Todd W. Schneider recently mined data from the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission to create a chart summarizing yellow taxi, Uber, and Lyft usage. 

The data only runs up until January 2016, but here’s what he found:

“…yellow taxis provided 60,000 fewer trips per day in January 2016 compared to one year earlier, while Uber provided 70,000 more trips per day over the same time horizon.”

The Uber data only begins in 2015, but you can still see how quickly it is growing and how yellow taxis are losing market share. Five years ago, yellow taxis were reaching over 500,000 trips per day (a pretty amazing number) and in January of this year they were at about 350,000 trips per day. 

It also appears that Lyft is struggling to gain traction.

What’s also great about Todd’s blog post is that he has set it up so that his chart will automatically update as new data becomes available. So if you’re interested in this topic, you should bookmark his post.

Bjarke Ingels’ West 57th Street project in New York (developed by The Durst Organization) has just started renting apartments (March 1). 

Since I’m in the rental business, I thought it would be worthwhile to take a look at the rents – though I tend to obsess over all buildings and not just rental ones.

Firstly, the project has a total of 709 apartments and 178 different unit types because of the architectural variations in the building. Of these units, 142 of them (20%) have been designated as affordable and were offered up via a lottery to people who fall within certain incomes ranges. 

Here are the affordable rents via 6sqft.com:

I don’t know the exact numbers, but Curbed New York speculated – based on what was seen at other buildings on the west side – that the total number of applicants for these 142 units may have reached over 100,000!

For the market-rate units, the average monthly rents are as follows (via Curbed NY):

• Studio: $2,770
  

• One-bedroom: $3,880
  

• Two-bedroom: $6,500
  

• Three-bedroom: $11,000
  

• Four-bedroom: $16,500
  

I wasn’t able to find average unit sizes (to calculate per square foot rents), but I estimate the overall average unit size to be around 1,000 square feet. 

940,000 sf (total gross floor area) - 45,000 sf of retail x 0.80 efficiency (lower than average because of the shape of the building) / 709 units = approximately 1,000 sf of rentable area per unit. That’s just my rough guess based on what I could find online.

Based on the Curbed comment section though, there are certainly some smaller units:

If anyone has any additional figures, please share them in the comments below. I think there are a few subscribers to this blog who are involved in the project.

Image from via57west.com

Here in Toronto there’s a push for more family-sized apartments. That’s what the planners want to hear.

Because the city has been trying to encourage developers to build more of them for years, but the challenge has always been that they didn’t sell or that they took a long time to sell. The market wasn’t ready.

But as I discussed earlier this week, that is starting to change. I think Toronto is reaching a tipping point where low-rise housing has simply become too expensive and people are starting to look to alternatives, mostly at the mid-rise scale.

It’s interesting though that something of the opposite appears to be happening in New York. I don’t know enough about the New York new construction market to really comment on overall unit mixes and sizes, but there definitely seems to be a push to create more affordable micro-units.

Curbed published this last October:

“…a report currently under public review, called Zoning for Quality and Affordability, recommends relaxing density caps and eliminating the 400-square-foot minimum for studio apartments, thereby creating more housing for single people. Almost 50 percent of the city’s population is estimated to be single, but only seven percent of the housing stock is studios.”

And just recently, New York completed its first all-micro-unit apartment building called Carmel Place. Rents start at $2,650 per month for a 265 square foot apartment. 

As a point of reference, that works out to be $10 per square foot per month and more than 3x the highest rents you could reasonably achieve in the more desirable areas of Toronto, today.

The model suite is 302 square feet and looks like this:

All of the above photos are via Curbed.