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.
Whenever you’re starting to feel like real estate prices in your city are getting out of hand, just turn your attention to New York. It’ll make you feel better.
The New York Times published an interactive overview of the Manhattan real estate market today. It was spurred on by the fact that the average residential sale price in Manhattan just hit $1.7 million (a new record) and that there’s a growing number of 8-figure apartments being bought up.
Last year half a dozen apartments sold for more than $50 million in the One57 tower at 157 West 57th Street. (The New York Times calls this building the “undisputed center of Manhattan residential extravagance.”)
Here’s one of their diagrams showing the number of residential sales over $10 million in 2009 and then in 2015:
And here’s another one of their diagrams showing the bottom and top 10% of the current market:
It’s interesting to see the clustering in certain areas and also the lack of clustering at the high end around the top of Central Park.
In his words, Toronto has become the success story that it is precisely because we are good at taking in lots of immigrants and making them economically productive.
Sure, there are many things that we could be doing better, but you don’t get to be the most multicultural city on the planet without doing a lot of things right. More than half of this city is now foreign born. The term “visible minority” is quickly expiring.
And more than anything else, this accomplishment is arguably what has allowed us to become the global city that we are. Click here for a fascinating chart from the Toronto Star that allows you to see the number and source of immigrants that have come to this city over the last half century.
But of course, Toronto is not alone in this accomplishment.
Urban economist Edward Glaeser wrote a great essay back in 2005 called Urban Colossus: Why is New York America’s Largest City? It’s an incredibly interesting read for those of you interested in cities and so I definitely recommend it.
But the crux of his argument is that New York is the largest and most dominant city in America because of geography – specifically its deep harbor – and because of its success in manufacturing.
What this meant is that New York became the center of shipping in the country and the point of entry for the majority of immigrants coming into the United States. But since transportation costs were still relatively high at the time, most immigrants arrived in New York and stayed in New York.
Luckily, New York had a robust manufacturing economy – notably because of sugar refining, publishing and printing, and the garment industry. This allowed the waves of immigrants flooding into New York to become economically productive.
From 1850 to 1920, the population of the New York grew about 800% from roughly 700,000 people to over 5.6 million people.
So the moral of the story is simply that immigration has and will continue to play a pivotal role in the shaping of our cities. Canada has a sub-replacement fertility rate somewhere around 1.61 births per woman (2012). This is lower than that of United States, which is around 1.88 births per woman.
That means that without immigration, we do not grow. We shrink. And that’s usually not a great thing for economies.
We’ve been talking about a lot of heavy topics here on Architect This City lately. Everything from the contentious Gardiner Expressway East to minimum population densities to density creep.
So today I thought we could talk about something a bit more fun: architecture.
When I was in New York last weekend, one of the buildings that was on my must-see list was the now under construction West 57th Street by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. See photo above. (It also happens to be at the exact location where the West Side Highway transitions from elevated to surface boulevard.)
This is supposedly the first North American project for Bjarke Ingels (he also has a project in Vancouver now). And if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that I’m a fan of his work. His diagrams and storytelling ability were a big inspiration for me when I was in architecture school.
The concept behind the project was to create a new hybrid building typology, one that is a cross between the typical European perimeter block building and the North American skyscraper. And the result is pretty wild.
Here’s a video in case you aren’t familiar with the project. Click here if you can’t see it below.
I am writing this post on a Porter flight from New York back to Toronto.
For my last day in New York, my close friend and I rented scooters and rode all around Manhattan and Brooklyn. It was a great way to cover a lot of ground, but also a great way to still absorb the city. It’s harder to do the latter in a car and I never have any desire to drive in New York.
Because the great thing about New York is that as a pedestrian you feel like you control the streets. When you’re waiting at a crosswalk, you’re never actually waiting. You walk off the sidewalk and onto the street so that you can assert yourself in front of the cars and wait for an opening. This serves to narrow the portion of road that the cars can actually drive on and reminds the drivers who is boss.
At the same time, there are many instances throughout the city where New York has purposefully reallocated the space dedicated to pedestrians (and cyclists) and the space dedicated to cars. They’ve created new public spaces, widened the areas where people can walk, and seemingly blanketed the city with bike lanes. And that makes a lot of sense given that in many (most?) areas of the city, pedestrians greatly outnumber cars.
So does that mean New York is at war with the car? (I’d be curious to know – in the comment section below – if those kinds of discussions take place in the city.)
I suppose you could spin it that way. But New York also does things for cars. While riding around on the scooter today, I was so impressed by how well timed the streetlights were along the avenues. It made it incredibly easy to go downtown or uptown. In Toronto, I often feel like we time our lights to make driving as slow as possible.
But make no mistake; New York is not a driving city.
New York is about walking, biking, taking transit, and hailing cabs. There is a reason they have the highest transit ridership in the US. The city is built for it. And unless driverless cars and ride sharing completely changes the equation, I will continue to believe that transit is the most efficient backbone for any big city.
I just stumbled upon a fascinating documentary series called Real Scenes. Each film explores “the musical, cultural and creative climate” within a particular city.
Below is Real Scenes: New York (click here if you can’t see it below). It’s an inside look at the underground music scene that has developed in Brooklyn, but that is at the same time being threatened by development and rising rents. Disclaimer: There’s a lot of f-bombs and a lot of hating on gentrification.
I’ve only watched the New York video from this series, but I plan to watch each and every one of them. The other cities are Tokyo, Johannesburg, Paris, Berlin, Detroit, and Bristol.
What’s fascinating about these short documentaries is that they give you a glimpse into a particular undertone within each city – one that would otherwise be hard to get if you weren’t living there and engrossed in the scene.
It’s also interesting to see how some people view change within cities.
To some, transforming a neighborhood from one that looks like a “bomb went off” to something more pristine, is a good thing. But to others, it’s the worst possible outcome. It all depends on your frame of reference.
Now, how do I get them to make a Real Scenes: Toronto? 🙂
In 1980, the last train ran on an elevated corridor on the west side of Manhattan known as the High Line. Originally built in the 1930s, the trucking industry had made these trains obsolete and service was halted.
At this point, neighboring property owners began to lobby for the demolition of the High Line, as they no doubt saw it as an opportunity to increase the value of their land holdings. But thanks to local residents – most notably a man by the name of Peter Obletz – the 1.45 mile-long elevated rail corridor was saved from demolition.
In 1999, Joshua David and Robert Hammond then decided to form a non-profit with the goal of both preserving and reusing this unused rail corridor. The group was called Friends of the High Line.
By the early 2000s, Friends of the High Line had successfully made an economic case for transforming the rail line into a public open space and things started moving forward. Initially, it was thought that a public park of this sorts would attract about 400,000 people annually and generate upwards of $286 million in new tax revenues over the following 2 decades (Globe and Mail).
With these expectations in mind, construction on the new High Line Park began in 2006. The first section opened in 2009 – a decade after Friends of the High Line was formed. And the third, and last section, opened just two weekends ago at the end of September.
Today the High Line Park attracts 5 million visitors a year and is believed to be directly responsible for about $2.2 billion in new economic activity. The increased tax revenues over the next 2 decades are expected to reach about $980 million. Without a doubt, the High Line has been a huge success. It has become the 2nd most visited cultural attraction in New York (Globe and Mail).
Which is why every city now wants their own High Line. Philadelphia wants one. Chicago wants one. Mexico City wants one. Seoul wants one. And the list goes on. Here in Toronto, we’ve recently proposed one called the King High Line, which will connect the Liberty Village and West Queen West neighborhoods across a rail corridor.
While I do believe that this is an important connectivity problem to be solved, I worry about how explicit the references are to the actual High Line. Even the street furniture is the same in their promotional video.
I worry not only because it means we’re clearly taking on the role of follower, as opposed to leader, but because an elevated park isn’t going to work in all urban contexts the same way that the High Line worked in Chelsea. This is similar to how Frank Gehry can’t magically turn your city into the next Bilbao.
So while I have shown my support by becoming a “Friend of the King High Line” (and I would encourage you to do so as well), it’s important to keep in mind that the problems we’re trying to solve here aren’t necessarily the same ones that New York had to deal with.
The High Line – from the start – was designed to have an intimate relationship with its surrounding buildings. The tracks rain directly through them so that the trains could easily load and unload their cargo – that was the whole point. So when the High Line was redone, all of a sudden these buildings were able to reconnect themselves to the park in a way that they were already accustomed to doing.
But in Toronto’s situation, and perhaps in your city, that’s not the case. We’re talking about stitching together two completely disconnected neighborhoods. It’s a noble goal and certainly one that I wholeheartedly believe we should pursue. But I don’t think we should assume that it’s a problem that has already been completely solved for us.
New York photographer Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao has an upcoming solo exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York next month called Assembled Realities. I just heard about it through CityLab.
Pushing the boundaries of traditional documentary photography, Liao (b. 1977) creates large-scale panoramas by combining multiple exposures of the same location taken over the course of several hours. The resulting composite photographs are often fantastical; complex, hyper-real views that no single shot—or the eye—could capture.
I love how his photos begin to distort reality and how they focus your attention – in many cases – on New York’s vibrant street life. I thought you might all enjoy them as well.
Right now, I’m sitting on the sun deck at my friend’s cottage and looking out at the Georgian Bay. So this is going to be a short post. The New York Times just published a stunning photo series of hidden rooftop pools and gardens in New York. All of the photos were taken from a helicopter. If you’re as fascinated by cities as I am, I think you’ll really like them.
I’ve spoken about the term YIMBY before and this site is exactly that: a site dedicated to “saying yes in my back yard” to new development in New York. It was founded by 23 year old Nikolai Fedak and currently receives 75,000 monthly visitors. He has plans to expand to other cities and I’ve already emailed him to see if he has any plans for a Toronto YIMBY.
At a time when it’s common to hate on developers and new developments, it’s refreshing to see a site dedicated to the exact opposite. That’s not to say that all developments are good (New York YIMBY has no problem blasting the ones that suck, as it should), but it’s certainly framing development as a positive thing for cities.
In growing cities like New York and Toronto, development is going to happen. And so I would rather we focus on how to make it happen in the best way possible instead of just saying no.
A friend of mine who lives in New York recently sent me this interesting article: “The Perverse Effects of Rent Regulation.” And he sent it to me, because he wanted me to take note of this stat:
There are, effectively, two rental markets in Manhattan. Roughly half the apartments are under rent regulation, public housing or some other government program. That leaves everyone else to compete for the half with rents determined by the market.
50% is a big number. I would never have guessed that the New York rental market would be split in such a way. But it is split because it’s fairly clear what would happen if it weren’t:
“Poor people would be priced out of Manhattan,” he says. “Period.”
This, as the article argues, could threaten the diversity that has made New York the economic and cultural hub that it is today. But at the same time, there are a number of important questions: Is 50% the right split? And are the control mechanisms in place the right kind of mechanisms? Should rent controls be attached to people as opposed to apartments, which is how it’s typically done today?
Diversity is hugely important and there will always be a portion of any city’s population that cannot afford market rents. But intuitively, and I could be wrong, 50% seems high. It seems high because these types of rent regulations achieve the exact opposite for the balance of the market that has to pay market rents: their apartments become more expensive.
I’ve been having a lot of discussions lately about affordable housing and rent control always comes up. I think that in a lot of cities there needs to be some sort of intervention in the market to keep them from becoming homogenous playgrounds for the rich. But I also believe that many policies–which may sound great in theory–can have unintended market consequences. These need to be seriously looked at.
