Search results for: “laneway housing”

• Powerhouse: A case study in neighborhood infill

  

  Dezeen recently featured the above project in Philadelphia by Interface Studio Architects. It’s called Powerhouse and the goal was to provide a variety of different housing typologies and tenures within a dense infill project that, at the same time, remains in keeping with its context.

  The full block complex contains 31 residential units, which are a mixture of apartments, duplexes (stacked towns), live/work units, and single-family townhouses. There’s also a corner retail space. 10 of the units are rental and the balance are for sale. The development also incorporates 3 existing rowhouses on the block. (Were these the holdouts?)

  Here is a diagram from ISA to give you a sense of how these different housing types come together:

  

  The project feels germane to Philly’s urban fabric and it is certainly interesting in its own right. But for those of us from Toronto, it’s perhaps even more interesting because it’s a scale of infill development that we don’t see very often in this city: low-rise intensification. (Also commonly referred to as “The Missing Middle”.)

  Recently I’ve been speaking with a number of people about whether or not Toronto should be thinking differently about its low-rise neighborhoods. Because as it stands today, even this sort of gentle density can cause quite a stir. 

  Two thoughts immediately come to mind – one of which will not surprise anyone who reads this blog. Firstly, I see laneway housing as an elegant way to intensify low-rise neighborhoods without changing their character. That’s why I’m proposing this house.

  Secondly, I have long felt that we should rethink how we treat arterial roads that are not designated as “Avenues.” That is, we should encourage greater densities. An “Avenue” designation signals mid-rise. But absent this, our policies are frankly retrograde, given the way some of these arterial streets have evolved over the years.

  What are your thoughts about this scale of infill?

  Images: ISA

  2017.05.09

• A prototype for low-rise intensification

  Laneway housing is back in the news here in Toronto. Last week the University of Toronto reported that they would like to build 50 laneway houses within the Huron-Sussex neighborhood and that they are aiming to start a 2 house pilot project some time in 2018.

  Here is a drawing from their Planning Study:

  

  What you see is mid-rise infill (orange) along the main streets and low-rise infill (purple) along the secondary streets and laneways. There’s also a “living lane” that runs north-south through the neighborhood. 

  I know we’ve talked a lot about laneway housing and neighborhood intensification on this blog, but I hadn’t seen the above plan before. And I wonder if we aren’t going to look back at this neighborhood plan as a prototype for low-rise intensification.

  2017.03.07

• Compact and constrained

  I was walking by a tight construction site last night and it got me thinking. Besides the obvious environmental benefits of building up, as opposed to out, compact urban sites can force something else: intent.

  One of the ways I think about good design is that it is intentional. It is about seeing problems and/or opportunities and then being deliberate in how you respond. Every creative decision needs a reason why. I like how John R. Moran talks about design in this blog post from 2014:

  “The opposite of design, then, is the failure to develop and employ intent in making creative decisions. This doesn’t sound hard, but, astonishingly, no other leading tech company makes intentional design choices like Apple. Instead, they all commit at least one of what I term the Three Design Evasions.”

  The three design evasions he goes on to talk about are (1) preserving, (2) copying, and (3) delegating.

  The thing about compact and constrained urban sites is that they can force you away from the three design evasions that Moran lists in his post. You can’t just repeat what was done in the past or copy what someone else has done, because that precedent probably didn’t have the same challenges you face.

  Of course, if this were enough to promote great design, our cities would look a hell of a lot different. Still, it’s one of the reasons why I’m attracted to compact forms of development such as laneway housing and other urban infill.

  2016.08.17

• Rethinking the backyard from Seattle to Toronto

  

  https://500px.com/embed.js

  The Urbanist recently published a guest post, called Let Us Build Backyard Cottages, that sounds a lot like a post I wrote a few years ago, called Why It’s Next to Impossible to Get a Laneway House Built in Toronto.

  It’s the same story: buy house; see opportunity to build low-cost well-designed backyard cottage (or laneway house); discover the countless obstacles in front of you; give up until the land use policies become more favorable.

  Here’s the Seattle version of the story (via The Urbanist):

  I bought my home in 2014 with the intent of building a backyard cottage on the property. The property is a mere 4,080 square feet, with a large flat backyard that is mostly wasted space. The plan was to buy a small, prefabricated, and super-insulated (to Passive House standards) house. We would install it and move into it while we brought the main house up to Passive House standards as well, adding insulation and ventilation. We would then move into the main house while my parents (who are currently living on the East Coast, and want to move closer to us) move into the backyard cottage.
  

  Unfortunately, Seattle’s backyard cottage requirements proved too onerous for us to move forward with building one. The requirement of an additional parking space was a bit irritating (especially considering that my family lives car-free near the future Roosevelt light rail station), despite the fact that we do technically have two parking spaces. But more frustrating than that, it was the owner-occupancy requirement that made us scrap our backyard cottage plans.

  What I find interesting about all of this is that the same narrative is happening in multiple cities, from Seattle to Toronto. That, again, suggests to me that change is likely inevitable. Especially since Seattle seems further ahead in this regard compared to Toronto. Change is happening.

  Of course, there are differences between accessory dwelling units (what The Urbanist wrote about) and independent laneway housing (what I wrote about). But I would classify them as being in the same family of urban change.

  Most North American cities are clinging to a specific kind of single family housing typology. I can appreciate why. But I believe that there will be a tipping point.

  I’m not sure that this year will be the year. Which is why I didn’t include laneway housing in my list of 10 city building predictions for 2016. But I think it will happen in the shorter term.

  2016.02.03

• Throwing butts

  For whatever reason, some of the people living in high-rise buildings believe that if you flick a cigarette butt off a balcony that it will magically disintegrate on the way down. It’s either that or they don’t give a shit about anyone else.

  Because if you happen to live in or manage a building which has patios or terraces at the base of tower, I bet you have this problem:

  

  Above is a picture of a Belmont cigarette burning through the tarp covering the wooden harvest table on my patio. 

  It’s a destruction of property, an environmental concern (many butts end up in stormwater drains), and a pretty scary fire hazard. I know of many incidences where thrown cigarette butts have started fires in a high-rise building. It happened last year in my mother’s building.

  However, the frustrating thing about this problem is that it’s exceptionally difficult to stop. I know this because I sit on the board of my condo building. The typical response is for management to send out notices to all the residents asking them to stop doing this. But frankly, that does nothing.

  So if any of you know of a company or service (or have a product idea) that can help with this, please contact me. But if no such company or service exists, I am positive that you could create it today and sell to almost every condo corporation and property management company that have a condition where terraces or patios sit below a tower. Because inevitably, there will be someone upstairs throwing butts.

  Many buildings have a similar issue with dog poo. People simply don’t pick up after their dogs. So some property managers have started taking stool samples of every dog who lives in the building. That way they can easily determine which residents aren’t picking up after their dogs. I guess that’s what it takes to get some people to give a shit.

  Of course, this isn’t a problem just in buildings. Cities in general are always fighting litter. That’s why you see ideas like this pop-up:

  #neatstreets, idea geniale per ridurre i mozziconi sulle strade pic.twitter.com/udbV7IH9AW

  — Else Project (@ElseProject_)

  October 14, 2015

  //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  This particular one (in London) was designed to stop people from throwing their cigarette butts on the street. Instead, you use your butt to vote. In this case: England vs. Australia.

  We talk a lot about big ideas here on Architect This City. What driverless cars will mean for cities, how laneway housing could help with housing affordability, and so on. But the smallest ideas can also matter a lot for city building. Sometimes we forget that.

  2015.11.04

• The missing middle will come, eventually

  Yesterday Lloyd Alter of Treehugger wrote a great rebuttal to my post about homes for families. His argument was that I missed a whole world of building typologies between single family homes and apartments. (Something that architect and urban planner Daniel Parolek calls “The Missing Middle”.)

  Now he’s absolutely right. I didn’t mention it – other than provide an option in the survey for townhomes. And he’s right that it’s a tremendous opportunity for cities looking to increase housing supply and improve affordability.

  But the reason I didn’t mention it in my survey is because, here in Toronto, we’re not very good at that middle scale.

  I previously wrote a post talking about Toronto’s 3 stages of intensification. It went from high-rise to mid-rise, and then to low-rise intensification. And my argument was that we’re still in and figuring out the mid-rise scale. (There are challenges at this scale, but that deserves a separate post.)

  Eventually though, I think we will get to low-rise intensification. And that will cover off many of the building typologies that Lloyd is talking about: duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and, my personal favorite, laneway houses.

  This, of course, isn’t the case in every city. Many cities, such as Montreal, have a strong history of neighborhood-scaled apartments. Lloyd points that out in his article. But that’s not the case here in Toronto.

  In fact, Toronto’s Official Plan explicitly designates these low-rise “Neighborhoods” as areas that are stable and should not see much intensification. And it was a great selling point for the Places to Grow Act: intensification here, but not there.

  But I think this will change. Not because I’m a real estate developer and I think it should change, but because our current arrangement is causing a dramatic erosion of affordability at the low-rise/ground-related housing scale.

  If it were up to me, and it most certainly is not, I would start with laneway housing. It’s a great way to intensify low-rise neighbourhoods without altering the character of the streets.

  If you live in a single family neighborhood, I would especially love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. 

  2015.06.03

• The great intensification debate–what’s better for cities?

  

  San Francisco Bay Blues by Stefano Termanini on 500px

  I recently stumbled upon a great Treehugger article by Lloyd Alter called: The real triumph of the city will be seen in Buffalo (2014). The post is partially a response to economist Ed Glaeser’s popular book, Triumph of the City, which I’ve mentioned and cited many times before here on ATC.

  Lloyd’s thesis is basically that Ed is wrong in arguing that reducing the barriers to building is the most effective way to maintain housing affordability; that cities are really made out of flesh, rather than bricks and mortar; and that urbanists need to move beyond the view that a city’s past should be preserved at all costs.

  Lloyd then goes on to argue that rather than continuing to over-intensify cities like New York, San Francisco, and Toronto, we should be turning our attention to former powerhouses like Buffalo and trying to figure out how to reinvigorate those cities. The bones are already in place.

  Now, I don’t disagree that there’s lots of potential in cities such as a Buffalo and Detroit. I’ve written a lot about Detroit and I’m genuinely rooting for the city. But I don’t think it’s as simple as it sounds to shift our attention, and I don’t agree with all of the critiques of Glaeser’s work.

  As important as built form is, cities like Buffalo and Detroit remind us that architecture and buildings alone aren’t enough to build a city. There are countless masterpieces – such as Michigan Central Station in Detroit – that regrettably sit abandoned. You need people and communities.

  There’s also a snowball effect. 

  As a city becomes more successful, there’s a natural tendency for more people to want to be there. It’s no different than the network effect experienced by a social network. A social network without people has no value. But the more people you add to it, the more valuable it becomes and the more difficult it becomes to replace.

  So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that people will put up with expensive real estate and small apartments just to live in cities like San Francisco. That’s where they want to be. And as long as the demand to live in those cities is increasing, I continue to believe that it makes sense to build more, not less, housing and to make it reasonably easy to do so.

  At the same time, I believe whole heartedly in heritage preservation. As a trained architect, there’s a strong possibility that I would shed an actual tear should a building with heritage value be torn down in my city or in any city in the world. 

  And that’s why when I was on CBC radio last week I said that neighborhood investment needs to be a balance between preservation and progress. The Twittersphere later blasted me for using the term “progress”, but I think you get my position.

  My interpretation of Glaeser’s work has never been that he supports completely erasing a city’s past in order to make way for the future. If that is his position, then I too disagree with it. 

  My interpretation has instead been that he supports removing unreasonable barriers to development so that cities are able to supply – or can at least try to supply – enough housing to meet growing demand. This also doesn’t exclusively mean high-rise intensification. It could mean removing the barriers in front of things like laneway housing. And I continue to believe that this is a good idea.

  I don’t believe that this approach alone will solve all housing problems, but I do think it’s a great place to start.

  Thank you Lloyd for the great post.

  2015.02.24

• 3 stages of intensification

  

  We all know that the Greater Toronto Area is growing and intensifying at an incredible pace. In fact, last year the region set a record with 25,571 new condominium units completed.

  If you listen to industry experts, such as George Carras of RealNet, they’ll tell you that this level of intensification — which usually means condominiums — is really a decade in the making. That’s when the government set out to explicitly encourage this type of growth.

  But in the decade since that decision, we’ve seen both government and the market evolve in terms of what that intensification should look like. It started out with a largely high-rise building typology. Tall buildings were to be allowed in the downtown, as well as in specific growth nodes throughout the region. But for everything in between — the officially designated “neighborhoods” — there was to be no development.

  This is what I’ll call the first stage of intensification.

  Then, we started to think about mid-rise intensification along the avenues. Most of these “avenues” (also an official term) cut through those same stable neighborhoods, but the main streets were seen as an appropriate place to allow additional growth. It makes perfect sense and so guidelines were created to help dictate what this new building typology should look like.

  This is what I’ll call the second stage of intensification.

  And it’s one that I’d argue we’re currently living through with new mid-rise projects like DUKE in the Junction (TAS project), Kingston&Co in Kingston Road Village (another TAS project), Abacus Lofts on Dundas West, and The Hive in Etobicoke. These are all mid-rise buildings going up in established neighborhoods.

  With the recent decision to also allow wood frame buildings up to 6 storeys in Ontario (instead of 4), we’ll probably see an even greater surge in mid-rise buildings once the private sector gets its head around this shift.

  So what’s next?

  I think it’s inevitable that we’ll eventually see low-rise intensification within our established neighborhoods. We started by avoiding them altogether, and then deciding that it was desirable to build along their periphery. But as demand for urban housing continues to increase, I believe it’s only a matter of time before we start to loosen the reins on our single family neighborhoods.

  Some of you might be thinking that this is going to be a bad thing, but I actually think the opposite. Projects such as Vancouver’s Union Street EcoHeritage prove that it’s entirely possible to intensify existing neighborhoods through sensitive and beautiful infill interventions. And of course, let’s not forget about laneway housing.

  The fact of the matter is that Toronto has already been intensifying its neighborhoods for a very long time — likely since the beginning — by converting single family homes into duplexes, triplexes, and other multi-family dwellings. We just haven’t been doing it in any sort of structured way.

  I don’t know when this will change, but I think it’s only a matter of time. And that will be the third stage of intensification.

  Image: Flickr

  2015.01.27

• Net-positive buildings — why a green building isn’t what you think it is

  

  “We can’t address climate change without thinking about buildings.” -Bryn Davidson, Lanefab (Vancouver)

  This is a line from a recent TEDx talk by Bryn Davidson, who is one of the founders of Lanefab out of Vancouver. Lanefab is a design and construction firm specializing in sustainable infill / laneway homes. Unlike Toronto, laneway houses are actually allowed in Vancouver.

  If you have any interest in climate change, I would encourage you to watch his talk. It’s less than 20 minutes long and he addresses many of the misconceptions that I think people hold about what it means to build “green”. Click here if you can’t see it below.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEUShQ7r_tE]

  While I think it’s great that the green agenda is much more front and center these days, I agree with Bryn in that we’re not yet on a sustainable path forward. For many people, being green means buying a LEED certified home, having a Tesla in the garage, and having a Nest thermostat on your wall. And certainly those things help.

  But they’re not the whole story. Instead of just focusing on green and LEED buildings, Byrn argues that we need to take it a step further and start focusing on “Net Positive” buildings. In other words, ask yourself this: Will there be fewer green house gas emissions on the planet after your project is built?

  

  More specifically, he outlines 3 criteria:

  1. How good is your building?
  2. Where is it located?
  3. What does it replace?

  The idea behind this framework is that the building itself (i.e. How good is your building?) is only one piece of the story. What also matters is its location and what it happens to be replacing. Is the building in a walkable area? Is it on a greenfield or infill site? Is it replacing an old energy inefficient building? Is it intensifying land use patterns?

  All of these things matter when it comes to assessing our greenhouse gas emissions.

  Let’s now apply this framework to three different building typologies: mid and high rise condominiums, and laneway houses. In the context of a Net Positive building, they all do quite well. In Toronto, we could certainly do a lot to improve the way many of our condo buildings are built, but they are usually in the right kinds of areas and they are the right kind of building typology.

  Similarly, laneway houses as a whole are an incredibly sustainable building typology. In fact, I would argue that an energy efficient laneway house is easily one of the most sustainable homes you could build. They’re compact. They’re located on under-utilized and previously developed land. They often replace parking. And they increase population densities in established residential areas, which then makes transit more feasible.

  But again, here in Toronto we’re not allowed to build them.

  So whether you like it or not, if you’re involved in shaping the built environment, you’re also involved in climate change. This is a job for architects and developers, but also policy makers and communities. Laneway housing is a perfect example of that. Lots of people would build them — if only they could.

  Image: Lanefab

  2014.12.05

• London garage to sell for £550,000

  

  The garage shown above (with the pseudo green roof) is located in the Chelsea neighborhood of London. It measures about 11’ x 7’ and it – along with the site it sits on – is about to go up for auction.

  It’s expected to go for more than £550,000 according to the DailyMail UK, which would make it the most expensive garage ever sold in the UK. The site area is 535 square foot – about the size of an average 1 bedroom condo in Toronto.

  Below is an aerial view of the site. It basically looks to be residual land.

  

  But as awkward as this site might appear, the expected value is being driven by the fact that planning permissions were granted to turn it into this:

  

  It’s a 2 bedroom house that feels a lot like a laneway house. It certainly fits the description of “a house behind a house”, which is often how laneway housing gets described here in Toronto.

  I wanted to share it because it supports my belief that, sooner or later, Toronto will come around to laneway housing. As property prices rise and affordability continues to erode, people will – quite justifiably – start looking in all sorts of new places for a decent urban home.

  Many thanks to my friend Adrian for sending me the link.

  2014.10.17