There was a good discussion on Twitter this morning about small-scale commercial uses in residential neighborhoods, like the coffee shop shown above on Shaw Street. In most residential neighborhoods in Toronto, this kind of commercial activity is not permitted if you were to try and initiate it today. The small convenience stores and bodegas that remain are often legal non-conforming uses. And while generally considered desirable in their current confirm, if you were to try and make a change, you could get caught in some municipal red tape where your grandfathered status suddenly no longer applies.
That is exactly what happened in the case of the above coffee shop and, from the discussions that happened on Twitter this morning, it is a problem that is not unique to Toronto. Alex Bozikovic wrote about this coffee shop and this project in the Globe and Mail over seven years ago. Getting it approved and built was no easy task. And my friend Jeremiah Shamess --
There was a good discussion on Twitter this morning about small-scale commercial uses in residential neighborhoods, like the coffee shop shown above on Shaw Street. In most residential neighborhoods in Toronto, this kind of commercial activity is not permitted if you were to try and initiate it today. The small convenience stores and bodegas that remain are often legal non-conforming uses. And while generally considered desirable in their current confirm, if you were to try and make a change, you could get caught in some municipal red tape where your grandfathered status suddenly no longer applies.
That is exactly what happened in the case of the above coffee shop and, from the discussions that happened on Twitter this morning, it is a problem that is not unique to Toronto. Alex Bozikovic wrote about this coffee shop and this project in the Globe and Mail over seven years ago. Getting it approved and built was no easy task. And my friend Jeremiah Shamess --
who renovated a similar and formerly commercial corner building in the area
-- ran into the exact same challenges.
But let's consider the other side of this argument for a minute. It's easy to look at a great and well-designed neighborhood coffee shop like this one and say to yourself that it is obviously a desirable use and that we should be encouraging more of them in our residential neighborhoods. But what if it was a noisy late-night bar, a nail salon, or a massage parlor? Would your opinion change? Would it change if you were an immediate neighbor? It is perhaps easy to see why the fear of the things we don't want has led us to sterilize our neighborhoods to the point where we no longer allow the things that we may in fact want.
And herein lies the immense frustration that many of us have with our land use policies. There are countless examples of obviously desirable uses and built forms that are exceedingly difficult to execute on because of the barriers that we ourselves have put in place. Whether it's a cool neighborhood coffee shop or new affordable housing, there are far too many examples of these sorts of projects being stuck in some kind of planning ether -- sometimes for decades. We say and know that we want these things, but then it is frequently the case that we can't get out of the way so that they can actually happen.
Every year since 1984, the National Association of Home Builders (in the United States) has commissioned a home with the goal of showcasing new trends and technologies in the industry. At the same time, it also serves as a kind of dream home. This is what one should aspire to achieve. The initiative is called the New American Home (TNAH).
The first home was built in Houston by Village Builders. The architect was Booth/Hansen & Associates and the home was about 1,500 square feet. It cost $80,000. Last year the home was in Montverde, Florida and was about 10,690 square feet (6,676 square feet of air-conditioned space). Not surprisingly, these homes have grown over the decades.
According to a recent New York Times opinion piece by Allison Arieff -- called, The New 'Dream Home' Should be a Condo -- the square footage of this New American Home has been steadily rising:
who renovated a similar and formerly commercial corner building in the area
-- ran into the exact same challenges.
But let's consider the other side of this argument for a minute. It's easy to look at a great and well-designed neighborhood coffee shop like this one and say to yourself that it is obviously a desirable use and that we should be encouraging more of them in our residential neighborhoods. But what if it was a noisy late-night bar, a nail salon, or a massage parlor? Would your opinion change? Would it change if you were an immediate neighbor? It is perhaps easy to see why the fear of the things we don't want has led us to sterilize our neighborhoods to the point where we no longer allow the things that we may in fact want.
And herein lies the immense frustration that many of us have with our land use policies. There are countless examples of obviously desirable uses and built forms that are exceedingly difficult to execute on because of the barriers that we ourselves have put in place. Whether it's a cool neighborhood coffee shop or new affordable housing, there are far too many examples of these sorts of projects being stuck in some kind of planning ether -- sometimes for decades. We say and know that we want these things, but then it is frequently the case that we can't get out of the way so that they can actually happen.
Every year since 1984, the National Association of Home Builders (in the United States) has commissioned a home with the goal of showcasing new trends and technologies in the industry. At the same time, it also serves as a kind of dream home. This is what one should aspire to achieve. The initiative is called the New American Home (TNAH).
The first home was built in Houston by Village Builders. The architect was Booth/Hansen & Associates and the home was about 1,500 square feet. It cost $80,000. Last year the home was in Montverde, Florida and was about 10,690 square feet (6,676 square feet of air-conditioned space). Not surprisingly, these homes have grown over the decades.
According to a recent New York Times opinion piece by Allison Arieff -- called, The New 'Dream Home' Should be a Condo -- the square footage of this New American Home has been steadily rising:
In Athens, I have a learned, there is something known as antiparochi. The practice took hold in the middle of the 20th century at a time when Athens was in desperate need of new housing. Supposedly during the 1950s, an estimated 560,000 people came to Athens from the countryside in search of opportunity -- effectively doubling the population of the city. That was a bit of a problem for a city with no money to build new housing. So something needed to be done. The solution was a ground-up arrangement (i.e. it wasn't a government initiative) that allowed developers and contractors to increase the supply of new housing without having to ever pay for land. And given the time period in which this took hold, it also spurred quite the modernist building boom, leaving an architectural legacy that to this day continues to define Athens.
Here’s how it worked: a contractor would approach the owner of a house and offer him a deal. He would knock down his house, and build a block of flats in its place. In return, the homeowner would be given a certain number of flats (usually two or three), while the contractor would then make his money by selling the remaining flats to Greeks who were seeking accommodation. Generally, no money was exchanged and no contracts were signed.
What’s so incredible about antiparochi is that it emerged spontaneously out of the housing crisis in Athens. “There was no specific law which told people ‘OK now you have the right to collaborate and build whatever you like’. It was the people themselves that found out this possibility,” says Panos Dragonas, professor of Architecture at the University of Patras.
Even more incredibly, the state completely accepted what its citizens had started doing, introducing only a few minor regulations, such as a maximum height for the apartment buildings – known as polykatoikies in Greek – and a ban on building over archaeological sites or on top of Athens’ seven historical hills. There were no property taxes – the state never made any direct income from antiparochi.
The elegance of antiparochi was that it appeared to solve all of Greece’s problems at once. It provided homeowners and home seekers with modern apartments, while creating enough profit for the contractors to continue investing in construction without state subsidies or bank loans.
This is, of course, reflective of what has been happening in the market as a whole. According to Arieff, the average size of a new U.S. home today is about 1,000 square feet larger than it was in 1973. The average space per human has increased from 507 to about 971 square feet. As our wealth has grown we have naturally become more consumptive.
But as Arieff asks in her article:
What if the next New American Home was a condo? And what if there was a new American dream, not of auto-dependent suburbia, but walkable urbanism?
She then contrasts last year's 10,000 square foot "Tuscan style" New American Home against this 6 unit urban infill condo project in Los Angeles, where the average home is about 1,800 square feet and the building in its entirety is around 11,000 square feet.
In Athens, I have a learned, there is something known as antiparochi. The practice took hold in the middle of the 20th century at a time when Athens was in desperate need of new housing. Supposedly during the 1950s, an estimated 560,000 people came to Athens from the countryside in search of opportunity -- effectively doubling the population of the city. That was a bit of a problem for a city with no money to build new housing. So something needed to be done. The solution was a ground-up arrangement (i.e. it wasn't a government initiative) that allowed developers and contractors to increase the supply of new housing without having to ever pay for land. And given the time period in which this took hold, it also spurred quite the modernist building boom, leaving an architectural legacy that to this day continues to define Athens.
Here’s how it worked: a contractor would approach the owner of a house and offer him a deal. He would knock down his house, and build a block of flats in its place. In return, the homeowner would be given a certain number of flats (usually two or three), while the contractor would then make his money by selling the remaining flats to Greeks who were seeking accommodation. Generally, no money was exchanged and no contracts were signed.
What’s so incredible about antiparochi is that it emerged spontaneously out of the housing crisis in Athens. “There was no specific law which told people ‘OK now you have the right to collaborate and build whatever you like’. It was the people themselves that found out this possibility,” says Panos Dragonas, professor of Architecture at the University of Patras.
Even more incredibly, the state completely accepted what its citizens had started doing, introducing only a few minor regulations, such as a maximum height for the apartment buildings – known as polykatoikies in Greek – and a ban on building over archaeological sites or on top of Athens’ seven historical hills. There were no property taxes – the state never made any direct income from antiparochi.
The elegance of antiparochi was that it appeared to solve all of Greece’s problems at once. It provided homeowners and home seekers with modern apartments, while creating enough profit for the contractors to continue investing in construction without state subsidies or bank loans.
This is, of course, reflective of what has been happening in the market as a whole. According to Arieff, the average size of a new U.S. home today is about 1,000 square feet larger than it was in 1973. The average space per human has increased from 507 to about 971 square feet. As our wealth has grown we have naturally become more consumptive.
But as Arieff asks in her article:
What if the next New American Home was a condo? And what if there was a new American dream, not of auto-dependent suburbia, but walkable urbanism?
She then contrasts last year's 10,000 square foot "Tuscan style" New American Home against this 6 unit urban infill condo project in Los Angeles, where the average home is about 1,800 square feet and the building in its entirety is around 11,000 square feet.
