Lately, I've become very interested in live/work uses. This is not something that I have written much about over the years, but it is now on my mind for a few reasons.
One, many of us tried working from home for the first time over the last 21 months or so, and my understanding is that some people enjoy it. It's not my preference, but I don't represent everyone.
Two, photography is a hobby of mine and I've always thought it would be super fun to have a studio space to play around with on the weekends. If any of you have any suggestions or spaces available, please let me know.
Three, there are lots of urban conditions where retail doesn't work, but a bit more ground-floor animation would be nice. This is commonly how live/work uses have been used. That said, I can think of a number of unsuccessful examples of this in Toronto. It's tough to execute on.
And four, there are lots of instances of older non-conforming spaces throughout our cities serving this purpose: inexpensive spaces for people to live, work, and create in. Though often "illegal", I believe they are important for fostering new ideas.
Here's an example that I was reading about this morning in The Spaces and that triggered this blog post. It's about sculptor Andreas Anastasis and his live/work loft on the west side of New York.
https://youtu.be/tZobmZnlvds
I don't know what building this is and whether or not work functions are technically permitted (presumably they are), but it's an example of what I'm talking about. Take a spin through the video embedded above. If you can't see it, click here.
Should we be designing and creating our new residential spaces with multiple uses and this kind of flexibility in mind? Is there a big enough market for it? Does it devalue the pure residential aspect of the building knowing that your next door neighbor might have an office in their space, an artist studio, or a short-term Airbnb rental?
These are some of the things that I've been thinking about and I would love to hear thoughts in the comment section below.
In a recent Spacing article, called Pollution and the fall and rise of urbanism, Dylan Reid argues that one of the reasons why urbanism declined in the 20th century was because of industrial pollution. (There are, of course, other contributing factors beyond just pollution.)
This article is the first time I have come across a study supporting the widely held belief that pollution and prevailing windows are the reasons for why the east sides of many former industrial cities are poorer than the west sides. Here is more on that from the article:
People recognized and understood that pollution had an impact on them, and they tried to avoid it if they could afford to do so. Have you noticed, for example, how in so many cities (Toronto included), the east side is poorer than the west side? It’s because the prevailing winds in Europe and North America are west to east, and they blow pollution to the east side. A fascinating study by economists Stephan Heblich, Alex Trew and Yanos Zylbergerg quantified this effect, identifying how 19th century pollution was dispersed eastwards and showing that the most polluted areas were also the poorest.
What the authors discovered is that not only did pollution cause a geographic sorting based on wealth, but that there’s also a certain degree of persistence to it. This makes sense if you think about it. Pollution in our cities has waned significantly and yet here we are still remarking and talking about east vs. west.
It goes to show you just how long lasting the impacts of our city building decisions can be.
Bjarke Ingels’ West 57th Street project in New York (developed by The Durst Organization) has just started renting apartments (March 1).
Since I’m in the rental business, I thought it would be worthwhile to take a look at the rents – though I tend to obsess over all buildings and not just rental ones.
Firstly, the project has a total of 709 apartments and 178 different unit types because of the architectural variations in the building. Of these units, 142 of them (20%) have been designated as affordable and were offered up via a lottery to people who fall within certain incomes ranges.
Here are the affordable rents via 6sqft.com:
I don’t know the exact numbers, but Curbed New York speculated – based on what was seen at other buildings on the west side – that the total number of applicants for these 142 units may have reached over 100,000!
For the market-rate units, the average monthly rents are as follows (via Curbed NY):
Studio: $2,770
One-bedroom: $3,880
Two-bedroom: $6,500
Three-bedroom: $11,000
Four-bedroom: $16,500
I wasn’t able to find average unit sizes (to calculate per square foot rents), but I estimate the overall average unit size to be around 1,000 square feet.
940,000 sf (total gross floor area) - 45,000 sf of retail x 0.80 efficiency (lower than average because of the shape of the building) / 709 units = approximately 1,000 sf of rentable area per unit. That’s just my rough guess based on what I could find online.
Based on the Curbed comment section though, there are certainly some smaller units:
If anyone has any additional figures, please share them in the comments below. I think there are a few subscribers to this blog who are involved in the project.
Image from via57west.com