Tag: athiscity

• Toronto housing — where we came from and where we’re probably headed

  This morning I’m working on a presentation that I’m going to be giving one evening next week to a delegation coming in from the US. The title of the presentation is the title of this blog post: Toronto housing – where we came from and where we’re probably headed.

  My plan is to start in and around the 50s and 60s and talk about Toronto’s first tower boom following the war. For this time period, I’m relying a lot on the work of Graeme Stewart of ERA Architects, who is one of, if not the, expert on post war towers in this city.

  

  I’m then going to move onto our current high-rise condo boom and compare the two.

  Because the interesting thing about the first boom is that, after it finished, we basically returned to the typical North American housing model: building single-family homes. And it wasn’t until this recent boom of the early 2000s that we once again resumed building more high-rise than low-rise housing. That is still the case today.

  But the question I want to address is really, what’s next? Where are we headed? Is history going to repeat itself or is – dare I say – this time different?

  I’ll eventually get to those questions here on Architect This City, but first I want to hear from you. So here’s what I’m proposing: leave your thoughts in the comment section below and I will feature the best ones in my presentation next week as the voices of Toronto. I’m sure many of you know that I’m a big fan of crowdsourced information.

  So here goes. Where is Toronto housing headed and how will we be living in the next 10+ years? Will we be raising families up in towers or not? Please comment by Sunday, September 27, 2015 at 6pm (ET) to make sure I have time to feature you in the presentation. 

  Thanks for participating 🙂

  2015.09.26

• The day modern architecture died

  

  In 1956, a large 57 acre urban renewal project was completed in St. Louis. It consisted of 33 apartment buildings, each 11 storeys tall. The entire complex was known as Pruitt-Igoe.

  Early residents seemed to really like the buildings. The first tenant, Frankie Mae Raglin, called it the “nicest place she’d ever had.” 

  But 16 years later in 1972, the first 3 buildings within Pruitt-Igoe were demolished. And in 1977, architectural historian Charles Jencks proclaimed that the day Pruitt-Igoe was demolished was the day that modern architecture had officially died.

  The modernist dream had failed. Architecture had failed us. Segregated “towers in a park” was not the way to socially engineer away poverty and slums from our cities. 

  This is the narrative that we have told ourselves, not only in St. Louis, but in cities all around the world.

  But was it really all architecture’s fault?

  Stuyvesant Town in New York (80 acres) shares many of the same architectural ideals that Pruitt-Igoe embodied and it seems to be holding up just fine. The same could be said for Lafayette Park in Detroit (46 acres), which is probably more telling given what the city witnessed in the years following 1956 – the year Lafayette Park was completed.

  So the reality is far more complex.

  Between 1950 and 1970, St. Louis lost about 30% of its population. Coming on the end, Pruitt-Igoe had a vacancy rate of 88%. Racial tensions were also surging. Here’s how the American Institute of Architects put it back in 2012:

  Pruitt-Igoe was built during a tumultuous time in U.S. race relations in a city with an intense history of racial segregation. Pruitt and Igoe were designed as separate, racially segregated projects: Pruitt for African-American residents, Igoe for whites. As the towers were going up, the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision banned segregation. Faced with the possibility of living next to African-American neighbors in an integrated Pruitt-Igoe, white residents moved out en masse, exacerbating Pruitt-Igoe’s vacancy problems.
  

  So while most cities rightfully would’t dare build in the spirit of Pruitt-Igoe today, this was not a strictly architectural problem. There is always an underlying social, political, and economic environment. And unfortunately architecture, alone, cannot solve everything. 

  If you’re interested in this topic, I recommend you check out a paper by Katharine G. Bristol called, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.

  Image by Bettmann/Corbis via The Guardian

  2015.09.25

• Find the best local construction professionals at the lowest prices

  One of my closest friends, who also happens to be in the same industry, is currently testing out a new construction marketplace idea. It’s called Tenderlet and it’s an online platform that helps your average house or condo owner “find the best local construction professionals at the lowest prices.”

  Right now it’s just a basic website, but he is obviously thinking that it could grow into a far more robust online marketplace.

  The way it works is real simple:

  1. You tell Tenderlet about your construction job – everything from a water damaged ceiling repair to new hardwood flooring. 
  2. Tenderlet goes out and gets multiple quotes on your behalf (just like how the professionals do it). 
  3. Then Tenderlet comes back to you with at least 3 quotes and a recommendation. It’ll even handle scheduling and payments.

  Eventually he’s imagining that there will be a mobile app, reviews for the construction professionals, and a location dimension, which can make all the difference, particularly for smaller jobs. But you have to start somewhere.

  I think he’s on to something here. I know I want to use it. So I would encourage you to check out tenderlet.com and give it a try. If you have any feedback about the idea, I am sure he would love to hear from you in the comment section below.

  2015.09.24

• Products people love

  

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

  I recently heard someone say, in a pejorative way, that all real estate developers think of what they build as “products.” I imagine this is in contrast to thinking in terms of buildings as spaces for people to live, raise a family, do their life’s work, and so on.

  When I heard this I immediately thought to myself, yeah, we (or at least I) do think of our spaces as products. But I also didn’t see it as a negative thing.

  In my view, there’s no reason that classifying something as a “product” has to make it any less beautiful, functional, and/or filled with design intent. My iPhone is a product. The wine on my shelf that somebody labored over is a product. The chair I’m sitting on right now is a product. All of these items were produced by people and then I consumed them because I liked what those people had made.

  When I was completing my first master’s in architecture and real estate, I used to walk back and forth across campus between the design school and the business school. And in these two places, we talked about bricks-and-mortar in very different ways.

  In the business school, buildings were the proverbial widget. How much does this widget cost to produce? How much can I sell or rent this widget for in the market? And how do I scale up my business so that I can sell/rent more widgets?

  On the other hand, in the design school we weren’t all that concerned with the cost of the widget or even what people would pay for it. Instead we were concerned with making it something so much more than just a plain old widget. These weren’t buildings. This was capital “A”, Architecture.

  I don’t think either school was wrong in their thinking. I just think they were missing each other. 

  Business is business. If you don’t make a profit then you’re not going to be around for very long. And while many companies can survive by making shitty products, those aren’t great businesses. The best businesses also deliver products that people absolutely love.

  So whether we call it architecture, a product, or even a widget, the goal should be to delight people. (Am I allowed to say “customer”?) Make people so happy that they have to tell their friends about it. If we’re doing that, then frankly I don’t care what we call it.

  2015.09.23

• The housing typologies of American cities

  Yesterday the Washington Post published a great chart showing the housing types of the 40 largest cities, by population, in the US. The list is ordered from lowest to highest according to the percentage of single-family houses in the city (green bar).

  Here’s the chart:

  

  Not surprisingly, many of the cities at the top of this list (meaning they have the lowest percentage of single-family houses) are in the older east coast cities. 

  It’s also interesting to see just how much the rowhouse dominates the urban landscape in Philadelphia and Baltimore. In Philadelphia, almost 60% of the housing stock is an attached rowhouse.

  Housing is the backdrop for such a big portion of our lives. And when you live in a particular kind of home, it impacts your life whether or not you realize it. The dense rowhouses of Philadelphia and the single-family houses of Oklahoma City are the result of two very different kinds of urban landscapes.

  In Toronto, that backdrop is in the midst of a dramatic change. More and more of us are now living in high-rise condos. That hasn’t always been the case, of course. It’s a recent shift. But it looks like it’ll be a big part of our future.

  2015.09.22

• Mega-cities vs. networked cities

  

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

  Ed Glaeser, Giacomo Ponzetto, and Yimei Zou recently published a new academic paper called, Urban Networks: Spreading the Flow of Goods, People and Ideas. 

  The paper looks at whether it’s more advantageous to build huge and consolidated mega-cities or build connected networks of smaller urban centers (perhaps connected by high speed rail). As countries like China rapidly urbanize, this is something that many people are thinking about.

  In China, there is a lively urban planning debate
  about whether to facilitate the increased expansion of the vast agglomerations of Beijing and
  Shanghai or whether to focus on creating networks of cities that are smaller, albeit still much
  larger than almost all of the cities of Western Europe. The current government policy favors
  networks, in the hope that connected smaller cities may be free of the extreme downsides of
  mass agglomeration, such as extreme congestion, pollution and high housing costs.

  Like most things, there are real trade-offs. 

  In the paper, they assume that larger cities lead to more urban amenities, which in turn serves as an important magnet for skilled workers. However, for unskilled workers who may not care/benefit from the same urban amenities, it is possible for them to dislike the bigger cities. In this case, the benefits do not outweigh the negatives of urban expansion and an urban divide is created (rich/poor).

  One of the potential negatives is housing.

  The attraction of denser, not larger, mega-cities is determined also by the elasticity of
  housing supply. When it is easy to add extra homes on a narrow plot of land, as in Texas,
  then density becomes more attractive. European urban networks may well be the right
  answer because history and regulation makes it so hard to build in Europe’s older cities.
  Even though China has usually been quite friendly towards skyscrapers, the sheer scale of
  the Chinese population may still make the case for urban networks.

  If you’re interested in this topic, there’s a section (#2) in the paper on the history of urban networks that you might like.

  2015.09.21

• Vancouver never plays itself

  There’s something powerful about seeing/hearing cities being depicted in film, TV, and other kinds of pop culture. It creates familiarity and does a lot to drive the brand of that place.

  But how often are you just seeing one city disguised to look like another? Actually quite often.

  Here’s an interesting video that talks about how the 3rd largest film production city in North America never actually plays itself.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojm74VGsZBU?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

  I know that there are real economic benefits to being a cheap place to film movies, but I would love to see Canadian cities play themselves. There are also big benefits to that.

  Thanks to Scott Bonjukian at The Urbanist for sharing the above video this morning.

  2015.09.20

• From map books to Google Maps

  When I was a kid I remember my parents having something called a “Perly’s” in their car. It was basically a map book and it was the best thing around. 

  You would start by looking at a big grid of the city and then you’d find the specific area you were looking for and then flip to that page. If you were on the road a lot for work, a Perly’s was a mandatory addition to your car.

  Things have obviously come a long way since then. It could take you a long time to find the street you were looking for in a Perly’s. I remember doing that from the passenger seat. Now our phones do that for us and if the connection makes us wait for more than few seconds, we get irritated.

  But we’ve also moved beyond just static maps. 

  The other morning I was driving out to the suburbs and I saw this road sign telling me that – given current traffic conditions – it was going to take me 15 minutes to get to HWY 427. 

  

  Have you ever wondered how they come up with those time estimates?

  There are a few ways to do it. But here in Toronto along the Gardiner Expressway and Lake Shore Boulevard it’s done using your mobile phone. Phones have unique network identifiers called MAC addresses. And when they try and connect via Bluetooth or Wifi they actually send out their MAC address.

  So what happens as you’re driving along is that your phone’s MAC address is being picked up at various locations. And since the distance between these various reception points is known, it’s pretty easy to determine how fast you’re traveling. That’s how they come up with those time/traffic estimates. 

  This data is anonymous but, in theory, the city also knows if people are speeding when the traffic is light.

  This same technology is being used by many retailers and shopping malls to track how people move through their spaces. It’s used to see, among other things, which merchandising strategies are working and what synergies one might be creating (or not creating) with the tenant mix.

  But getting back to traffic, there are obviously ways to collect traffic data without any additional physical infrastructure.

  As I was about to leave the suburbs and head back downtown, my phone somehow knew I was about to do that (perhaps because I was stopped at a Starbucks near the highway) and so it decided to tell me this:

  

  It wasn’t the best notification to receive on my phone, but I was impressed nonetheless. This traffic data is collected using GPS data transmitted from mobile phones using Google Maps, Apple Maps, and so on. Clearly we’ve come a long way since the days of manually leafing through a thick Perly’s.

  At the same time, it feels like we are still pretty far away from solving the problem of urban congestion. Every big city in the world is grappling with this issue. 

  Part of the problem, I think, is the belief that there’s some sort of silver bullet – more highways, a magic smartphone app, and so on – that will enable everyone to be able to drive around in their own car by themselves. I don’t believe that’s possible in big cities. And the sooner we get away from that toxic thinking, the quicker we’ll solve this problem.

  2015.09.19

• Is venture-based real estate development coming to the Bay Area?

  

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

  Chamath
  Palihapitiya is a Sri Lanka born, Canada educated, venture capitalist in
  Silicon Valley, who made a boatload of money as one of the early employees of
  Facebook. He now runs a VC firm called Social +
  Capital and owns part of the Golden State Warriors.

  The other
  night he was interviewed at a StrictlyVC event in San Francisco and I think
  that many of his comments would also be of real interest to the Architect This City
  community. He’s super passionate in interviews and always fun to listen to.

  Below is what
  he had to say about the San Francisco startup scene. It really speaks volumes
  about what people will put up with in order to live in an awesome place/city that they love. All of his responses below are from this
  TechCrunch article.

  “The city has to be doing more, around
  transportation, around housing… You have to get rid of the nimbyism and you
  need to quadruple, if not quintuple, the amount of housing. You need to tell
  that engineer from the University of Michigan that he can live here on a salary
  of $80,000.

  [In the meantime], we look at our startups, and
  the minute that they start to spend more than 15 percent of their burn – good
  money that we give them – on rent, a huge red flag goes up. When they, on a
  per-head-count basis, are spending so much, we start looking at the
  productivity of the technical team. And if it’s good but not great and they’re
  spending this insane amount of money [versus] a different team in Redwood City,
  we start to ask ourselves: “Are you so convinced that success is going to
  happen in this city at 1.5x the cost?”

  Because for every dollar that someone in
  Mountain View or Redwood City is raising, you [in San Francisco] have to raise
  one-and-a-half to two times that just to get to the same point. So you’re cutting
  your half life in half. To prove that you can take an Uber from some fuckin’
  shitty bar to another shitty bar? Like, I don’t understand.”

  And here he
  talks about the possibility of his venture firm also getting into the real
  estate development business. I couldn’t resist blogging about this.

  “We made a big
  decision with our last fund to build an organization that looks really
  different than a venture firm, and that organization is going to be this
  hybrid, bastard stepchild of Berkshire Hathaway and Blackstone and BlackRock.

  What I mean by this is
  that we want to have a large permanent capital base and we want to make really
  long, discontinuous bets on companies and sectors and trends.

  And one of the things
  we talked about was having a real estate fund …[because] we owe it to our
  companies to alleviate some of these problems when no one else is going to. If
  we went and built one million square feet somewhere of mixed use, where you
  work and live, and we rethink what it means to have a modular living environment
  for a millennial cohort that wants to work at companies and doesn’t necessarily
  have kids, we can do that in a way and give that back to our CEOs as a benefit
  of working with us.

  And you can probably
  make the economics work. Because we only really care about the equity of the
  company anyways. And the equity in the real estate will take care of itself if
  you take the 30-year view. So we’re at the point now where we’re like, wow, we
  should raise a few billion dollars and get into the real estate business and
  solve this problem systematically for our companies. And maybe in that, it
  becomes a blueprint for how others should do it. We’re just basically going to
  act as our own city-state and decide how to do it ourselves.”

  It’s
  interesting to think about what the economics might look like if your primary goal is
  simply to provide space to your portfolio companies (entrepreneurs) so that
  they get more (financial) runway and, therefore, have a greater chance of success. I’d love to see that pro forma.

  2015.09.18

• NXT City Night 2015

  

  I just got
  my tickets for NXT City Night,
  happening Thursday, September 24, 2015 at 6:30pm here in downtown Toronto.

  If you’re
  not familiar with NXT City Prize, it’s an annual urban design competition where
  young Canadians (35 years of age or younger) submit ideas to improve the built
  environment. The top submissions win a total of $9,000 in prize money and the winning idea
  gets paired up with the City of Toronto work on actually implementing it. That’s
  the best part.

  The 2015
  finalists have already been announced, here, but the top submissions
  will be announced at NXT City Night. The Chief Planner of Toronto, Jennifer
  Keesmaat, will be there, along with the
  competition’s very impressive jury.

  I think it’s
  important to keep in mind that a lot of what makes cities great often happens
  through citizen-led grassroots movements.

  The
  High Line in New York – which today attracts over 5 million visitors a year
  and is believed to be responsible for over $2.2 billion in new economic
  activity – was really the work of 2 friends who thought that preserving and
  repurposing the High Line was a cool idea. Which is why in 1999 they founded a
  non-profit called Friends of the High line. Amazing things happen when people and
  passion get involved.

  So I would
  encourage you to grab a ticket and join me at NXT City Night next week. Tickets are
  $25, but if you use the coupon code ATHISCITY,
  you’ll get $5 off your ticket 🙂

  The event is
  also taking place in a spectacular old warehouse building at 56 Maud Street
  (formerly St. Andrew’s Market Hall). That alone is reason enough to come. I’ve been inside before. Get your Instagram ready. But
  if that’s not enough, there’s also:

  • Open bar including Steam Whistle beer and Pillitteri Estate wine
  • Catering from Oyster Boy, Kanpai Snack Bar, Thoroughbred and many more
  • Art installations by Wayward Collective
  • Beats by Jesse Futerman and A Digital Needle
  • Local wares from GetFresh, Shopify, Spacing Store and Swipe

  I hope to see
  you there. Make sure to tweet at me
  if you’ll be there so we can connect in person.

  2015.09.17