This morning I stumbled upon an old (2013) post from Rebel Metropolis that documents urban American life through street photos taken before the automobile. 

Above is Little Italy, New York City, 1900. All of the photos in the post are from Shorpy. 

The photos are beautiful architecturally and from a photography standpoint. But as is pointed out in the post, they also speak to a different kind of street:

What’s more, the street here is not purely the thoroughfare – it is the essential common gathering place for demonstrations, for buying and selling food, for children to play in, for celebration, for lingering and people watching.

That sounds like a great street. And now I am off to start my day. Because I have meetings all around the city today, I’ll be driving to the office. 

The Seattle Times has an article up about “widespread single-family zoning” that will feel familiar to many here in Toronto who, I know, are having similar conversations about the amount of land dedicated to low-density housing.

The article, by Mike Rosenberg, estimates that 49% of all developable land in Seattle is dedicated to single-family housing; that 8% is dedicated to multi-family housing; and that another 8% is dedicated to commercial and mixed-use buildings. The rest of the land is institutional, open space, vacant, and so on.

Of all the residential lots in the city, the estimate is that 69% of them are occupied by single-family houses. This is compared to 1% in Manhattan. 

I tried to reverse engineer the 69% based on the land use areas in the article, but the math didn’t quite add up. In any event, the argument here is, of course, that single-family homes are too expensive in Seattle and that the city needs more land available for multi-family housing.

Housing supply is no doubt important, but looking at the above chart, having a low, or lower, percentage of residential land dedicated to single-family housing doesn’t seem to necessarily guarantee affordable housing.

The Globe and Mail recently ran an article arguing that tech salaries in Toronto are significantly less than those in the US and that it is leading to “alarmingly high rates” of brain drain. The claim is that the average tech salary in 2017 was US$73,000 in Toronto, compared to US$140,000 in the Bay Area or US$129,000 in New York City. 

However, if you adjust these salaries for each city’s cost of living, the numbers look like this (chart taken from the same article):

Now all of a sudden Toronto is lumped together with the Bay Area and New York City. It was adjacent to London even when you didn’t adjust the salaries. As Tobi Lütke – CEO of Shopify – points out in his Twitter rebuttal of the article, housing is the determining factor in this adjustment: “Toronto is a very expensive city, and Austin isn’t.”

Lütke also points out, in case you’re in the market, that Canadian-based Shopify pays its tech employees well above market, provides stock compensation, and is currently “hiring like crazy”. But perhaps more importantly, he stresses the importance of Canadians building the economy of the country in which they are from. I feel exactly the same way.