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.
This is a telling map from Jens von Bergmann. It shows the changes in population density across Toronto from 1971 to 2021 (measured in people per hectare). What is obvious is the spikiness of our city. We have been very effective at adding lots of people downtown, along the central waterfront, and in certain other pockets. But at the same time, we have let our older inner city neighborhoods move in the opposite direction and lose people.
The irony of this outcome is that we have long created policies that refer to these areas as being “stable” neighborhoods. The idea was that they weren’t supposed to change, at least not too much. But what this data shows is the opposite. By restricting growth, we actually created the right conditions for them to lose people as demographics changed and household sizes got smaller, among other things. We created unstable neighborhoods.
Thankfully, we have started to change course and allow some intensification. We’re not there yet, but I do believe that the next 50-year map will look quite different than the one you see here.
This is the sort of housing project that you’d fully expect to find in Tokyo. Seven homes built on a small urban lot measuring only 11 feet wide by 93 feet deep. But in this case, it’s not Tokyo; it’s Chinatown, Philadelphia, where a residual lot that was created when the sunken Vine Street Expressway was carved through the middle of the city in the 1950s.
Designed by Philadelphia-based Interface Studio Architects (ISA), the project contains 7 levels of livable space. What’s interesting, though, is that from a building code perspective this is still a 4-story building. There are two mezzanine levels that don’t get counted (and that create some great double-height spaces). This also seems to be what allowed them to get away with a single egress stair in the middle of the building.
The other technique that was used to maximum density is facade projections. Philadelphia’s zoning code allows for projections up to 3 feet in the horizontal dimension. And if you look at the above plans, you’ll see that these were used to “top up” or extend the site’s 11 foot width to 14 feet, when it made sense to do so from a programming standpoint. The result is some very livable spaces.
I am endlessly fascinated by these sorts of projects because they demand creativity and because you ultimately end up unlocking something that the market had been overlooking. Here is an example of a small leftover urban parcel that was previously used as surface parking for two cars. Now it’s seven beautiful homes.
This evening in French class we discussed a Parisian apartment type called the chambre de bonne. The direct translation is “maid’s room”, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. A small one-room apartment that is found on the top floor of bourgeoisie apartment buildings. Indeed, nearly one-third of Paris’ entire supply of chambres de bonne are in the wealthy 16th arrondissement.
Their original function was to house servants. The reason they were on the penthouse floor is because, when they emerged in Paris in the 1830s, the elevator hadn’t yet been invented. And so this was the least desirable floor. The people staying in these rooms typically worked for the people living on the lowest floors in the same building. That’s where you wanted to be. Fewer stairs.
Fast forward to today, and it is estimated that Paris has somewhere around 114,000 chambres be bonne (also known as chambres de service). They are also occupied by a broad cross section of different people:
But it means living small. The smallest allowable size for an apartment in Paris is 9 m2 (area) or 20 m3 (volume). Meaning, even if the surface area is under the 9 m2 threshold, it might still be able to pass as livable if the ceilings are tall enough. But under these figures, and the place can’t be rented. And supposedly, about half of Paris’ chambres de bonne do not meet these minimum thresholds.
These requirements are immediately interesting to me — not only because they’re much smaller than what we allow in Toronto — but because most people don’t think of real estate in terms of volumes. Ceiling heights, yes. But when have you ever seen or measured the volume of an apartment? It’s clearly appropriate in this instance given that many of these apartments sit under sloping rooflines.
But the most interesting question, I think, is whether this housing type is functionally obsolete. On the one hand, Paris is an expensive city, and these apartments represent what is likely the most affordable housing option. Go on YouTube and you’ll find lots of students giving tours of their compact room-apartments. On the other hand, census data shows that occupancy within his housing type has been steadily declining since at least the 1960s:
Based on these figures from 2011, only about 17,300 chambres de bonne are occupied as a principal residence. This doesn’t seem like a lot for a big city like Paris. (It’s around 1.25% of its entire housing supply based on my rough math.) The rest of these apartments appear to be vacant, ineligible for renting, or serving as a secondary space for owners in the same building.
This represents an ~85% vacancy rate, which begs the question: Is there something more productive that Paris could be doing with all of this under-utilized penthouse space? Though perhaps it’s helpful to start with: would you live in 9 square meters or 97 square feet? This is smaller than the minimum size of a parking space in Toronto.
When we build next to transit, we often call this transit-oriented development.
What’s interesting about this moniker is that it implies we’re doing something a little special — something out of the ordinary. And I guess that makes sense because, in many cities, it is often out of the ordinary.
That’s why you don’t hear people at real estate conferences saying, “check out this newcutting edge car-oriented development that our firm is developing.” That doesn’t need to be specified.
But at the end of the day, I’m not sure how special transit-oriented development really is; it’s basically just urban development. Meaning, you put density on top of and next to transit stations and then more people take transit. That’s how this works.
On that note, here is an interesting study from the School of Cities that looked at Toronto’s transit network and how the populations around each station have changed (or not changed) between 1996 and 2021 (census data).
If you look at the various transit lines, you’ll see that, in some cases, like downtown, we have added a lot of new transit-oriented development. This is good. Populations increased.
But in many/most other cases, populations remained flat; or worse, they declined. This is a serious problem, and it shows how land use restrictions are forcing us to underutilize our existing transit assets.
Maybe what we need to do is stop thinking about transit-oriented development as something special, and instead remind ourselves that this is standard operating procedure. It’s just what you do next to transit.
Thanks to Sam Kulendran for sharing the above study with me.
The 15-minute city is a popular topic these days. So here is a recent study that used GPS data from 40 million US mobile phones to estimate the percentage of consumption-related trips that actually adhere to this concept. The unsurprising result:
The overwhelming majority of Americans have never experienced anything resembling a 15-minute city. The median resident, we found, makes only 14% of their consumption trips within a 15-minute walking radius.
There is, of course, regional variation. For New York City, the data suggests that 42% of consumption-related trips occur within a 15-minute walking radius. Whereas in more sprawling cities like Atlanta, it’s only 10% of trips. Again, this is not surprising. But it begs the question: What should we do?
The challenge is that 15-minute cities generally require built environments that are dense, conducive to walking, and filled with a concentration of different amenities. And this is more or less the opposite of the prototypical suburban model, where the car and single-use zoning tends to spread everything out.
The good news is that zoning is relatively easy to change. For instance, if we want to allow corner stores in our residential neighborhoods, that is a decision we can make. The greater hurdle will be transforming car-oriented communities into places where people might actually want to walk. This is much more difficult.
If you’ve ever been to Rome, then you’ve probably been to the Trevi Fountain. It is, arguably, the most famous fountain in the world. And if you’ve ever been to the Trevi Fountain, then you’ve probably thrown change into it, over your left shoulder, and hoped for good things. Lots of people do this. I did it when I was there in 2007 as a grad student. And in 2016, the fountain collected nearly US$1.5 million in change, all of which was (and still is) donated to a Catholic charity. But I can’t help but wonder if this number is declining at all. I mean, I couldn’t tell you the last time I handled physical money, especially coins. Though maybe this is such an entrenched tradition that people seek out change for this very purpose. The desire to want to believe things that aren’t true can be a strong one.
We talk a lot about walkable urban communities on this blog, and I’ll be the first to admit that this is my own bias. It’s my preference. But at the same time, we can’t ignore that, as of 2022, there were nearly 280 million registered personal and commercial vehicles in the United States. And that only about 8.3% of households do not have a vehicle. Most households drive in this part of the world.
The result is that lots of people want to regularly wash their car(s). According to Bloomberg, there are some 60,000 car washes across the US, and the overall sector has been growing at roughly 5% per year (I’m not sure over what time period). More thrilling, though, are the stats that the car wash market is expected to double by 2030 and that there were more car washes built in the last decade compared to all prior years combined.
The obvious reason for this is that there are a lot of drivers. But why right now? Apparently, there are other more specific reasons for the recent boom in car washes:
Now, washes can take just 90 seconds, labor costs have been automated down, and recurring revenue from memberships has eliminated weather risks. Plus, the tax reforms enacted in 2017 by former president Donald Trump allowed car wash owners to claim 100% depreciation on new equipment — a generous subsidy to further investment. While that incentive was written to shrink over time, the tax proposal currently in Congress would restore the 100% depreciation allowance.
This has the PE and real estate industries interested:
“If private equity thinks it’s sexy, they’re gonna throw money at it, right?” said Emil Khodorkovsky, founder and CEO of Forbix, a real estate firm that just acquired a car wash in Santa Monica, California. “It’s a basic business. It isn’t complicated finance. Certain actors are getting squeezed but this one still has a much higher-yielding return than an apartment building or a retail center.”
It’s hard to think of a retail use that is more antithetical to walkable urban communities. Even most drive-through places have the ability to service things that aren’t cars. It is also possible to go through a drive-through on a bicycle or other micro-mobility device. I have done this before and it was fun. But going through a car wash on a bicycle is probably a lot less fun.
Intuitively, as long as there are lots of cars, there will be lots of people who want car washes. At the same time, there may even be a more urban use case, here. If you happen to have a garage and a driveway, there is always the possibility that you could wash your own car. But if you live in a walkable urban center and you park your car in a stacker accessed via an elevator, it’s probably a lot harder for you to do that.
Today on the blog, I thought we’d feature a new fourplex being developed here in Toronto at 2343 Gerrard Street East called The Walk-Up. Designed by Studio JCI and presented by Paul Johnston of Unique Urban Homes, this is the first in a series of “missing middle” projects now being developed by Urbinco.
Housed on your typical single-family lot, The Walk-Up is somewhere between 3-4 stories and has four homes: a garden suite, a ground suite, a center suite, and a sky suite. And each is family-oriented both in terms of design and size. They all have over 1,000 square feet of interior space, have two bedrooms, and have access to outdoor space.
In other words, it is exactly the kind of housing solution that Toronto needs a lot more of! Thankfully, this form of housing has been permitted (as-of-right) in Toronto since May 2023. Unfortunately, there are still many municipalities and politicians who don’t seem to get it. But that’s okay. This is usually how things go. Toronto leads, and then others follow.
Recently, I wrote about 4 predictions that I have for Toronto’s laneways. And one of them is what I refer to as a “market inversion.” What I mean by this is that I think we’ll start to see the laneway side of lots become more desirable than their traditional street frontages.
Maybe it won’t be a universal thing, but I definitely think we’ll stop thinking about laneways as being the “rear” or “backside” of lots and just think of them as quieter and more intimate streets. Because here’s the thing, as more and more laneway houses get built, we are, in a lot of cases, removing parking at the same time. And so generally speaking, as time goes on, our laneways are going to become even more pedestrian-oriented by default.
Now here’s a built example.
Designed by Williamson Williamson, I think this house, called the Garden Laneway House, is immediately notable for two reasons. One, the overall design is beautiful, especially the exterior brickwork. I mean, wow:
And two, it is a 4-bedroom house for a family of five. In fact, what the family did is turn the front house into a duplex, creating three homes on a lot where previously there was only one. And from the looks of it, it was their preference to live in the laneway house and use the laneway as their front door.
This is exactly the sort of thing that I was getting at with my predictions post.
Matt Elliott writes a newsletter called the City Hall Watcher. And one of his features is something called Intersection Inspection. It is where he does a deep dive into traffic counts and modal splits for intersections across Toronto. This week, he covered Yonge & St. Clair in midtown, and so I thought it would be interesting to share it on the blog. (Thanks to Canada Record for the tag on X.)
Here are traffic counts for the intersection going back to 1984:
What seems clear is that Yonge & St. Clair is fairly evenly divided between cars and pedestrians. And it has been this way going back many decades. At the same time, though, the volume of cars seems to be declining. According to the above data, cars haven’t seen a count above 20,000 since 2014. There does also seem to be a slight spike in bike usage recently (this is broken out further in Matt’s newsletter).
Data is crucial to good city building and I don’t think it is leveraged nearly enough. For example, take the intersection of Baldwin St and Kensington Ave in Toronto’s Kensington Market. If you look at the traffic counts (which can also be found in the above newsletter), you’ll see that 88% of traffic tends to be from pedestrians (79%) and bikes (9%). Only 12% of traffic is from cars.
With this data in hand, you might, then, ask yourself: Should Kensington Market be mostly pedestrianized? And in my opinion, this is a lot easier to answer when you have numbers in front of you telling you how humans actually occupy the area.
