I’m on a flight right now reading the latest issue of Monocle Magazine in a seat that barely accommodates the length of my femur. This month’s issue has their annual ranking of the top 25 cities in the world.
Munich is first, which is not unusual for their ranking methodology. It generally scores well. Quality of life is high. Crime is low. The economy is strong. Beer gardens are fun. And you’re close to the Alps for snowboarding.
One stat that caught my attention — and it’s not included for all of the cities — is the number of homes built in the past year. Presumably this is all housing units in the metro area — for sale, for rent, subsidized and so on.
Here are their (clearly rounded) numbers. The order is as they appeared in the ranking, but again, not ever city included this stat.
Munich: 8,300
Tokyo: 150,000
Copenhagen: 5,000
Berlin: 11,000
Madrid: 1,600
Hamburg: 7,000
Melbourne: 5,100
Helsinki 4,400
Stockholm: 7,000 (18,000 in Greater Stockholm)
Sydney: 39,000
Hong Kong 17,000
Vancouver 22,600
Amsterdam 5,100
Kyoto 8,900
Dusseldorf 2,600
Barcelona 1,000
Some of these numbers appear to stand out, such as the counts for Tokyo, Sydney and maybe Vancouver. But it’s hard to draw any conclusions around housing supply and housing affordability.
Melbourne and Amsterdam allegedly have the same number of homes built over the past year, but according to Monocle the metro areas of Melbourne and Amsterdam have populations of 4.85 million and 2.4 million, respectively. This also says nothing about their growth rates.
So which one is doing a better job of addressing housing demand? I’m not sure.
But it was still interesting to see that Tokyo delivers somewhere around 150,000 homes a year. Tokyo is somewhat unique globally in that it’s a big city — one of the biggest — that somehow manages to gracefully balance both scale and quality of life.
Photo by Elias Keilhauer on Unsplash
Last week was developer Urban Capital’s 5th annual “Naughty or Nice” party. It’s obviously a holiday tradition of theirs and it has become a tradition of mine to attend. Judging by my vast collection of photo booth photos, there’s a chance I may have been to all of them. It’s easily one of the best holiday parties in the business.
One of the things that Urban Capital does at its annual party is release its annual magazine. And this year I was fortunate enough to be invited to write a piece for it on the highs and lows of mid-rise development. Put differently, it’s about the challenges facing developers who want to build mid-rise, but also why they’re pretty great for cities.
If you’d like to have a read, you can do that online by clicking here. And if you’d like to receive a hard copy of the magazine, I can make that happen as well. Tweet at me. Alternatively, you can also pick up the magazine at any Urban Capital sales office.
I deliberately tried to make it so it wasn’t your typical real estate puff piece: condos are great, yada, yada, you should buy one from us. I tried to make it an intelligent piece on some of the real challenges facing mid-rise developers. And that’s what Urban Capital wanted as well. I hope you enjoy it :)
I was recently interviewed by a Berlin-based online magazine called Archipreneur. You can read that interview by clicking here.
If you haven’t yet heard of Archipreneur, you should definitely check it out. It’s a great read. The magazine is dedicated to the intersection of architecture and entrepreneurship. They cover a lot of the same topics that I cover here on Architect This City – such as design, real estate development, technology, and so on. But they are generally more focused on architects (or people trained as architects, in my case) who are doing interesting things other than traditional practice.
In my case, it’s real estate development and this blog. Check out the interview here.