For whatever reason, some of the people living in high-rise buildings believe that if you flick a cigarette butt off a balcony that it will magically disintegrate on the way down. It’s either that or they don’t give a shit about anyone else.
Because if you happen to live in or manage a building which has patios or terraces at the base of tower, I bet you have this problem:
Above is a picture of a Belmont cigarette burning through the tarp covering the wooden harvest table on my patio.
It’s a destruction of property, an environmental concern (many butts end up in stormwater drains), and a pretty scary fire hazard. I know of many incidences where thrown cigarette butts have started fires in a high-rise building. It happened last year in my mother’s building.
However, the frustrating thing about this problem is that it’s exceptionally difficult to stop. I know this because I sit on the board of my condo building. The typical response is for management to send out notices to all the residents asking them to stop doing this. But frankly, that does nothing.
So if any of you know of a company or service (or have a product idea) that can help with this, please contact me. But if no such company or service exists, I am positive that you could create it today and sell to almost every condo corporation and property management company that have a condition where terraces or patios sit below a tower. Because inevitably, there will be someone upstairs throwing butts.
Many buildings have a similar issue with dog poo. People simply don’t pick up after their dogs. So some property managers have started taking stool samples of every dog who lives in the building. That way they can easily determine which residents aren’t picking up after their dogs. I guess that’s what it takes to get some people to give a shit.
Of course, this isn’t a problem just in buildings. Cities in general are always fighting litter. That’s why you see ideas like this pop-up:
#neatstreets, idea geniale per ridurre i mozziconi sulle strade pic.twitter.com/udbV7IH9AW
— Else Project (@ElseProject_)
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This particular one (in London) was designed to stop people from throwing their cigarette butts on the street. Instead, you use your butt to vote. In this case: England vs. Australia.
We talk a lot about big ideas here on Architect This City. What driverless cars will mean for cities, how laneway housing could help with housing affordability, and so on. But the smallest ideas can also matter a lot for city building. Sometimes we forget that.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about condominium governance and how things might be improved.
If you own a condominium, you pay a monthly maintenance fee. Let’s say, for example, you own a 833 square foot condo and your maintenance fee is $500 per month. That works out to be $0.60 per square foot.
For a lot of people, this fee probably feels like a bit of a black hole. The money goes out every month and that’s the end of it.
But as I explained here, a portion of that fee goes into the condo’s reserve fund to cover future capital expenditures. This is basically an investment you are making for the future benefit of the building.
As an example, if you’re paying $500 per month, somewhere around 25% could be going towards your condo corporation’s reserve fund. That’s $125 per month. $1,500 per year. $7,500 over a 5 year period. And $15,000 over a 10 year period.
Now this is an investment that you’re obliged to make, but one that you might not be around to directly benefit from if you decide to sell before capital expenditures are made using the money you’ve invested.
Of course, if you’re a savvy buyer, you’re going to scrutinize the reserve fund and the corporation’s overall financials before you buy into a building. And sometimes the unit valuations do get deeply depressed by out of control maintenance fees and/or special assessments. So you could maybe argue (as an owner) that your reserve fund investment ends up getting recaptured in an eventual sale.
But what I wonder is to what extent a properly funded reserve gets accurately reflected in the valuation of the individual units. I suspect not that well. And as far as I know, there isn’t great data on this metric. (If you know of anything, please share it in the comments.)
It’s certainly important information to have and consider. Again, when you buy a condo unit you’re not only buying the unit itself, you’re also buying the future investments (and liabilities) that others have left before you.
So what I really want to know: Why aren’t reserve fund balances and building studies made publicly available? This is not easy information to get today.
But imagine what would happen if the market had full transparency. Imagine if you could see a map of every condo building in your city and sort by age and reserve fund balance. In theory, unit pricing would become more accurate. But even more than that, there would be significant opportunities for collective intelligence.
Now all of a sudden buildings would be able to benchmark themselves against other buildings to see if their reserve fund is sufficient, as well as learn from other buildings with respect to their history of capital expenditures. It would also hold the building’s management more accountable and allow owners to easily see if the contracts in place are competitive with the overall market.
I know that a lot of people get nervous when it comes to sharing information like this. I mean, what would happen if your building is underfunded relative to its peers? Would that pull down property values? It certainly could. But if you’re underfunded and you get stuck with a special assessment in 5 years, then your property values are going to drop regardless.
So I would love to see a lot more condo information made available to the public for free. In my view the benefits outweigh the potential negatives, particularly if this were to be done at scale. Condo corporations are also non-profit entities, so it’s not as if their balance sheets and income statements are filled with sensitive trade secrets.
But what do you think? Would you feel comfortable if your condo’s reserve fund balance was made available online to the public? Do you even know off the top of your head what the balance is for your own building? I would be curious to know.
Yesterday the Washington Post published a great chart showing the housing types of the 40 largest cities, by population, in the US. The list is ordered from lowest to highest according to the percentage of single-family houses in the city (green bar).
Here’s the chart:
Not surprisingly, many of the cities at the top of this list (meaning they have the lowest percentage of single-family houses) are in the older east coast cities.
It’s also interesting to see just how much the rowhouse dominates the urban landscape in Philadelphia and Baltimore. In Philadelphia, almost 60% of the housing stock is an attached rowhouse.
Housing is the backdrop for such a big portion of our lives. And when you live in a particular kind of home, it impacts your life whether or not you realize it. The dense rowhouses of Philadelphia and the single-family houses of Oklahoma City are the result of two very different kinds of urban landscapes.
In Toronto, that backdrop is in the midst of a dramatic change. More and more of us are now living in high-rise condos. That hasn’t always been the case, of course. It’s a recent shift. But it looks like it’ll be a big part of our future.