At the beginning of the year, I wrote this:

The desire to add more housing to single-family neighborhoods will continue to pick up steam across North America. How exactly this plays out will be market specific, but in Toronto I expect to see new planning policies put in place, as well as supportive building code changes.

And this continues to happen. Right now, the City of Toronto is working on making fourplexes permissible in all low-rise neighborhoods across the city.

This is exciting. But it's not done yet. And it's not perfect.

The biggest change that I think still needs to happen is around maximum densities. If we actually want to encourage more missing middle housing, we need to increase the permitted FSIs or, better yet, remove them all together.

Urban planner Sean Galbraith does a good job of explaining this in NRU:

I responded to the city's multiplex survey last night and this was one of my main comments. If you'd also like to voice your opinion, you have until March 10, 2023. Here's the link.

Jason Segedy, who is the Director of Planning and Urban Development for the city of Akron, Ohio, recently penned a two-part series in the American Conservative about urban revitalization in the Rust Belt. Part two is specifically about the importance of new housing in “cities left for dead.”

As I was reading through the piece, my first thought was that it would be a good follow-up to yesterday’s post on “winner-take-all-urbanism.” The contrast between alpha cities like San Francisco and Rust Belt cities like Akron is stark.

The former city can’t build housing fast enough. And the latter city was forced to implement a citywide, 15 year, 100% residential property tax abatement program just to induce new investment. Any and all new housing is eligible.

But as I got further down the article, I was struck by something else. I was surprised to hear Segedy say that, rather than market forces, community opposition is “perhaps the biggest challenge of all” when it comes to delivering new housing in these markets.

Here is a longish excerpt that I would encourage you to read:

David Levinson, who is based Sydney and authors the Transportist – a blog you should follow if you don’t – has a recent post up about signalling inequity and “how traffic signals distribute time to favour the car and delay the pedestrian.” In it he provides some background into traffic signal coordination (introduced in New York City in 1922), as well some some suggestions for how we could and should be prioritizing pedestrians.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

There is a reason that traffic engineers don’t automatically allocate pedestrian phases. Suppose the car only warrants a six second phase but a pedestrian requires 18 seconds to cross the street at a 1 meter/second walking speed. Giving an automatic pedestrian phase will delay cars, even if the pedestrian is not there. And there is no sin worse than delaying a car.  But it also guarantees a pedestrian who arrives just after the window to push the actuator passes will wait a full cycle.

Sometimes pressing the walk button appears to do nothing. I suppose that’s why some cities call it the “placebo button.” And in other cases if you don’t press the walk button you’ll never get a walk sign. That’s usually a strong indicator that you are located in an environment not intended for pedestrians. David’s article also has me curious about the relationship between traffic signals/pedestrian phases and urban form. I bet you could tell a lot about the latter simply by understanding the former.