Last week the Ryerson City Building Institute published a terrific report on Toronto’s Great Streets. It profiles five streets in the city that have been “redesigned for greatness.” They are:
Harbord Street (continuous bike lanes)
Roncesvalles Avenue (placemaking and people)
St. Clair Avenue West (dedicated streetcar lane)
Queens Quay West (public waterfront promenade)
Market Street (prioritized for people and patios)
But what exactly makes a street a great one? The report describes it in this way: “They all play a key role in making the surrounding neighborhood a great place to live, work, and visit.”
This relates closely to what the City of Toronto calls a “complete street”, which is an approach to accommodating multiple kinds of users, enhancing the local context, and determining which trade-offs to make.
And there will always be trade-offs. I am fairly certain that all of these street redesigns were contentious at the time when they were proposed. Because at the end of the day they will never be all things to everyone.
I remember the St. Clair West fight vividly because I moved to the neighborhood in 2009 and the dedicated streetcar lane didn’t fully open until 2010. From 2005 to 2017, streetcar ridership grew 23%. But drivers have remained grouchy.
I now walk Market Street every single day and I agree that it’s one of the most beautiful and functional streets in the city. But the bollards are constantly getting beat up by drivers attempting to parallel park and the retail vacancy rate has not been 0% like is suggested in the report.
Queens Quay West is also a magnificent street. It was a giant step forward in terms of the quality of the public realm in this region and I spend a lot of time there. But it’s of course not perfect. All of us have seen the reports of cars ending up in odd locations, including underground, along the waterfront.
Riding your bike there can also feel like a challenging game of Frogger with all of the pedestrians that now obliviously meander back and forth across the cycling trail. I suggest riding with a good blow horn. The report rightly mentions the lack of delineation between these users.
But cities are a living laboratory and none of these streets should now be considered static. We are fortunate to be in a position to critique levels of greatness. If anything, the map at the top of this post tells me that we need to create more greatness across the other areas of this city.
The below figure shows the taxing authority of US cities by state. In some cases there’s a city or two with additional taxing authority. New York City, for instance, has been authorized by the state to levy property, sales, and income taxes, whereas other cities in the state can only levy property and sales taxes.
The figure is from a recent report by Brookings called,
I spent this evening reading about Opportunity Zones, or “O-zones”, in the United States.
For a census tract to become an O-zone, it has to have a poverty rate of 20% or higher, or the median household income has to be less than 80% of the surrounding area. Governors are also only able to designate 25% of their eligible census tracts.
Here is a map of the areas that have been designated as Opportunity Zones.
The report concludes that cities generally have a stronger fiscal position when their tax structure aligns with their economy. For example, cities such as Las Vegas that have lower than average property values and are only authorized to collect property taxes, do not score well.
One thing that the above figure does not get across is that more money now comes in from non-tax revenues, user fees, and other charges. According to 2012 census data, 37% of all municipal revenue in the United States came from these sorts of charges.
To download a PDF of the full report, click here.
Here is how these O-zones work. (All excerpts taken from this Forbes article.)
The law’s engine is a new breed of financial product, the opportunity fund, that offers investors a trifecta of attractive tax breaks. Here’s how it works. Investors who sell assets have 180 days to plow their taxable capital gains into an approved opportunity fund, which must hold 90% of its assets in Opportunity Zone projects. To put money to work fast, the law requires that the funds invest all of their cash within some specified time frame. (The Treasury Department is still deciding on that and other crucial details.) Tax on the original reinvested gain isn’t due until 2026, and the taxable gain is cut by 15%. Meanwhile the new opportunity investment grows tax-free, like a Roth IRA, provided it’s held for at least ten years. (If it’s sold earlier, it can be rolled into another opportunity fund and remain tax-free.)
Here is how it could get the real estate industry to take action.
For real estate developers, O-zones offer cheap real estate and unlimited, untaxed upside if a neighborhood takes off. Developers must do more than stash cash in crumbling property. To qualify for tax perks, they must make swift and significant upgrades (at least equal to the cost of the initial purchase). With real estate projects come new office buildings, industrial districts, restaurants and affordable housing—all of which can lay the groundwork for an economic boom. “The real estate aspect is a great catalyst to attract new businesses,” says AOL founder Steve Case, an early supporter of the O-zone initiative, whose Rise of the Rest Fund invests in backwater areas. “But it’s the startups that will be the real job creators.”
And here is how it could influence where new businesses decide to locate.
“If Facebook could have chosen to locate itself in an Opportunity Zone, like the Tenderloin in San Francisco, the investors would’ve paid no capital gains on their equity,” says Parker, who presumably would have been one of the big winners. The promise of mega-returns could send VCs, investment banks and private equity firms scrambling to launch their own opportunity funds to create incubators, scour second cities for overlooked talent or move portfolio companies into O-zones. “It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of Silicon Valley VCs started to tell founders, ‘We’d like you to go over the bridge to Oakland, or we’d like you to go to Stockton,’” Parker says.
If you’d like to learn more about Opportunity Zones, check out the Forbes article.
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