Earlier today, Christopher Hume of the Toronto Star published a review of The Residences at RCMI building currently under construction on University Avenue. He gave the building a ‘B’ grade.
His main criticism was the faux facade that has been integrated into the base of the building:
Then there’s the question of the historic 1907 building the RCMI occupied until recently. Though listed as a heritage site in 1973, the city approved its demolition. Planners also allowed the neo-classical front façade to be replaced with a replica that will fool no one, another example of the city talking out of both sides of its mouth.
But faux facades aside, one of the things that makes this development project unique in Toronto is actually something that you can’t see from the outside: there’s no resident parking. Apparently there’s 9 spots for deliveries and other short-term uses, but for the 315 suites in the building there’s no parking.
Depending on where in the world you’re from this may not seem like a big deal. I’ve written before about minimum and maximum parking requirements, and how some cities – such as Berlin – don’t have them. But here in Toronto, we do. And the city generally takes them very seriously.
“To assume a residential development of the project’s scale might be totally car-free runs counter to expert study and experience,” municipal staffers argued. “Although there are many households in the downtown without cars, it would be highly unlikely to find 315 of them permanently concentrated in one building.”
The fact planners were dead wrong is a shocking sign of a department either out of touch or that doesn’t believe its own hype.
In so many ways – as Hume pointed out in his article – this is complete hypocrisy. We’re always talking about building walkable communities and encouraging alternate forms of mobility, but when it comes time to build anything new, we force a certain number of parking spots to be included. And so we end up encouraging the exact opposite.
This also has a significant impact on the way we build our cities. Parking minimums can actually render smaller sites “undevelopable” simply because there isn’t enough room to lay out the required parking. In fact, it might surprise you how much of what we do ends up being governed by cars, parking, and traffic.
That’s why I think this image is so impactful:
The most accurate representation of the public space we give up for cars. Courtesy of @tchebotarev :) #athiscity pic.twitter.com/KBUX0Td4fj
— Brandon G. Donnelly (@donnelly_b)
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But I’m certain that a lot of this will change as Toronto continues to grow. Progressive cities all around the world are rethinking their positions on parking, and on cars in general.
Earlier this year Sao Paulo joined the club and got rid of parking minimums for sites along major transit corridors. And they actually imposed a parking maximum: 1 spot per residence. The expectation is that this will reduce traffic and improve housing affordability.
Parking minimums may not seem like a big deal, but the reality is that their impacts are far reaching. They change development patterns, they change project economics, and they send a message about the kind of city you hope to build.
Image: Looking south on University Avenue in Toronto (Flickr)
One of the biggest pieces of infrastructure currently under construction in Toronto is the Crosstown LRT line, which will run on and under Eglinton Avenue right through the heart of midtown. The total length of the line is 19 km, and 10 km of it will be underground along with 12 of its stations.
Here’s a map:
But as the Chief Planner of Toronto, Jennifer Keesmaat, rightly pointed out in this blog post earlier this year, it’s important to think of this line, not just as a piece of transit infrastructure, but as a broader city building initiative. With this line comes a tremendous opportunity to rethink and rebuild one of Toronto’s most important avenues.
I have no doubt that this will happen over the coming years and decades. I mean, just look at the development activity taking place on St. Clair Avenue West right now, which you could argue is the result of its right-of-way streetcar line. But in this instance, what I’m specifically curious about is what will happen at each of the stations along Eglinton Avenue.
If you take a look at the Stations and Stops page on the Crosstown website, you can see where all of the primary and secondary entrances will be and how each station will generally function. But what is not clear is whether we will be using this opportunity to build additional density on top of them.
Here’s how they have “blocked out” the primary entrance for Avenue station:
I have no idea what it’ll become. But if it ends up as single-storey and single-purpose building, then I think we will have missed an opportunity. And the same goes for many, if not all, of the other stations along the Eglinton Crosstown line. Fixed rail is such a massive driver of real estate value, and so it seems silly not to take advantage of that in some way.
If anyone has any insights into how these stations will or will not be developed, I would love to hear from you in the comment section below.
Earlier this week I stumbled upon this entertaining article from the Guardian talking about how expensive housing is in London. The author’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion was to setup a new miniature London in the middle of nowhere where everyone could flock for affordable housing, but where many of London’s attributes could be exported: “We can all refuse to wear socks and sell each other overpriced cocktails in jam jars.”
All joking aside, the article is yet another reminder that big global cities are expensive places to live. And in these cities, one of the most precious commodities is, quite simply, personal space. That’s why a garage in London can sell for £550,000 and why a 35 square foot storage cage in New York can sell for $75,000.
But affordable housing is not the reason why people want to live in places like London and New York. If it were, they wouldn’t be coming. Instead, they come for lifestyle, wealth creation, and the dating market – among other things. However, at a certain point, usually when they form families and start to need/want more space, they start looking around.
Here’s an infographic via the Atlantic showing how relationship status impacts where people tend to live in London. The purple areas indicate an “above average concentration” of a particular relationship status. As you can see, single people tend to live in the core of the city, and when they get married, they move out to the periphery. Intuitively, this probably makes sense to you.
However, I’m always curious as to whether this trend happens more because of consumer preference (people don’t want to raise kids downtown) or because of economic necessity (they can’t afford anything beyond a shoe box apartment). Because if it is largely out of economic necessity (and the Guardian article would suggest it is), then we’re not creating the inclusive cities and neighborhoods that all city builders like to talk about.
So how do we get better at this?
In my view, and I’ve argued this before, the first step should be about improving supply. That is: get more housing built. And the way to start doing that is to make land available and improve the approvals process for new developments. In a recent McKinsey report, they referred to my first point as “unlocking land.”
“Land cost often is the single biggest factor in improving the economics of affordable housing development. It is not uncommon for land costs to exceed 40 percent of total property prices, and in some large cities, land can be as much as 80 percent of property cost.”
The reason this is important is because most big cities operate with massive supply deficits. There simply isn’t enough housing. And so if you can address that at a fundamental level, you can actually do a lot to start improving affordability.