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I tweeted this yesterday (please forgive the grammar mistake).
What it shows is a bunch of narrow urban properties ranging, for the most part, from 5 to 7 storeys. Some of them are old buildings, and some are new. Regardless, the point I wanted to make was that this is a scale and rhythm of building that does wonders for cities. They’re dense, they have a compact footprint, and they promote urban vibrancy.
And yet, it's a building type that is far too difficult to develop in many cities. It is not always the case, but oftentimes the only way to underwrite these kinds of projects is to make them ultra high-end. That's a shame. So let’s talk about this a little more, starting with what makes this urban pattern so appealing.
One key thing that narrow lots and narrow retail frontages do is increase the number of destinations within walking distance. This promotes visual interest by always showing you something new.
At the same time, there are numerous economic benefits to this urban pattern. Smaller shops lower the barrier to entry for small businesses and allow greater adaptability. Change is able to happen faster, and if one or two businesses happen to turnover on a street, it’s not the end of the world.
One way I like to think of this is in terms of shops per step.
For example, let's assume that the average walking speed is 4 km/hour and that, as a starting point, fine-grained urbanism translates into storefronts that are around 6 m wide. This would mean the average person walking on a street would see a new shop (or retail frontage) about every 9 steps.
If we instead assume a retail frontage of something like 30 m (which is five times our original 6 m), then the average person would need approximately 43 steps for every shop. This is a meaningful difference that fundamentally changes the character of a street. If you’ve ever walked on a great main street, you know this, even if you’ve never explicitly acknowledged it.
But this is only the ground floor. The other benefit of these simple, straight-up infills is that they also bring homes and offices to the same compact footprint. Density is good. It is a prerequisite for urban vibrancy. And it can be achieved simply. Strip away the facade ornament from the building examples in my tweet, and these are extruded boxes with no stepbacks to speak of.
This used to be how many (or most) cities built fabric buildings at scale, but for many reasons, we forgot how. One of the reasons is that we’ve generally made building things more onerous, and that means developers need bigger and bigger projects to justify the costs.
But it's clear our desire to experience human-scaled environments hasn’t changed. So I reckon it’s about time to bring back the skinny extruded boxes.
Cover photo by Praewthida K on Unsplash
Waymo has just been granted approval to test its autonomous vehicles in New York City. The permit allows up to eight of the company's Jaguar SUVs to circulate in Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn. And according to the company, the plan is to start "immediately." This first approval only runs until the end of September, after which it will need to be extended — but I'm guessing that shouldn't be too difficult to obtain.
What's noteworthy about this announcement is that (1) New York City is a big and complex place and (2) it's the first city for Waymo that receives snow. The company currently operates in San Francisco, Austin, Phoenix, and Los Angeles.
That said, the company has been doing cold weather testing since, I think, 2012. And in 2016, they opened a 53,000-square-foot self-driving center in Michigan for this purpose. They've also run tests in Truckee, California, Upstate New York, and the Detroit area. So presumably its sensors are ready to melt snow and ice. But it's looking like the true test will be on the streets of New York.
Next should be Toronto.
"Rent control is the second-best way to destroy a city, after bombing." —Lawrence H. Summers
Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for the mayor of New York City, clearly ran a good campaign. He used social media and short-form videos to find his audience and win with the message that the city has become unattainable to most.
But it is also clear that the stock market really does not like his message. Shares of firms with exposure to New York City's real estate market reacted immediately: Vornado Realty Trust, SL Green, Equity Residential, Empire State Realty Trust, LXP Industrial Trust, and others, were all down. At the same time, the wealthy vowed to leave New York for places like Florida, as they so often do these days.
One of reasons for this negative reaction was Mamdani's commitment to not just cap rent increases, but freeze rents in rent-stabilized units for the entire duration of his term. We've spoken a lot about rent control over the years (here, here, here, and other places) but, at a high level, the problem with rent controls is that they create a strong disincentive for landlords to invest and maintain their homes and for developers to build new homes. So what ultimately happens is that you get a more rapidly aging inventory of existing homes and a reduced amount of new supply.
A full-out rent freeze takes this even further. A rent freeze does not mean that utility costs will also be frozen, that insurance and taxes will be frozen, that interest rates will be capped, and that all other landlord operating expenses will be restricted from inflating. (If this were the case, we really wouldn't have market economy.) So what a rent freeze does is ensure that, in real dollars, a landlord is able to collect
The same is true in condominiums and other ownership structures. Whenever somebody talks about frozen maintenance or common element fees, I immediately remind them that this is a bad thing, not a feature. It means the condominium corporation is on an unsustainable path and will eventually run out of money. Something is being sacrificed in order to keep up with rising operating and capital expenses. At the very least, you need to keep up with inflation.
I can appreciate that rents are too high. As a developer, I would love to be able to build to lower rents. It reduces absorption risk and it's better for the city. But rather than just freeze rents, a more productive and sustainable approach would be to attack the underlying root causes for the problem. A rent freeze is a short-term political fix that will have second and third-order consequences. Problems for a different day and for a different mayor, perhaps. But problems nonetheless.
Cover photo by Daryan Shamkhali on Unsplash
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