Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.
Dave LeBlanc recently published an article in the Globe and Mail called, “How wide is your sidewalk?” And in it, he links to this sidewalk map of Toronto (pictured above), which uses open data from the city to plot sidewalk widths.
It was originally intended as a map of where social distancing is possible (oh, how far we’ve come), but today it serves as a really interesting way of looking at the city. What it makes clear to me is that we could use a lot more sidewalk, and that too many areas of the city have a discontinuous public realm.
Sometimes there’s very little that can be done until an adjacent property gets redeveloped. And when this does happen, the city will demand pedestrian widenings. But in other cases, there are solutions that could be implemented today, without private participation.
So I sure hope that someone is looking at a map like this and trying to come up with holistic solutions for making Toronto a more walkable and more pedestrian-friendly city.
Note: Sometimes a narrow sidewalk does not necessarily equal an inhospitable street. I mean, look at this example.
I opened up X this afternoon and I saw a photographer tweet that he hadn’t sold a single NFT in the last four months. His conclusion: The NFT market is dying, if not already dead. There are no collectors left. Damn.
I’m sure it probably feels this way to most. But the reality is that there are a lot of asset classes that feel this exact same way today. (I know that many of you will contest whether NFTs are actually an asset class.) There aren’t a lot of buyers out there right now.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the NFT market, in particular, is done with. In fact, if you look around, there are countless signs that point to the opposite.
I, for example, find it interesting that if you’re an architect or a city planner in the US, and looking to check off some continuing education units, you can now register for a course at Harvard called From Crypto to the Metaverse: Blockchain Applications in Real Estate.
And if you look at the learning objectives, it includes things like demystifying how Blockchain technologies work, how they might impact real estate businesses in the future, and what opportunities they may create. This suggests we’re still early.
Right now just feels like that time in the cycle that tests both your conviction and your discipline. It’s easy to believe in something when everyone else does. But what about when most people don’t?
Up until last year, non-residential uses within Toronto’s low-rise neighborhoods were typically legal non-confirming uses. Meaning, the use wasn’t technically allowed, but if it had been there for a long and continuous time, we would let it slide and say it’s legal.
Then we decided that small-scale retail, service, and office uses might be kind of good in our neighborhoods. Especially if they empower people to perform their daily necessities without a car. So we agreed to allow these sorts of uses provided they don’t annoy too many people.
But what about in Toronto’s laneways? Can and should they go there, too?
But we need to get out of the way and we need small and affordable spaces. Which is why it’s hard to imagine a more ideal place than in our laneways, especially considering that there’s a long history of these spaces being used for exactly this. (Read this recent article by John Lorinc.)
Fortunately, this idea continues to gain positive momentum, thanks to people like the late Michelle Senayah (co-founder of the Laneway Project) and Blair Scorgie (a partner at Sajecki Planning). So in my mind, it’s only a matter of time before we start getting out of the way.
There are many ways to describe one of the prevailing urban forms emerging across the Greater Toronto Area. You could call it spiky urbanism. You could call it a collection of peaks and plains. Or — as it is referred to in this recent article by Alex Bozikovic about “turning the suburb into the city” — you could call it cruise ship urbanity:
These megaprojects are where Toronto has chosen to cram much of its new growth – “cruise ships of urbanity,” as Mr. Giannone told me, in a sea of houses. As such they provide an opportunity to create citylike density and activity.
What we are talking about is a dichotomous form of urbanism: high-density mixed-use nodes surrounded by low-rise car-oriented communities. And on many levels, this makes a lot of sense, especially if the cruise ship happens to be docked on top of a transit station. This is where density needs to go. If you have a transit station without much density, that should be addressed immediately.
But it also presents a great challenge. If transportation planning is necessarily land use planning, then we are dealing with two very different kinds of land use patterns and, therefore, two very different kinds of mobility demands. You can address this by making the cruise ship as self-sufficient and pleasant as possible, but eventually someone will want or need to get off the ship.
Does that mean they will then need a car?
You don’t have this same problem with more consistent forms of urbanism. Consider, for example, cities like Paris and Barcelona. These are dense cities, but more importantly they are, for the most part, uniformly dense. Or at least, uniformly dense enough. Meaning that you can probably apply a more uniform transportation strategy. What works in one part of the city is likely to work in other parts too.
Of course, we could also apply a uniform transportation strategy to our urban cruise ships. Given that they exist in a sea of low-rise houses, we could simply say that each urban cruise ship resident should also have their own parking space (1:1 ratio). The solution: everyone drives! But this, to me, seems like an insane long-term solution.
In my view, the most impactful solution lies not in the ships themselves, but in the seas surrounding them. We need to look holistically at our entire city region and determine what it will take to turn suburb into city. And that likely means a whole host of things, ranging from leveraging the infrastructure we already have (i.e. upzoning around transit stations) to embracing autonomous vehicles.
In the end, I don’t think we want cruise ships of urbanity. We need more density, everywhere.
Exclusionary zoning is the use of zoning ordinances to exclude certain types of land uses from a given community, especially to regulate racial and economic diversity. In the United States, exclusionary zoning ordinances are standard in almost all communities. Exclusionary zoning was introduced in the early 1900s, typically to prevent racial and ethnic minorities from moving into middle- and upper-class neighborhoods. Municipalities use zoning to limit the supply of available housing units, such as by prohibiting multi-family residential dwellings or setting minimum lot size requirements.
This is a common way to think about it. Prohibiting multi-family residential is a way to try and keep renters away. And mandating minimum lot sizes is a way to ensure that lots don’t get subdivided and that nobody builds homes of, you know, lesser value.
It’s more or less a way of setting a minimum bar, which is why the term exclusionary zoning is used. If you don’t meet this minimum bar, you are excluded.
Many of you will know my views on this (related post, here). But for the purposes of today’s post, consider this question: Should there also be an upper bound? In other words, should there be things like maximum lot sizes?
Manhattan Beach, California seems to think so, which is why when Rob DeSantis bought three adjacent lots in 2000 for $13 million and proceeded to build a 12,640 square foot home — one that is currently on the market for $150 million — the City reacted by forming a “Mansionization Committee.”
And ultimately they decided, through the passing of a new ordinance, that mansions of this fortitude should not be allowed in Manhattan Beach. It’s just too much.
So it turns out that exclusionary zoning actually cuts both ways. You can be too poor for a particular community. Or, you can be too rich.
“…he took the department through significant reforms: allowing new houses in back laneways, then garden suites; eliminating minimum parking requirements; even legalizing four-unit apartment buildings on any lot in the city.“
All of this was not easy, as anyone in our industry will attest.
I also got to know Gregg, a little, by way of our development projects. And I can say that he (1) genuinely loved our great city and (2) was always looking for ways to make things better, whether that be through planning policy or through processes internal to City Hall.
We have spoken before, here and here, about so-called “use-it-or-lose-it entitlements”.
The catalyst behind this idea — and it is just an idea at this stage, at least here — is the belief that too many developers are sitting idle on zoned land. And they’re allegedly doing this because they believe it will be worth more tomorrow.
Why bother building anything when you can instead just wait and make money that way?
To counteract this speculative force, some believe that one answer is to just strip land of its zoning entitlements if it’s not used within a certain period of time (right now it lasts forever). I get why this is sometimes proposed, but my response to this has consistently been: it’s a terrible idea.
It is a terrible idea because developers are generally always incentivized to move as quickly as possible. And it is a terrible idea because every now and then a period in the cycle will arrive where, it’s not that developers don’t want to build, it’s that many/most can’t.
Back in 2016, the City of Toronto announced plans to run a transit-priority pilot on King Street in the downtown core. What this meant was that cars would be restricted to only certain movements and that streetcars would be given priority. This pilot was ultimately implemented in 2017 and, eventually, it was made permanent. Presumably because it was doing some good for transit flows. But just this week, new data was revealed showing that, in some cases, travel times today are worse (i.e. longer) than they were before the pilot:
CityNews has learned that eastbound travel times from Bathurst to Jarvis during the evening rush hours averaged 19 to 26 minutes before the pilot program in 2017. The latest times show it is now worse with an average of 22 to 29 minutes.
One way to look at this data would be to say, “okay, clearly this transit corridor thing isn’t working. Streetcar travel times have gotten worse. So why bother?” But I think the real answer is this: King Street hasn’t remained a transit corridor since the pilot. Many/most motorists continue to use it, even though some 22,000 tickets have apparently been issued since the pilot began. Here’s a random photo of King Street West taken from my office window one afternoon:
So I think what this data is really saying is that we’ve probably done very little to actually improve transit flows on King Street since 2016, and that traffic has generally gotten worse during this time. This seems like a more accurate description to me. But of course, it doesn’t need to be this way. If really want King Street to be a transit corridor, we have the power to make that happen. It just means spending some money on public realm enhancements, gates, bollards, and the like. The choice is ours.
Many of you probably didn’t click through on this link in yesterday’s post, but it was a link to a book called Emergent Tokyo — Designing the Spontaneous City. What this book is largely about is the idea that Tokyo — usually considered to be the largest urban region in the world — is more the result of bottom-up actions than top-down actions. In other words, it is a kind of complex and self-organizing system.
Some of you may be reading this and thinking that the result would be chaos. But the opposite is, in fact, true. Despite being the largest urban agglomeration in the world, Tokyo is consistently viewed as one of the most livable big cities in the world. How is that possible?
One topic that we’ve been talking about on this blog recently is the planning approach of mandating ground-floor retail in new developments. While certainly good intentioned, this is one example of top-down planning. We are saying, “retail needs to go here because.”
The problem, as we have talked about, is that the market may not want it. It may not actually be viable or desirable. Of course, it is a delicate situation. Because if you don’t provision for it, then you might block it from ever being possible on sites where it clearly makes sense. (We spoke specifically about this, here.)
There is also the opposite question of: where are we not allowing retail?
Maybe there are places where retail activity would be viable today, except it’s currently not permitted. One concrete example of this is Toronto’s laneways. Right now, we only allow residential (throughout our “Neighbourhoods”). But there many people, including myself and planner Blair Scorgie, who have been arguing that they should be mixed-use:
Would office and retail uses actually work in Toronto’s residential laneways? I frankly don’t know. Because they’re not allowed today, it’s largely impossible to know. If we allowed these uses and nothing happened, then we’d have a better idea that there’s little demand for it. (I say a better idea because there still could be other obstacles in the way.)
On the other hand if we decided to mandate non-residential uses in our laneways and nobody did anything, two things might then happen. One, we’d be similarly led to believe that there’s little to no demand. And two, we’d probably be sacrificing the residential use, for which we can say today there is clear demand.
There are also the considerations that demand will almost certainly change over time and be inconsistent across different locations. For instance, maybe retail doesn’t work in this laneway, but it will work in that laneway. Can we actually plan for this?
Top-down approaches generally assume that we know all or many of the answers. It presumes that we know that this street should have ground-floor retail and this street should not. It’s also about control. More bottom-up approaches admit that it’s impossible to plan for everything and that there could be latent potential that we’re not even thinking about.
Of course, there is something naturally unsettling about this approach because it is, by definition, unknowable. And it relinquishes a certain amount of control. Maybe a restaurant will appear here or maybe it won’t. Maybe someone will open a small office in this laneway or maybe they won’t. Either way, the potential for change exists.
But I think this should be seen as empowering, transparent, and highly efficient. It is a way of reducing the barriers to entry and allowing more urban creativity and ambition to shrine through. I believe, for example, that if we made it easier, cheaper, and possible to open a small restaurant (perhaps in a laneway), we would have more and overall better restaurants in the city.
And as we have seen in the case of Tokyo, the result of more flexibility is not necessarily chaos. It can be a highly livable city that has people wondering, “how did they manage to plan such a large city so well?”
The Dutch now believe that the number is 230cm. This is an increase from a previous recommendation of 200cm. The thinking behind this number is roughly as follows. Apparently there are Dutch laws stipulating that bikes can’t be wider than 75cm. So this is the starting point.
But since it’s impossible to always ride in a perfectly straight line, there seems to be a generally accepted rule that, at an absolute minimum, cyclists need about 100cm of width to themselves.
If you now double this so that two people can ride side-by-side, you’re at 200cm. This is an important design criteria because the Dutch also seem to believe that (1) cycling is a social activity and (2) a child should be able to ride beside their parent. (Love this!)
Finally, add in a bit of buffer so there’s room to pass slower cyclists and/or nobody feels like they’re going to crash into oncoming cyclists, and you get to 230cm as the ideal width of a single bike lane.
I’m not sure I had given this much thought before, so I look forward to scrutinizing (and possibly measuring) every bike lane I ride in going forward.
