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.
I have written about Medellín, Colombia before on the blog. But the content has mostly come from my urbanist friends. About five years ago, my good friend Alex Feldman — who is a Managing Director at U3 Advisors — wrote this guest post about what other cities could learn from Medellín. He wrote it following a trip to the city for the World Urban Forum.
I haven’t been to Colombia, but it’s high up on my list. So I enjoyed watching the story of Medellín’s turnaround in this Future of Cities Retro Report. It is the same story that Alex told over five years ago, but that doesn’t make the lessons any less valuable. (If you can’t see the embedded video at the bottom of this post, click here.)
Eugenie Birch — who is interviewed in the video and who is a professor at my alma mater — hits the nail on the head when she says that a lot of this stuff isn’t rocket science. Look, we know how to lay pipes. We know how to build transportation systems. It comes down to this: Is there the political will?
Lincoln Road is one of my favorite parts of Miami Beach. Supposedly the pedestrian-only street attracts some 11 million visitors a year. But I have noticed that the street has lost some of its mainstays to areas such as Wynwood. This is probably why the city and local property/business owners struck a deal this past summer to makeover the street based on a design by Field Operations.
The deal works like this: The City of Miami Beach is going to pay for the entire US$67 million makeover. This money will come from city and county taxes, as well from bonds. In return, property owners in the Lincoln Road Business Improvement District (BID) have agreed to tax themselves an additional 25% in order to pay for promoting and programming the street.
Obviously everyone believes that they will come out ahead as a result of this makeover. An improved Lincoln Road means more foot traffic, more sales, and more tax revenue. There’s also talk of expanding the boundaries of the BID, which would generate additional funds. Right now the district is bounded by Alton Road on the west and by Washington Avenue on the east.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Business Improvement Districts, they are essentially defined areas where additional taxes are levied in order to fund projects and improvements that help overall economic development within the district. It is a structure that is used all around the world and it is one that was actually pioneered here in Toronto.
Here we call them Business Improvement Areas, and the first ever was the Bloor West Village BIA, which was established in 1970. There are now 83 BIAs in the City of Toronto. The first BID in the United States was the Downtown Development District in New Orleans. It was established in 1974. There are now over 1,200 across the U.S.
If you’d like to learn more about the improvements planned for Lincoln Road, here’s a copy of the master plan that was submitted to the City of Miami Beach’s Historic Preservation Board. The link is from The Next Miami.
This week, RBC Economics published a study on Canada’s rental market where they argued that the pace of new supply needs to at least double in markets like Toronto in order to meet future housing demand and balance the market. Similar things, I’m sure, could be said about many other housing markets around the world.
The report pegs the current rental housing deficit in Toronto at about 9,100 units:
And because they believe that the cost of ownership is pushing more people into rentals, the number of renter households is expected to grow at an average rate of 22,200 units per year in Toronto.
If you take 22,200 units per year over the next two years, and add in the current deficit of 9,100 rental units, you get to a total count of 53,500 rental units. This is what RBC Economics believes must be delivered to the market in order to restore equilibrium, and decrease the upward pressure on rents.
Rental units are, of course, delivered to the market in two main ways. There’s purpose-built rentals and there are for-sale units that end up as rental housing. But even if you amalgamate both of these tenures, we are not building enough housing.
Against this backdrop, I find it curious that developers are so often vilified. Earlier this week, I saw Jennifer Keesmaat tweet out that — as we ready for this fall’s federal election — any sensible housing plan must move away from our current for profit housing delivery model.
Who, then, will build these 53,500 rental units? That part wasn’t clear to me.
From 1899 to 1902, the north side of 42nd Street, between 7th Avenue and Broadway in Manhattan, was occupied by the Pabst Hotel. At the time, this neighborhood was called Longacre Square.
Owned by the Pabst Brewing Company of Milwaukee, the building was part of a growing network of hotels and restaurants that the company used to promote its beer. Note the cool rooftop sign.
The portico you see in the above picture was highly controversial. I guess some things never change. City officials were criticized for allowing such a structure to encroach over a public right-of-way. Curiously, the Times was one of its biggest critics. A judge ultimately ordered for it to be removed in 1901.
The building also came down not long after. The introduction of New York City’s first subway — operated by the private Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) Company — began to spur new investment in the area. The first IRT line ran right through Longacre Square.
Adolph S. Ochs was the owner of the The New York Times during this period and he believed that the new subway line would increase foot traffic in the area. Betting on transit is clearly not a new phenomenon. So in January 1905, the newspaper moved into a new headquarters on the site of the former Pabst Hotel; a building that it developed for itself.
Today this building is known as One Times Square. Here is a photo of it under construction in 1903:
And here is a photo of the completed building in 1919 (at this point, it was no longer occupied by the paper):
At the time of its completion, it was one of the tallest buildings in New York City. And eventually, perhaps as a result of some encouragement on the part of Ochs, Longacre Square was renamed to commemorate this new building and the paper. It became known as Times Square.
By 1913, the Times had outgrown the building and would move down the street. But not before it would introduce a now famous New Year’s Eve celebration in the Square. The Times would continue to own the building up until 1961.
The area continued to evolve into an important theater district and transit hub. Everything connected through Times Square. Sadly, the Great Depression was not kind to the area and, either because of it or alongside it, Times Square declined into an area of vice filled with everything from burlesque shows to prostitution. This would come to define the area for almost the balance of the 20th century.
It would take many attempts starting in the 1980s to try and redirect Times Square’s now entrenched reputation. In 1982, the Department of City Planning created the Special Midtown Zoning District, which attempted to attract developers with tax breaks and other subsidies. It didn’t really work.
The City eventually looked to eminent domain to try and tidy up the area. But property owners — many of whom owned the adult businesses in the district — objected via a group known as the Coalition for Free Expression.
It would take a few other mayors, many legal battles, and interim ordinances such as the 60/40 rule — which allowed adult businesses to continue operating as long as no more than 40% of their floor area were allocated to sex — before things would really change.
Today, or at least as of 2015-2016, Times Square represents 15% of New York City’s total economic output. And it does this via 0.1% of the city’s total land area and 7% of its total employment.
Real estate in the district is estimated to be worth over $7 billion, with the Square generating about $2.5 billion in municipal tax revenue and about $2.3 billion in state revenue. A lot has changed in more than a century. But perhaps most importantly, the portico came down.
This recent study used geotagged tweets to measure social connectedness within American cities. There are two measures: (1) concentrated mobility and (2) equitable mobility. The first measures the extent to which social connections (geotagged tweets) are concentrated in a set of places within the city. And the second looks at the degree in which people move between neighborhoods in roughly similar proportions. These measures are the y-axis and the x-axis, respectively, in this graph:
So how do you read this chart?
Well if you look at New York, you’ll see that it is relatively high in concentrated mobility, but the lowest in terms of equitable mobility. This means that social connections are highly concentrated and that there’s low connectedness to other neighborhoods within the city. Miami, on the other hand, is the opposite. It’s also an outlier. Few hubs. But its social connections appear to cross neighborhoods and spread across the city.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the study found that the size of a city seems to have the biggest impact on social connectedness. Which makes sense — it becomes harder to get around and so people start to localize. I am reminded of this whenever my friends in Los Angeles tell me they never go to the beach because it’s simply too difficult and too time consuming to get across the city.
This also became clear to me after I started playing around with the Moves App back in 2015. The app no longer exists, but it was an activity tracker that allowed you to map where you, well, moved. And the more time you spent in one place, the more concentrated the activity would become. They depicted this through larger and larger circles. Example maps, here. My maps revealed that I need to branch out into different neighborhoods more often.
There’s a stretch of restaurants and bars on the south side of King Street, west of John Street, here in Toronto, that I generally try and avoid. I won’t name names, but if you’re from Toronto, you know what I’m talking about. With all due respect to the business owners, I think of this stretch as tourist row. All cities have them. Usually the identifying marker is a human on the street with a menu trying to entice you to come inside and eat. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I can appreciate good street hustle.
But whenever I’m traveling and trying to find a place to eat, I’ll often think to myself, “Oh man, is this the (insert city name here) equivalent of tourist row? I see people on the street with menus in their hands. Could be.” This is one of the reasons why I like Time Out’s recent “definitive list of the planet’s cultural and culinary hotspots.” They surveyed over 27,000 city dwellers in order to figure out where locals actually want to hang out. The result is the 50 coolest neighborhoods in the world.
I am somewhat embarrassed to say that, I think, I’ve only been to 6 of them. I have work to do. But Toronto does make the list — once — and it is none other than the Junction. Their recommendations, here. However, one thing they did miss was the Union Pearson Express. That is the way to get to the Junction from Union Station and it is, clearly, still under the radar for most. The number one spot on their list goes to Arroios in Lisbon, which is actually beside where I stayed when I was there this summer. Damn that city is cool.
This week, Matthew Yglesias of Vox makes the case for raising kids in the city. Spoiler: Driving sucks. Cities have lots to do. And parks can be better than lawns. However, he also talks about why this proposition is becoming increasingly difficult for many families. Here are a couple of excerpts:
Now the father of a 4-year-old son, I live in Washington, DC, a city that is, mercifully, marginally more affordable than New York, and I wouldn’t want to raise a family any place other than the city.
But unfortunately, families are disappearing from American cities even as city living in general has become fashionable again for those who can afford it.
Children cost money. And they take up space. And urban space has become much more expensive — repelling growing families. This suits the proclivities of smug suburbanites just fine, but as someone who grew up in a big city in the 1980s and 1990s when city living was both less fashionable and more affordable, it seems like a tragedy to me.
I didn’t grow up in the city. Though, I spent time in apartments and other higher density housing. And I don’t have kids. But I find this topic interesting. It’s also an important one. I don’t believe that the childless city is a good thing.
Transit City in Vaughan is providing direct access to an adjacent Buca restaurant. 55C in Yorkville is providing refrigerated storage space for perishable deliveries. And Junction House is incorporating a co-working space on the ground floor overlooking Dundas St W. We wanted it to have real utility (a place to work and hang out), but also serve to foster a sense of community within the building.
I have long been a fan of hotel lobby bars. They’re a place for social interaction, as well as a place for chance encounters. One of the best in the city is perhaps the Lobby Lounge (or “urban living room“) at the Shangri-La.
Of course, part of their success is aided by the fact that hotels are, by their very nature, transient places. And that transience can often encourage people to be more open. That makes the spaces more social. You also have the benefit of an operator (i.e. a bar/restaurant), which is what Transit City is leveraging with Buca.
Residential lobbies aren’t quite the same, but there are lessons to be learned. Oben Flats has been programming the lobbies in its rental buildings for years and they are doing a great job. And with the growing interest in co-living arrangements and small space living, I am sure we’ll be seeing more, not less, lobby rethinking.
On September 8, 1949, Toronto held a groundbreaking ceremony at the intersection of Yonge & Wellington to celebrate the start of construction for its very first subway line. (Formerly known as the Yonge line, now called line 1.)
The scene looked like this:
Some of the buildings in these pictures still remain, but many do not. The first picture is looking north. And the second one is looking south toward the lake. You can see the rail corridor in the background.
There’s something very urban about these images. The storefronts look active and the streets are full, though no one appears to be live tweeting the event and this clearly pre-dates Toronto’s transformation into the most diverse city in the world.
But my favorite bit of these photos is the people hanging out on the exit stair, watching the march toward modernity. It’s an image that no longer correlates to Toronto.
This deserves a blog post. Below is a great tweet by Jason Thorne. Jason leads the department of planning and economic development at the City of Hamilton, where, full disclosure, we have a development project.
I have said this many times before on the blog, but the challenge with most “community engagement” is that cities typically hear from the people who disagree. Those voices are then taken as representative.
My gut tells me that we need to make it easier for people to agree. We need to reduce the barriers. Some will take the time to write a thoughtful letter. But most won’t.
