I was out on College Street this week for our team Christmas dinner, and on my way to the restaurant I passed the southeast corner of College and Euclid. Specifically, 533 College Street, pictured above. And as I was passing by, I immediately thought to myself, "my god, this is a really beautiful corner and building."
Now, I know the building. I've been in it before. It's about 3,500 m2. And in 2022, WZMH Architects (who is also the Architect of Record for One Delisle) completed a renovation of it for Akelius. But it was looking particularly beautiful the other night.
Liu Loqum Atelier (a Turkish bakery) is now in the ground floor retail space and they did a wonderful job with their fit out. The entire space was glowing and the ground floor felt grand.
The building itself is also just a bit taller than what you typically find on Toronto's main streets, and that gives the entire street a more urban feel. I'd argue that it's not tall enough, but still, it gives you the feeling of an urban fabric with a bit more grandeur.
So in the end, I came away thinking about how much better Toronto will be once we have more buildings akin to this one, all across the city. Add in some more floors (with no stepbacks, of course) and you have a tried-and-true urban formula that is hard to beat.
Photos via WZMH
As a follow-up to yesterday's post about infill housing and overall urban densities, let's look at some basic math.
The City of Toronto has an estimated population of 3,025,647 (as of June 2023) and a land area of 630 square meters. That means that its average population density is about 4,803 people per km2. Obviously this number will be higher in some locations, and lower in others. But overall, this is the average.
Now let's consider how many people we could actually fit within the existing boundaries of the city (city proper not the metro area) if we were to simply match the average population densities of some other global cities around the world.
Again, what this chart is saying is that if we took the same physical area (Toronto's 630 square meters) and just increased the population density to that of, say, Paris, we would then have a total population of over 13 million people and we'd be housing an additional 10,011,573 humans on the same footprint.
I am not suggesting that this is exactly what should be done. (Though, you all know how much I love Paris.) What I'm suggesting is that calling a place "full" isn't exactly accurate. How would you even measure that? What someone is really saying is that they are content with the status quo in terms of built form and density.
Note: The above population densities were all taken from Wikipedia, except for Toronto's figures, which were taken from here.
On July 1 of this year, a new California bill, called the "Affordable Housing and High Road Jobs Act of 2022", will go into effect. And the goal of this legislation is to significantly increase the supply of new homes in the state by allowing multi-family construction on lands that are currently zoned for commercial uses.
On some level, it is of course curious that there even needs to be this bill. Because what we are effectively saying is, "hey, we should allow people to build a mix of uses on our main streets and with high enough densities that we might actually be able to support transit." Why was this not always the case? (Rhetorical question.)
In the words of architect and planner Peter Calthorpe, who was recently interviewed here in ArchDaily, this is a "landmark piece of legislation" that has "received very little attention." So that's why we're talking about it today.
Calthorpe was actively involved in crafting this legislation, and his work apparently started with different scenario land-use models. The first experiment looked at a 43-mile stretch of El Camino running from San Francisco to San Jose (pictured below). And what they found was that this one strip alone could accommodate somewhere around 250,000 new infill homes.
I was out on College Street this week for our team Christmas dinner, and on my way to the restaurant I passed the southeast corner of College and Euclid. Specifically, 533 College Street, pictured above. And as I was passing by, I immediately thought to myself, "my god, this is a really beautiful corner and building."
Now, I know the building. I've been in it before. It's about 3,500 m2. And in 2022, WZMH Architects (who is also the Architect of Record for One Delisle) completed a renovation of it for Akelius. But it was looking particularly beautiful the other night.
Liu Loqum Atelier (a Turkish bakery) is now in the ground floor retail space and they did a wonderful job with their fit out. The entire space was glowing and the ground floor felt grand.
The building itself is also just a bit taller than what you typically find on Toronto's main streets, and that gives the entire street a more urban feel. I'd argue that it's not tall enough, but still, it gives you the feeling of an urban fabric with a bit more grandeur.
So in the end, I came away thinking about how much better Toronto will be once we have more buildings akin to this one, all across the city. Add in some more floors (with no stepbacks, of course) and you have a tried-and-true urban formula that is hard to beat.
Photos via WZMH
As a follow-up to yesterday's post about infill housing and overall urban densities, let's look at some basic math.
The City of Toronto has an estimated population of 3,025,647 (as of June 2023) and a land area of 630 square meters. That means that its average population density is about 4,803 people per km2. Obviously this number will be higher in some locations, and lower in others. But overall, this is the average.
Now let's consider how many people we could actually fit within the existing boundaries of the city (city proper not the metro area) if we were to simply match the average population densities of some other global cities around the world.
Again, what this chart is saying is that if we took the same physical area (Toronto's 630 square meters) and just increased the population density to that of, say, Paris, we would then have a total population of over 13 million people and we'd be housing an additional 10,011,573 humans on the same footprint.
I am not suggesting that this is exactly what should be done. (Though, you all know how much I love Paris.) What I'm suggesting is that calling a place "full" isn't exactly accurate. How would you even measure that? What someone is really saying is that they are content with the status quo in terms of built form and density.
Note: The above population densities were all taken from Wikipedia, except for Toronto's figures, which were taken from here.
On July 1 of this year, a new California bill, called the "Affordable Housing and High Road Jobs Act of 2022", will go into effect. And the goal of this legislation is to significantly increase the supply of new homes in the state by allowing multi-family construction on lands that are currently zoned for commercial uses.
On some level, it is of course curious that there even needs to be this bill. Because what we are effectively saying is, "hey, we should allow people to build a mix of uses on our main streets and with high enough densities that we might actually be able to support transit." Why was this not always the case? (Rhetorical question.)
In the words of architect and planner Peter Calthorpe, who was recently interviewed here in ArchDaily, this is a "landmark piece of legislation" that has "received very little attention." So that's why we're talking about it today.
Calthorpe was actively involved in crafting this legislation, and his work apparently started with different scenario land-use models. The first experiment looked at a 43-mile stretch of El Camino running from San Francisco to San Jose (pictured below). And what they found was that this one strip alone could accommodate somewhere around 250,000 new infill homes.
To put this into context, the state of California is currently building about 140,000 new homes each year, through a roughly equal (1:1) split of multi-family and low-rise single-family. Already this represents a shift, as supply used to be slanted (3:1) toward low-rise. (I don't know when exactly this was the case, but Calthorpe mentions the figure in his interview.)
Moving on from El Camino, Calthorpe and his team then ran a similar exercise for the five-county inner Bay area. And here they found that some 700 miles of commercial land could produce up to 1.3 million multi-family homes at "reasonable densities." This was then expanded to the entire state of California and the number increased to 10 million new homes.
Of course, as we have talked about before on this blog, not all of this land might actually be feasible for development. Sometimes the math doesn't work even at a zero land cost; you might need a negative land cost in order to pencil a new development. Meaning, you might need to be paid, perhaps through some sort of subsidy.
So what Calthorpe and the team did was use MapCraft to quickly run development feasibilities on the above sites. They had it run 6 different pro formas using local rents, construction costs, city fees, and so on. And what they determined was that this 10 million number drops down to 2 million when you apply the economic realities of the world.
As a disclaimer, I'm not at all familiar with MapCraft. But I'm going to take this number at face value and say that this is still a lot of new homes. And this is what people are hoping for come July 1 of this year.
Image: HDR / Peter Calthorpe
To put this into context, the state of California is currently building about 140,000 new homes each year, through a roughly equal (1:1) split of multi-family and low-rise single-family. Already this represents a shift, as supply used to be slanted (3:1) toward low-rise. (I don't know when exactly this was the case, but Calthorpe mentions the figure in his interview.)
Moving on from El Camino, Calthorpe and his team then ran a similar exercise for the five-county inner Bay area. And here they found that some 700 miles of commercial land could produce up to 1.3 million multi-family homes at "reasonable densities." This was then expanded to the entire state of California and the number increased to 10 million new homes.
Of course, as we have talked about before on this blog, not all of this land might actually be feasible for development. Sometimes the math doesn't work even at a zero land cost; you might need a negative land cost in order to pencil a new development. Meaning, you might need to be paid, perhaps through some sort of subsidy.
So what Calthorpe and the team did was use MapCraft to quickly run development feasibilities on the above sites. They had it run 6 different pro formas using local rents, construction costs, city fees, and so on. And what they determined was that this 10 million number drops down to 2 million when you apply the economic realities of the world.
As a disclaimer, I'm not at all familiar with MapCraft. But I'm going to take this number at face value and say that this is still a lot of new homes. And this is what people are hoping for come July 1 of this year.
Image: HDR / Peter Calthorpe
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
