At the beginning of the year, I wrote this:
The desire to add more housing to single-family neighborhoods will continue to pick up steam across North America. How exactly this plays out will be market specific, but in Toronto I expect to see new planning policies put in place, as well as supportive building code changes.
And this continues to happen. Right now, the City of Toronto is working on making fourplexes permissible in all low-rise neighborhoods across the city.
This is exciting. But it's not done yet. And it's not perfect.
The biggest change that I think still needs to happen is around maximum densities. If we actually want to encourage more missing middle housing, we need to increase the permitted FSIs or, better yet, remove them all together.
Urban planner Sean Galbraith does a good job of explaining this in NRU:
I responded to the city's multiplex survey last night and this was one of my main comments. If you'd also like to voice your opinion, you have until March 10, 2023. Here's the link.
If you drive around the Cottonwood Heights neighborhood in Salt Lake City, which I have done multiple times over the last year, you will invariably see lawn signs shouting for "no gondola!" And the reason for this is that last summer, the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) came forward with its preferred solution to traffic congestion in Little Cottonwood Canyon: an eight-mile long gondola all the way up and into the mountains. If built, this would apparently be the longest and most expensive urban gondola in the world.
To try and explain why this is being recommended, I'll give the example of what happened to us when we were there last week. We drove into Little Cottonwood Canyon on Tuesday morning when it was not snowing. We left Park City around 8am, passed through the valley (Salt Lake City), and arrived at Snowbird (resort) in around 45 minutes. This is normally how long it takes. But on the way up it started snowing, and it didn't stop all day. (Nice!) So our drive home took significantly longer and looked like this (we were going 8-10 miles per hour all the way down):
Knight Frank just published the 17th edition of its annual "The Wealth Report." I have spoken about this report many times before on the blog because I generally find them really interesting. So today I'd like to share two items from this latest one.
The first item is their most recent Prime International Residential Index (PIRI). What this does is track prime residential prices across 100 key city, sun, and ski locations. "Prime", in case you are wondering, is defined as the most desirable and most expensive properties in each market -- generally the top 5%.
Look at Dubai go:
At the beginning of the year, I wrote this:
The desire to add more housing to single-family neighborhoods will continue to pick up steam across North America. How exactly this plays out will be market specific, but in Toronto I expect to see new planning policies put in place, as well as supportive building code changes.
And this continues to happen. Right now, the City of Toronto is working on making fourplexes permissible in all low-rise neighborhoods across the city.
This is exciting. But it's not done yet. And it's not perfect.
The biggest change that I think still needs to happen is around maximum densities. If we actually want to encourage more missing middle housing, we need to increase the permitted FSIs or, better yet, remove them all together.
Urban planner Sean Galbraith does a good job of explaining this in NRU:
I responded to the city's multiplex survey last night and this was one of my main comments. If you'd also like to voice your opinion, you have until March 10, 2023. Here's the link.
If you drive around the Cottonwood Heights neighborhood in Salt Lake City, which I have done multiple times over the last year, you will invariably see lawn signs shouting for "no gondola!" And the reason for this is that last summer, the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) came forward with its preferred solution to traffic congestion in Little Cottonwood Canyon: an eight-mile long gondola all the way up and into the mountains. If built, this would apparently be the longest and most expensive urban gondola in the world.
To try and explain why this is being recommended, I'll give the example of what happened to us when we were there last week. We drove into Little Cottonwood Canyon on Tuesday morning when it was not snowing. We left Park City around 8am, passed through the valley (Salt Lake City), and arrived at Snowbird (resort) in around 45 minutes. This is normally how long it takes. But on the way up it started snowing, and it didn't stop all day. (Nice!) So our drive home took significantly longer and looked like this (we were going 8-10 miles per hour all the way down):
Knight Frank just published the 17th edition of its annual "The Wealth Report." I have spoken about this report many times before on the blog because I generally find them really interesting. So today I'd like to share two items from this latest one.
The first item is their most recent Prime International Residential Index (PIRI). What this does is track prime residential prices across 100 key city, sun, and ski locations. "Prime", in case you are wondering, is defined as the most desirable and most expensive properties in each market -- generally the top 5%.
Look at Dubai go:
This is what happens when it snows in the canyons. Which is why a wise bartender at one of the resorts advised us that, "on powder days, you need to leave the valley at 6AM. Because at some point, some asshole is going to think they can get up the canyon in a Tesla, and they will ruin it for everyone. It's better to nap in your car at the resort than white knuckle for 2-3 hours." During our drive home, we learned that he was not at all joking. This is what happens. And it is why UDOT wants to build one really long urban gondola.
There are, however, some very good reasons why urban gondolas aren't really that common. Portland has one. Medellín has one. And apparently both are quite successful. But other than these examples, they generally aren't thought of as the most effective tool in the transportation arsenal:
Gondolas are low-capacity vehicles that quickly get cramped if turned into high capacity ones. They don’t work well for multiple stops. As a result, they are a point-to-point transportation method with low capacity. They are also expensive, especially relative to how many people they might serve, making them financially unattractive options for most applications. At their best, gondolas work when traversing difficult terrain with a consistent but low ridership, which is why they’re most often deployed on ski resorts.
But this situation is maybe a bit unique. It's kind of urban transport, but really it's for people to get up the canyon and shred deep powder. Here's more on how it might work:
The Cottonwood Canyon gondola would be a hybrid of sorts between urban transportation solution and resort-based gondola. The proposal is to build a massive 2,500-spot parking garage at the base of the canyon, about 20 miles from downtown and the airport, where people will park. They will then ride the gondola for 27 minutes to Snowbird or 37 minutes to Alta, a trip duration which has no parallel in the urban or resort gondola scene (the Snowbird tram, one of the most famous in the world, fits more than 100 people per tram but takes less than 10 minutes to ride). Even though the gondola would serve two ski resorts, it belongs more to the urban gondola concept because it is being proposed and recommended by the state’s transportation department as a solution to a recurring traffic problem.
As a snowboarder, this sounds great. But it is, of course, complicated. Conservation groups are objecting, and some/many taxpayers don't want to pay for a gondola that will largely benefit two ski resorts. Especially one that doesn't permit snowboarders (I made this part up). So we'll see. A final decision is expected by UDOT this summer. In the meantime, if you're interested in urban gondolas, check out this recent article in Vice Magazine by Aaron Gordon (quoted above). He does a good job explaining both sides of this debate. And if you are interested in this topic, I'd be curious to hear whether you think this is a good idea or not.
When I see a chart like this I usually start at the top and then immediately start scanning for Toronto. Here, it's more or less in the middle with a 4.1% increase. Totally reasonable. Prime property in Auckland and Wellington, on the other hand, didn't fair as well in 2022.
The second item is this very wonderful diagram showing flight connectivity before Covid (12 months to March 2020) and then post-Covid (12 months to December 2022):
The way to read this diagram is that the most connected cities -- ranked by the number and quality of flight connections -- get pushed toward the center. They also get bigger. Less connected cities, on the other hand, slide toward the edges. All of the cities also generally gravitate toward their main regional connections.
The most obvious change is the greatly weakened connectivity of Chinese cities. This is not surprising given their zero-Covid approach. Moscow also seems to get rightly pushed out to the side.
Another story is the continued rise of both Singapore (to the likely detriment of Hong Kong) and Dubai. I have only been to Dubai once, and I couldn't figure out how to navigate its sea of roads and highways, or how to locate an actual city center where humans walk around (though the historic Bur Dubai area was interesting).
But there is no denying that Dubai has become a pretty important global city.
This is what happens when it snows in the canyons. Which is why a wise bartender at one of the resorts advised us that, "on powder days, you need to leave the valley at 6AM. Because at some point, some asshole is going to think they can get up the canyon in a Tesla, and they will ruin it for everyone. It's better to nap in your car at the resort than white knuckle for 2-3 hours." During our drive home, we learned that he was not at all joking. This is what happens. And it is why UDOT wants to build one really long urban gondola.
There are, however, some very good reasons why urban gondolas aren't really that common. Portland has one. Medellín has one. And apparently both are quite successful. But other than these examples, they generally aren't thought of as the most effective tool in the transportation arsenal:
Gondolas are low-capacity vehicles that quickly get cramped if turned into high capacity ones. They don’t work well for multiple stops. As a result, they are a point-to-point transportation method with low capacity. They are also expensive, especially relative to how many people they might serve, making them financially unattractive options for most applications. At their best, gondolas work when traversing difficult terrain with a consistent but low ridership, which is why they’re most often deployed on ski resorts.
But this situation is maybe a bit unique. It's kind of urban transport, but really it's for people to get up the canyon and shred deep powder. Here's more on how it might work:
The Cottonwood Canyon gondola would be a hybrid of sorts between urban transportation solution and resort-based gondola. The proposal is to build a massive 2,500-spot parking garage at the base of the canyon, about 20 miles from downtown and the airport, where people will park. They will then ride the gondola for 27 minutes to Snowbird or 37 minutes to Alta, a trip duration which has no parallel in the urban or resort gondola scene (the Snowbird tram, one of the most famous in the world, fits more than 100 people per tram but takes less than 10 minutes to ride). Even though the gondola would serve two ski resorts, it belongs more to the urban gondola concept because it is being proposed and recommended by the state’s transportation department as a solution to a recurring traffic problem.
As a snowboarder, this sounds great. But it is, of course, complicated. Conservation groups are objecting, and some/many taxpayers don't want to pay for a gondola that will largely benefit two ski resorts. Especially one that doesn't permit snowboarders (I made this part up). So we'll see. A final decision is expected by UDOT this summer. In the meantime, if you're interested in urban gondolas, check out this recent article in Vice Magazine by Aaron Gordon (quoted above). He does a good job explaining both sides of this debate. And if you are interested in this topic, I'd be curious to hear whether you think this is a good idea or not.
When I see a chart like this I usually start at the top and then immediately start scanning for Toronto. Here, it's more or less in the middle with a 4.1% increase. Totally reasonable. Prime property in Auckland and Wellington, on the other hand, didn't fair as well in 2022.
The second item is this very wonderful diagram showing flight connectivity before Covid (12 months to March 2020) and then post-Covid (12 months to December 2022):
The way to read this diagram is that the most connected cities -- ranked by the number and quality of flight connections -- get pushed toward the center. They also get bigger. Less connected cities, on the other hand, slide toward the edges. All of the cities also generally gravitate toward their main regional connections.
The most obvious change is the greatly weakened connectivity of Chinese cities. This is not surprising given their zero-Covid approach. Moscow also seems to get rightly pushed out to the side.
Another story is the continued rise of both Singapore (to the likely detriment of Hong Kong) and Dubai. I have only been to Dubai once, and I couldn't figure out how to navigate its sea of roads and highways, or how to locate an actual city center where humans walk around (though the historic Bur Dubai area was interesting).
But there is no denying that Dubai has become a pretty important global city.
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