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.
There are over 8 million people living in New York City. And if you were to look at the modal split for these people — that is, how they get to work and how they get around — you’ll see that other than Staten Island, the majority of New York City does not rely on cars.
They walk, bike, take transit, and probably use other things like electric scooters. And in Manhattan, the number of people who drive is particularly low.
So if you were tasked with coming up with an equitable way to allocate street space, one logical way to do it would be to allocate based on usage. If 5% of people are driving and 95% of people are doing things that require walking, maybe these are the numbers to use.
The problem, of course, is that cars take up a lot more space than humans and so the math gets a little more nuanced than just a straight 5/95 split.
And if you look at how most cities have decided to allocate space, this problem is reflected. In the case of New York City, about 75% of its street space is used for cars and the balance is for people to walk around and do stuff (see below chart from The Guardian).
Because of this mismatch, New York has just launched a new proposal called NYC 25×25.
The proposal is pretty simple. It is to take 25% of the space that is currently allocated to cars and convert it into space for walking, plazas, green spaces, bus lanes, and dedicated cycle paths (see above chart once more). And the plan is to get it all done by 2025, which seems entirely doable.
It’s hard to think of a better North American candidate for a shift like this than New York City. It is a city that is already heavily reliant on transit and other forms of mobility. But of course, we shouldn’t stop here.
The US Bureau of Transportation Statistics has just published some recent data looking at average trip distances across the country. What it allows you to do is drill down to the county level and see exactly how many trips people take that are less than 1 mile, between 1-3 miles, between 3-5 miles, and so on. This is interesting, in my view, for two reasons.
One, it showcases the fact that most of our trips tend to be short ones (a trip is defined as being away from your home for more than 10 minutes). If you look at the data you’ll immediately see this, which is, of course, a pretty good argument for trying to encourage other forms of mobility besides driving.
And two, it is yet another example of how much data our mobile phones are constantly off-gassing. I mean, how do you determine where someone’s home is so that you know when they’re taking a 10 minute trip away from it? You figure out where their phone spends long periods of time (particularly at night) and you likely have that person’s home.
What would be even more interesting to see is how this data correlates with built form. In other words, to what extent are higher densities inversely correlated with trip distances? This should certainly be the case, but it would be cool to see the data.
Slate Asset Management, RAD Marketing, and the top producing brokers for One Delisle were fortunate enough to be able to tour a Studio Gang-designed project in Amsterdam today called the Q Residences. A huge thanks to the developers — Kroonenberg Groep and Neoo — for their time and hospitality this afternoon.
Here are two photos of the exterior:
The building, which is a mixed-income rental apartment, is still under construction, and occupancy is expected sometime this fall. The structure is poured-in-place concrete, but the balconies were all pre-fabricated and installed on site. You can tell this by looking near the top of the above photo.
Here are a few other interesting takeaways from the tour:
– 40% of the complex is social housing (which is housed in an entirely separate but similarly impressive building); this is a mandatory requirement
– The land is owned by the city and is being leased to the developers; the lease rate was discounted to account for the social housing requirement
– The entire building uses in-floor heating and cooling, so there are no ducts or bulkheads in any of the suites (slabs are all about 300mm to accommodate this)
– The balconies all have a rainwater collection system, which is mounted and concealed on the exterior of the building (it rarely goes below freezing here I am told)
– The parking ratio for cars is very roughly about 0.5 per unit and the bicycle parking ratio is very roughly 3 per unit (remember this is the bicycle capital of the world)
– Structural system is mostly shear walls; they also have some post-tensioning in the slabs
– Less reliance on metal wall studs; instead they use a more expensive block-like system that offers more rigidity and better sound attenuation (I will look for the exact specification)
– There is also this odd/interesting requirement that all of the suites have an operable window that can provide both natural ventilation and sound attenuation; in other words, it needs to let air in and block sound at the same time
Here’s what that looks like at Q Residences:
We don’t have a requirement like this in Toronto and so that’s why I used the word odd. We have ventilation and sound requirements, but they don’t need to be solved simultaneously in this same way.
Why I also think this is interesting is because I think it speaks to a greater reliance on natural ventilation over active mechanical systems. In Toronto, the underlying thinking is that if it’s too hot and noisy, it’s just a matter of shutting your windows and turning on the AC.
Of course, we obviously we have to manage around a very different climate, so I don’t mean this as a criticism of Toronto codes. It’s just an observation.
If you aren’t familiar with the Q Residences, or the work of Neoo and Kroonenberg, I would encourage you to search around online. The project is gorgeous and so is the rest of their work.
It was explained to me this week that Paris has two principal towers: The Eiffel Tower and the awful tower. The awful tower is, of course, the Tour Montparnasse. Completed in 1973, the Tour Montparnasse is tall, brown, monolithic, and seemingly out of place with the rest of Paris’ urban context. At the time of its completion it was the tallest building in Paris and it remains the tallest building outside of La Defense (business district).
But the Eiffel Tower is also tall. In fact, it’s taller. So how is it that the Eiffel Tower became such a symbol for Paris and the Tour Montparnasse became the “awful tower?” Both were intended to represent modernity (at their respective times) and both were controversial at the time of their construction.
Today people respond to these two towers very differently. Is it because the Eiffel Tower is set in a beautiful park and more separated from its urban context? Or is it because the Eiffel Tower has had almost another 100 years to settle in. It’s not exactly clear. But we do know that as humans we have a bias toward the status quo. And so I like to think of change in the following way:
– There’s change that people immediately like
– There’s change that people hate and will always hate
– And there’s change that people initially hate but will eventually like
The Eiffel Tower, you could argue, falls into category number three. It was big, modern, and alarmingly different when it was built at the end of the 19th century. But now people seem to like it. I know this based on the number of street vendors selling little replicas. For the record, I have yet to see little replicas of the Tour Montparnasse sitting on blankets on the street. I’m a buyer if I do come across one though.
But is it really right to place Montparnasse into category number two? Could it be that it just needs more time to settle in and then it will ultimately move into number three? Maybe. In 2017, an international design competition was held to find an architect for the redesign of the tower. Studio Gang submitted an entry. But Nouvelle AOM was ultimately selected.
I wasn’t part of the selections committee, but I think a good way to evaluate the success of this project will be whether or not it moves the tower into category three. That is, people start to like it. Then maybe Paris will become known as a city of two towers, as opposed to a city with one nice one and one awful one.
I have remarked this before, but I’ll say it again anyways: sneakers are very popular in Paris. Everybody seems to be wearing cool and colorful sneakers, regardless of what the rest of their outfit happens to look like.
Full business suit? Why yes, you should be wearing cool sneakers.
But why is that?
Paris is a famously walkable city. At any given time, you’re on average just about 500m from the closest subway station. So my entirely unproven sneaker theory is this: shoes follow built form.
If you build a city around people walking everywhere, one will ultimately choose the most appropriate kind of footwear.
This is a great diagram from Smart Density comparing the urban and regional rail networks of Toronto, London, and Paris. All are at the same scale.
What immediately stands out to me — besides Toronto’s relatively miniscule network — is Paris’ compactness. I have said this before on the blog (here, here, and here), but I will say it again: There seems to be a tendency to fetishize the scale and height of Paris.
But building height is only one component of its ubiquitous built form. Unlike Toronto, we’re not talking about midrises built up against single-family homes. Paris is far more dense and its buildings are far closer together (usually with interior courtyards)
The typical way to measure carbon emissions is to think about it in terms of geography. You pick a particular place, such as a country or a city. You add up all the emissions that are taking place within its boundaries. And you’re then left with a territorial carbon footprint. If you’ve done any research on carbon emissions or climate change, you’ve likely encountered this method of accounting for carbon.
But there’s a flaw with this logic.
The problem with this method is that it considers each geography to being more or less independent. For example, let’s say you live in Philadelphia and you happen to be the owner of something called a computer. With territorial accounting, the carbon emissions associated with you powering your computer would get attributed to Philadelphia and the emissions associated with the actual production of the computer would get attributed to wherever it was made. Let’s say it was China.
One of the problems with this approach is that it penalizes the places that make a lot of stuff and it privileges the places that don’t make as much stuff, even if they may actually be the consumers of far more stuff. This might make you feel better about your life decisions if you happen to live in a dense urban knowledge economy that doesn’t really make anything physical — but is it entirely accurate?
An alternative measurement approach is consumption-based carbon accounting. The goal here is to capture all lifecycle emissions associated with a particular good or service, and then attribute it back to the consumer that arguably triggered the emissions. In the case of our Philadelphia computer example, the emissions associated with the production, transportation, and consumption of the computer would also get attributed locally to Philadelphia, instead of to China.
This more complex method of carbon accounting — which is something that the University of Pennsylvania has been working on over here (hence the Philadelphia computer example) — can be instructive for a whole host of reasons. It also has some relevance to city building.
It is widely understood that building up is more sustainable than building out. Because when you build out, you end up doing things like forcing people into cars. But the other side of this equation is that cities tend to also house a lot of rich people, and household wealth is a massive driver of carbon emissions when you account for them based on consumption. Some would argue it is more important than urban density.
In my opinion, none of this is to suggest that dense urban environments are bad. The point here is that territorial carbon emissions don’t fully capture the emissions caused by high consumers who might happen to live in an otherwise efficient urban environment. You can live in a compact apartment and walk to work, but what else are you consuming? And how might these consumption patterns change based on built form?
For more on this topic, check out this report by Daniel Cohen and Kevin Ummel (of the University of Pennsylvania) called, “The case for neighborhood-level carbon footprints.”
Deeply affordable housing is mostly infeasible to build.
This is why you don’t see the market naturally building this kind of housing on its own. It, for the most part, doesn’t make any economic sense to do so. So this is also why the US has fabricated things like low-income housing tax credits. They are a way to make up the economic shortfall that exists with low-income rental housing and get the private sector building this kind of housing.
We sometimes try to convince ourselves — or maybe it is a way of shirking responsibility — that there can be such a thing as no-cost affordable housing through things like inclusionary zoning. But I think we all know that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Somebody is ultimately going to need to pay. The big question, of course, is who should that be?
By definition, we acknowledge that the people who will ultimately live in these affordable homes cannot afford to pay market rates. So by default, the subsidies will need come from somewhere else. But again, from where and from who? Should it be specific people who pay or should it be mostly everyone who pays?
If we return to the Toronto building industry’s favorite topic right now — development charges — you’ll see that under the current rates, every new 2 bedroom or larger apartment that is constructed must pay $3,727 toward affordable housing. Under the proposed rates, this will increase to $12,545 for every new large apartment. It’s by far the largest proposed percentage increase (237%) and also one of the largest service items.
This raises two interesting philosophical questions.
One, should the buyers of new housing be responsible for contributing to affordable housing in this way? Because what we are in effect saying to these people is, “Hey, you can afford to buy a new market rate home, so we’re going to collect some additional money from you — $12,545 to be exact — so that we can try and help those that aren’t in the same position as you. We’re also going to mandate additional affordable homes within your building and we’d like you to subsidize those too.” This is one way to redistribute wealth.
But if the goal is to try and create more broad-based affordability, an alternative approach might be, “Hey, you already own a home and it has gone up a lot in value, so we’re going to collect some additional money from you over time so that we can try and help those that aren’t in the same position as you.” This would be the property tax approach. It’s probably not perfect, but might it be a more fair and equitable way to redistribute wealth?
The second interesting philosophical question has to do with whether this is consistent with the dogma that growth should pay for growth. The idea behind development charges (also known as impact fees in some parts of the world) is that they should pay for the cost of new development. This makes complete sense. When you build new housing you certainly need some additional stuff — everything from additional school capacity to emergency services.
But the question here is whether the construction of new housing in and of itself creates a direct need for more affordable housing, and therefore should be charged for it. Asked in the opposite way, if you weren’t building this new housing, would you then no longer need this affordable housing, just like you no longer need that additional school capacity?
This is definitely not the case. In fact, I would argue that the opposite is true. If you don’t build any new housing in a growing city, you actually exacerbate the problem of affordability. So here’s a provocative thought. Rather than a charge, should this affordable housing line item actually be a credit towards each new project given that it benefits affordability?
While it may not make any economic sense to build affordable housing, I think that many of us would agree that it makes a lot of social sense to build affordable housing. We know that our cities are at their best when they are both diverse and inclusive. The problem is that we can’t agree on who should pay for it.
Today’s post is perhaps a good follow-up to yesterday’s post about housing supply in Ontario. Below are a few charts taken from a recent article by Wendell Cox looking at net domestic migration across the US. The takeaway here is that the shift from larger cities to smaller cities seems to be accelerating, following a trend that started before COVID.
The data in these charts is organized according to population and by Core Based Statistical Areas (CBSAs). At the bottom are America’s two megacities: New York and Los Angeles. Both have metro areas that exceed 10 million people. As you can, these two city regions have been losing the most people, both in terms of total humans and on a percentage basis. The goldilocks sweet spot seems to be cities in the 500k to 1 million range.
But the most telling figure is probably this one here:
This chart adds up all major metropolitan areas with a population greater than 1 million, and then shows net migration over the last decade. Here you can see when this trend started (around 2016) and how it has been accelerating. In this case, it does appear that COVID added some fuel to the fire. But the question remains: Why is this longer-term trend even happening?
Is it a short-term phenomenon? Is it because once a city reaches a certain size it simply becomes more annoying to live in it and people would prefer to live elsewhere? Or is it more about overall affordability? That is, if we could figure out how to deliver more affordable housing in our cities, could we stymie the bleeding toward smaller and more affordable ones?
I don’t know the answers to the questions. But they have been widely debated and I still think they’re interesting ones. If all things were equal (or closer to equal), how and where would most people choose to live? Put differently, how much of this is some sort of natural market outcome and how much of it is a direct result of our actions (or inactions)?
Times Square in New York has, as we all know, a checkered past. For much of its history, it has served as an important civic gathering space for New Yorkers. But it has also alternated between being a place for New Year’s Eve countdowns and being a place for salacious entertainment. This was the case as far as back as the late 19th century when prostitution from New York’s entertainment and red light district (then known as the Tenderloin) started moving northward.
But it was also the case during the economic fallout of the Great Depression and again the case from the 1960s to 1990s when the area become a symbol for a more broadly decaying New York City. The area was seedy, dangerous, and according to tax records, fairly vacant, notwithstanding all the sex shops. Most would probably agree that this was not a high point for the area. As a rule, cities are generally better off when their buildings aren’t vacant and decaying.
But are all red light districts bad and undesirable?
Last year, Amsterdam voted in favor of closing down its famed city center red light district and moving it to some kind of new “erotic center” on the outskirts of the city, in a location that is yet to be determined. Not surprisingly, this decision hasn’t been without some controversy. Local sex workers seem to be generally against the idea and petitions are now circulating, such as this one here from Failed Architecture, asking the building industry not to participate in the build out of this new center.
In some ways Amsterdam has the opposite problem compared to what Times Square experienced between the 1960s and the early 1990s. Amsterdam is too popular. Back in 2019, prior to COVID, the city saw some 22 million unique annual visitors. And I am guessing that more than a few of these visitors probably got drunk, wandered through the narrow streets of De Wallen, and peed on the side of a few buildings. Is it unsafe? I don’t know. I’ve never been. Is it immoral? Depends on who you ask. Is it annoying for locals? Probably.
The city has been clear in that it views this as over-tourism, and also the wrong kind of tourism. Rather than rely on sleaze, Amsterdam wants to “reset” its tourism approach and focus more on highbrow things like art and culture. This is an understandable objective. Because presumably the tourists who actively seek out art and culture attractions are, you know, a bit less reckless and a bit less likely to pee on the side of buildings. Of course, you never know.
But is this really the right city planning approach? Is there any cultural value to these historic uses? And what does this say about the city’s famously liberal attitudes? More specifically, does wanting to move your red light district from the middle of the city to some less conspicuous location — in an effort to dissociate your city brand — a reflection that you’re becoming maybe a little less tolerant towards the activities that take place in said district? It certainly seems like it.
But I don’t know, maybe that isn’t entirely the case. Maybe there’s a tenuous argument that the city is just as liberal and permissive. After all, the city is still generally okay with this kind of debauchery. It just wants this debauchery to take place in a different area outside of the overcrowded city center. In other words, the activities themselves aren’t the problem. It is arguably the negative externalities that come along with them that need to be managed. And a suburban “erotic center” is simply better for that.
What are your thoughts? And what would you do if you were the mayor of Amsterdam?
Should Amsterdam close down its red light district and create a new "erotic centre" on the outskirts of the city?
