I have a new favorite blog that I think you might all enjoy as well. It’s called BT | A | Works and it is the “architectural and urban research and development division” of Bing Thom Architects in Vancouver.
I think it’s it’s important to have people in a firm who are researching and experimenting with ideas beyond the day-to-day tasks of a job. So I was excited to discover their work this morning.
Their most recent post is a look at ownership patterns of single family homes sold in 3 west end neighborhoods in Vancouver from September 2014 to February 2015 (a 6 month period). These are some of the most expensive areas in the city and, collectively, they found 172 properties sold with an aggregate value of around $520 million.
Given the presence of foreign buyers in Vancouver’s real estate market, one of the things they then did was identify “non-anglicized Chinese names” on the title records. This means names like “Li Xian”, but not names like “Andrew Shui-Him Yan”, because the anglicized first name suggests that they are probably not a new immigrant or probably not living abroad.
Here’s what they found:
In total, 66% of the properties in the sample (172 properties) were associated with a non-anglicized Chinese name. And for properties over $5 million, the percentage jumps to 88%. The other interesting thing worth noting is that 23% of the registered owners declared their occupation as “homemaker/housewife.”
I thought this would serve as an interesting follow-up to the post I wrote about a month ago called, Is Hongcouver better off than Vancouver? If you’d like to see the full BT | A | Works presentation, click here.
We all know that city building is a multi-disciplinary endeavour. That’s why I was incredibly interested to learn about a new “Artist-in-Residence” program that Los Angeles is launching:
The Honorable Mayor Eric Garcetti, is pleased to announce the first collaboration between two City of Los Angeles departments to place an artist in residence in a department to serve as a Creative Catalyst who will develop creative intervention strategies to achieve department specific goals. The Creative Catalyst Artist in Residence Program will serve as a model to stimulate creative thinking and innovative projects, while supporting Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Back to Basics priority outcomes: to make our city livable / sustainable, prosperous, safe, and well-run.
Cities are complex organisms. And some of you might be wondering how artists can help city build. But this is about bringing different minds together, thinking across disciplines and, hopefully, leveraging design thinking to solve urban problems. And LA is not the only city to try this approach.
In my view, it’s not that dissimilar from the trend around “Designer-in-Residence” programs at venture capital firms and startup incubators. Cities, businesses, and many other organizations are recognizing that the way artists and designers think can be of tremendous value.
So if you’re an artist who lives and/or works in LA, this might be something worth considering. You have until this Friday, November 6th, 2015 to apply.
Wharton real estate professor, Mariaflavia Harari, recently published a paper that looks at the relationship between urban geometry (specifically compactness) and inner city commuting efficiency across 450 cities in India.
Consistent with previous research done in this space, she finds that people generally prefer compact cities and that they are willing to pay a premium for it. It increases overall welfare. Here’s an excerpt from her paper:
“My findings are broadly consistent with compact city shape being a consumption amenity. All else being equal, more compact cities grow faster. There is also evidence that consumers are paying a premium for living in more compact cities, in terms of lower wages and, possibly, higher housing rents.”
So her recommendations for the Indian cities she analyzed was that they should relax land use restrictions to allow for more vertical / compact development and that they should focus on improving urban transport in order to offset some of the negatives externalities associated with sprawl. This is no different than the approach that many cities in the developing world are adopting or looking to adopt.
One of things that really stood out for me in her paper though is the way people perceive commuting:
“The loss associated with non-compact shape appears to be substantial: a one-standard deviation deterioration in city shape, corresponding to a 720 meter increase in the average within-city round-trip, entails a welfare loss equivalent to a 5% decrease in income. This is considerably larger than the direct monetary and opportunity cost associated to lengthier commutes. Less compact cities also appear to attract fewer low-income immigrants, as captured by the share of slum dwellers.”
What this is saying is that we tend to overvalue the negatives of commuting, beyond the direct costs of gas, insurance, car payments, our time, and so on. We hate it so much that we also want to be compensated for the mental anguish. Here is that same idea said differently:
The estimated welfare loss from longer commutes appears to be large, relative to the immediate time and monetary costs of commuting. This is consistent with the interpretation that commuting is perceived as a particularly burdensome activity. The behavioral literature has come to similar conclusions, albeit in the context of developed countries. Stutzer and Frey (2008) find a large and robust negative relation between commuting time and subjective wellbeing, using German data. They estimate that individuals commuting 23 minutes one way would have to earn 19 percent more per month, on average, in order to be fully compensated.
So I guess I’m not the only one who thinks commuting and driving sucks.