Category: Urbanism

• Toronto should light the underside of the elevated Gardiner Expressway

  Back when Toronto was debating the future of the eastern portion of the elevated Gardiner Expressway, I was an annoying and vocal supporter of tearing it down and replacing it with an at-grade boulevard. I was blogging about it ad nauseam. I participated in Jane’s Walks where I spoke about the merits of removal. And I even created a petition that went to City Council the day the decision was being made.

  But throughout all of this, I felt like I was in the minority. Most people said I was crazy (though former mayor John Sewell agreed with me). How will people and services get to downtown Toronto? This is critical infrastructure, they said. And indeed, Toronto voted not to remove it.

  Whatever you feel was the right decision at the time, that ship has sailed. We tore down a leg of the Gardiner east of the Don River, at that was positive; but the rest of it is either staying intact or being relocated. In both cases, it will be elevated.

  But I believe in looking forward, not backwards. And so with that, I think we should be doing everything we can urbanistically to make the Gardiner as nice as it can be. It is for this reason that I think The Bentway is an extraordinarily important project. And it is for this reason that I wish we would light the underside of the Gardiner so that when you’re driving on Lake Shore it makes you feel happy.

  We should light the underside of the Gardiner so that when you’re on Lake Shore it’s less depressing. pic.twitter.com/qT6xVUOw2q

  — Brandon Donnelly (@donnelly_b) March 19, 2022

  A good example of this in action is the Yan’an Elevated Highway in Shanghai (greenery, of course, also helps):

  View this post on Instagram

  A post shared by Luca Fugazza (@lucafugazza)

  https://www.instagram.com/p/BzvTmo3nN2J/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

  Relevant scene from Skyfall (James Bond):

  But let me be clear before my inbox lights on fire: I am not suggesting that this is an approach to urbanism that is in any way desirable or worth emulating. I am not advocating for elevated highways running through the middle of dense downtowns and walkable city centers. All I am saying is that if we are stuck with something as dreary and as utilitarian as the Gardiner Expressway, the least we can do is make it kind of cool. And lighting can be a relatively cost effective way of doing that.

  2022.03.19

• High-rise urban families in Toronto’s CityPlace

  The narrative in this fairly recent FastCompany article about Toronto’s CityPlace neighborhood is that the area was initially planned and built for young professionals who wanted to be close to work and party. But that it has since evolved to become a more mixed residential community. Over time, the young professionals started having children and now the area is filled with a surprising number of urban families. “Hundreds” according to FastCompany. In response to this shifting demographic, the Canoe Landing Campus was recently completed, containing a community center, two public schools, a public park, and childcare facilities. And apparently it was long overdue.

  This is interesting for a few reasons. CityPlace has long been criticized for its planning. Local Toronto lore has been that the area was destined to become a slum. But is that actually playing out? Anecdotally, it would seem that families are sticking around (and being attracted to the area) and that it’s settling in nicely as an urban residential community. In fact, I wonder if CityPlace might be emerging as one of the areas in the city with the highest concentration of high-rise urban families. I quickly tried to find some data on this but couldn’t.

  Something else worth pointing out: One of the objections that you’ll often here when it comes to new development is that there isn’t the infrastructure in place to support it. Where are the schools? Where are the community centers? And where are the hipster coffee shops? Because without these invaluable things, development should be stopped immediately. Now I’m not suggesting that these things aren’t important. But the CityPlace example is yet another reminder that cities and neighborhoods evolve — often in fortuitous ways. The best city building is nimble and entrepreneurial.

  2022.03.16

• Where US students want to live after college

  

  Axios and Generation Lab have something new called the Next Cities Index. The goal is to track US work and culture trends through people’s geographic preferences. For their first cities index, they asked over 2,100 students in the US, on two separate occasions, the following question: “Considering all factors that matter to you, where would you most like to live after college?”

  The aggregate answer to this question is shown above. But they also collected people’s incomes (anticipated since they’re students?), political affiliations, and gender. The list of cities changes slightly when you sort based on these different factors, but not by much. Seattle, New York, and Los Angeles remain top cities — at least in people’s minds.

  It is, however, interesting to note that about 45% of respondents had different answers to where they want to live and where they think they will live. For a number of reasons, the city of people’s dreams isn’t often a practical or realistic choice it would seem. Still, wanting a particular place still tells you certain things I suppose.

  Given all the chatter over this pandemic, I would have thought that Miami would have appeared higher up on this want list.

  Chart: Axios/Generation Lab

  2022.03.14

• 6-unit missing middle site for sale in Toronto

  Marty over at Laneway Housing Advisors published this listing in his newsletter today. It’s for an entitled lot at 78 Gladstone Avenue in Toronto that has been approved (by way of a minor variance) for 6 units. Five units in the front where a house currently sits and one unit at the back in a standalone laneway suite. Though it also happens to be a corner lot and so the laneway suite isn’t really “in the back”.

  It’s listed for $2.5M. And according to the description, you can build about 5,500 square feet (4,200 sf in the front with a 1,300 sf laneway suite). This ask translates into a land cost that is just over $450 per buildable square foot, which is far more than what high-density land typically trades for in the city right now. This is usually the case for smaller low-rise sites.

  To help put this figure into some kind of context, Bullpen Consulting published in their latest insights report that the average high-density land price in Q4-2021 was $135 per buildable square foot in Toronto (416 area code only). Of course, averages only tell you so much. To truly evaluate the feasibility of a site like this, you’d need to create your own pro forma and do your own residual land value calculation. The value of development land depends on what you can build on it.

  If you were to do that, I suspect that you would discover at least two things: 1) you would find it challenging to make the numbers work, particularly for rental housing, and 2) you would quickly realize that this sort of “missing middle” housing isn’t, in its current form, some undiscovered bastion of housing affordability.

  Part of the problem is that these 6 units are not being delivered on an as-of-right basis. Somebody had to go out and entitle the land in order to secure these permissions. That means that time and money were spent and that the current owner is now rightly seeking a margin for their efforts. But if we collectively believe that this is an appropriate and sensible form of housing, then this should not be a necessary step in the whole process. Especially for only 6 units.

  All of this being said, we know that Toronto and many other cities around the world are taking a hard look at this issue. And that there is a groundswell of interest in allowing more housing in our low-rise communities. It’s going to be a battle — just look at how Toronto’s new garden suite policies have now been appealed by various resident’s groups. But I’m certain that we’ll get there, just like we are getting there with laneway housing and other types of ADUs.

  2022.03.13

• Cars make cities less compact

  The relationship between car ownership and urban density is a fairly intuitive one. Below are two charts from a study by Francis Ostermeijer, Hans Koster, Jos van Ommeren, and Victor Nielsen, showing how urban density is inversely correlated with car ownership. In other words, the more people with cars, the less dense that a particular place is likely to be.

  

  But there’s an interesting chicken-and-egg question here. Does Atlanta, which is near the bottom right in the above chart, have a lot of cars because it wasn’t dense enough to support other modes of transport, or did the prevalence of cars in Atlanta cause the city to spread out and become less dense? And that is exactly what the above researchers set out to determine.

  To do this, they started by looking at the presence of commercial car manufacturers in the above geographies in the 1920s. One of the things they found was that having a car manufacturer in your city at this time appears to have had no effect on population density. But over the long run, rising car ownership seems to have had a sizeable effect on reducing population densities in those places.

  The conclusion they draw from this is the title of this post: cars have made cities less compact, rather than low population densities causing people to go out and buy more cars. This makes some sense to me because cities were doing just fine before we invented cars. But like all transportation innovations that allow us to move faster over longer distances, the car encouraged decentralization.

  There are, of course, all sorts of possible implications for a finding like this. But the authors specifically mention developing countries where car ownership may still be relatively low. This is something to be mindful of because if you put most people into cars, history strongly suggests that it will impact the kind of city that you end up building.

  Chart: Cars make cities less compact

  2022.03.11

• Margolese National Design for Living Prize

  

  This landed in my inbox earlier in the week. And since I think it’s important to support Canadian talent and I think it’s important for us to continually nurture a Canadian cultural identity, I’m sharing this design prize with all of you today.

  Hosted by the University of British Columbia’s School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture (SALA), the Margolese Prize is intended to recognize early to mid-career Canadians who are doing outstanding work related to the built environment. This could be in fields like architecture and planning or it could be in adjacent fields.

  Nominations are open until April 10, 2022 and you can both nominate yourself and nominate others. The winner will be announced this September and, in addition to a ceremony and presumably a trophy of sorts, the committee will be giving out $50,000. If you’d like to nominate yourself/someone, click here.

  2022.02.25

• The enduring allure of private vehicles

  Uber’s recent investor day presentation (link here) is interesting if you’re an investor or thinking about becoming an investor, but it’s also interesting from an urbanism standpoint. Part of the promise of Uber was that it was going to help lure people away from owning cars. Looking at the data though (see below), ridesharing penetration is still pretty low in even Uber’s largest markets: 3.9% for the US and 3.3% for Canada. Brazil is a leader here, which you might think is because of a lower cost per mile, but Australia isn’t far behind.

  At the end of the day, the vast majority of mobility trips are still being done through personal vehicles. This is certainly the case in the US with 6.6 billion weekly trips in personal vehicles versus 191 million on public transit and 22.6 million with UberX (all 2019 data). And for those taking Ubers, about 90% of riders are using some form of UberX — that being a solo, on-demand, point-to-point trip with a 4-door car. So sharing a car with strangers and using different/multiple modes of transport hasn’t really caught on here.

  

  

  2022.02.22

• Philadelphia readies new inclusionary zoning policy

  

  When I was living in Philadelphia as a graduate student, new development was seen as a bit of a gift. I remember developers telling me that it costs the same to build in Philly as it does in New York, except that the rents are obviously a fraction in the former relative to the latter. So it was tough to make projects pencil.

  At the same time, Philadelphia had a 10-year residential tax abatement program in place. I think it’s still in place, but it may have been modified since I was there. Either way, it was essentially an incentive to develop or redevelop existing residential properties. In the case of a renovation, the taxes associated with any improvements were what got abated for the 10 years.

  Put differently, it was an invitation to gentrify. Come buy an old row home, fix it up, and then don’t pay any additional property taxes on those improvements. This was the way things felt at the time. So it was interesting to learn today that Philly’s current development boom is about to get throttled down with a new mandatory inclusionary zoning policy that will take effect later this year. Gentrification, it would now seem, is a problem.

  The policy requires that 20% of the units in any new housing development (with 10 or more units) must be affordable for at least a 50-year period. For rental households, affordability means 40% of the area median income (AMI). And for owner-occupied households, it means 60% of AMI.

  I have already said pretty much everything I can say about inclusionary zoning. But one of the unique things about Philly’s policy is that it is only going to apply to two of its Council Districts. It is not a citywide policy. This is going to create a strong disincentive to develop in these areas, and will likely force new development into surrounding ones. But maybe that’s part of the point.

  Photo by Dan Mall on Unsplash

  2022.02.21

• Comparing the weekly earnings of Canada’s visible minorities to white people

  We just finished up three days of snowboarding and skiing in Tremblant, Quebec and we’re now in Montreal closing out the long weekend. I am arguably Toronto’s greatest fan and supporter, but I continue to admit that Montreal is the coolest city in Canada.

  In other news, Theresa Qiu and Grant Schellenberg recently authored a Statistics Canada report looking at the weekly earnings of visible minorities and white people across the country. The study focuses on Canadian-born individuals aged 25 to 44 who were gainfully employed and making money in 2015.

  The reason why they isolated the study to Canadian-born visible minorities is that they wanted to eliminate the noise around new immigrants who may be struggling with the language(s), the recognition of their foreign credentials, or some other variable.

  In this case, every individual that factors into the study was born in Canada and, in theory, had access to similar sorts of opportunities. Of course, we know this isn’t always the case, but it’s an attempt an equal baseline.

  The findings are pretty interesting.

  Korean, Japanese, and South Asian men all tend to earn more than white males (which formed the baseline for the study). More than 60% of Chinese and Korean men also have a bachelor’s degree or higher, whereas only 24% of white males are in the same position.

  This is an important data point because we know that economic outcomes tend be positively correlated with educational attainment. The benefits of education also tend to compound later in life and this study only focuses on people aged 25 to 44. So the spreads could widen.

  One the factors that is surely influencing the above findings is that visible minorities are overwhelmingly urban. About 60% of visible minorities in Canada live in just three cities: Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. This compares to only 27% of white people.

  Again, an important data point given that people in big cities tend to earn more than those in smaller communities.

  For the full study, click here.

  2022.02.20

• Do the best cities have a lot of immigrants?

  The best cities have a lot of immigrants.

  — Brandon Donnelly (@donnelly_b) February 13, 2022

  I tweeted this out last night while watching old reruns of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown series. This was a great show. If I were to give everything up and become a YouTuber, this is the kind of travel and food channel I would want to make, except that I would naturally have to add in some equal parts around architecture, planning, and real estate.

  The responses to my tweet were of course mixed. Some people agreed and some people didn’t. And a few people provided examples of great cities that aren’t particularly known for their openness to new entrants — places like Tokyo. This kind of response is not at all surprising given how divisive this topic has always been throughout history.

  But here’s what I was thinking:

  1/ There are some obvious current case studies. Consider places like Toronto and Miami, where foreign born residents now make up the majority of the population. These are two fast growing and dynamic cities that wouldn’t be anywhere near as interesting without their immigrant populations. Certainly the food wouldn’t be as good.

  2/ Many of the most beautiful cultures in the world are the result of different cultures coming together. Brazil is one example that comes to mind. Throughout history they have been one of the largest recipients of immigrants in the western hemisphere. Sadly, Brazil was also the last country in the western world to abolish slavery.

  3/ Rome and Tokyo were cited (in the comments) as two great cities that frankly aren’t all that diverse. According to Wikipedia, less than 10% of Rome’s population is non-Italian. But Rome, while nice, is provincial these days. And Tokyo, while awesome, has a bit of a demographic problem.

  4/ Even if you think a place doesn’t have a lot of immigrants and maybe isn’t all that diverse, it is still probably the result of diverse cultures coming together at multiple points throughout history. Maybe because of immigration. Or maybe because of something bad like war. Think of the Moors from northern Africa who crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and conquered the Iberian Peninsula.

  5/ An openness to new people could signal and probably does signal an openness to other things. And since we are living in a world that thrives on innovation and new ideas, being open strikes me as being a fairly good and useful characteristic to have.

  6/ Lastly, I come from a family of immigrants. I self-identify as being entirely Canadian. But I had to come from somewhere (multiple places, in fact). And so it strikes me as being odd and entirely selfish to want to block the flow of people now that I’m here and established.

  What are your thoughts?

  2022.02.13