any development that is well-connected to transit – or to future transit – to be “car-free”.
If you have a chance, the new London Plan is worth a scan. Maybe you don’t want to print it though.
Right now, there’s an apartment building in San Francisco that is trying to encourage car-free living by offering residents a $100 per month credit that can be used for Uber and/or for public transit. Prospective residents can even get a $20 credit to go check out the community. (The program is a partnership with Uber.)
The reason this leasing strategy caught my attention is because we’re at a point where city builders are now trying to recalibrate themselves to this new emerging world.
When I was at the Land & Development conference earlier this month, one developer brought up this exact point. He more or less asked: If you’re starting development on a new building today and you’re expecting approvals in 2 or so years and completion in another 3 or 4 years, what do you think the state of cars/driving will be at that point? Should you really be building all that underground parking?
These are great question. And they highlight one of the challenges of development. It takes a long time to bring new supply to the market and a lot can change during that time period. My sense is that we are pretty clearly seeing downward pressure on driving and car ownership.
That said, this isn’t the case in every city or in all parts of a particular city. I just got back from a trip to a Detroit where it’s pretty hard to imagine the city being oriented around anything but the car. But in cities like San Francisco and Toronto, car-free living is already a reality for many people and so we need to respond to that.
How do you see yourself driving, or not driving, in the next 5 to 10 years?
It feels really good to have shared the details about my laneway project yesterday. It’s a project I’ve been working on for a few years now, and – though I’ve spoken to architects, engineers, and city staff about the project – I hadn’t really gone public with it. And I’m happy I did.
I got a lot of great feedback from the twittersphere. In fact, I didn’t receive one negative comment about the idea of a laneway house in Toronto. Everyone seemed to think it was a great idea and many expressed their dismay with the city’s reticence to formally support them.
I also received a number of encouraging emails, one of which was from a resident of the Toronto Islands. And he raised a really great point: Toronto already has a very successful community of laneway-like houses and it’s called the Toronto Islands.
The streets are no wider than the laneways we have here on the mainland (and even smaller in some cases) and yet there are about 250 houses serving a population of roughly 750. He went on to mention that they even have “downsized garbage trucks”, which are used to navigate the small, car-free streets of the Toronto Islands.
What this reinforces is that our aversion to laneway housing is not because we can’t figure out the logistics of how to service them. We can and are already doing that. If we can figure out how to do that on the islands, I’m pretty sure that we could also figure out how to do it on the mainland.
So what this really comes down is that there isn’t the political will to make this happen. And there isn’t that will, I’m guessing, because there’s a fear of upsetting the established neighborhoods. That’s why Ontario’s Places to Grow Act (2005) was deliberate in concentrating growth in specific areas of the city – it meant that we could say that the rest of the city would receive little to no growth.
We’ve since revised that position with the push to intensify our Avenues with mid-rise buildings. But just as we went from high-rise to mid-rise intensification, I think it’s only a matter of time before low-rise intensification starts to also happen.
I firmly believe that the demand is already there for laneway housing (the Lanehouse on Bartlett pretty much sold out in one evening). It’s simply a matter of now figuring out the supply side of this equation.
Image: Ward’s Island (Toronto Islands)
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