Tag: athiscity

• 10 reasons to visit Philadelphia right now

  

  Today’s ATC post – which happens to be a guest post – is coming to you live from on board the UP Express train that runs from Union Station in downtown Toronto to Pearson Airport. (Everywhere should have free wifi.)

  I’m on my way to Philadelphia and I’ve been wanting to try this train since it opened earlier this summer. It feels great to finally ride it. It’s everything I could have hoped for. It even has that new car smell 🙂

  Last month I wrote a post called, 10 reasons to visit Toronto right now. It was in honor of my good friend Alex Feldman’s visit. Well now it’s my turn to visit Philadelphia and he has decided to return the favor and do a Philly version of that same post. 

  Alex is to Philadelphia what I am to Toronto. He grew up in Philly. He was educated in Philly (we went to Penn together). And he’s super passionate about the future of Philly. And I think that’s how everyone should be about their city.

  So I hope you enjoy his list of 10 reasons to visit Philadelphia right now. It’s basically my to-do list for this weekend.

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  10. World Heritage City: Philadelphia is on track to become the first World Heritage City in the United States. This UNESCO designation will underscore the city’s historic importance as the birthplace of American Democracy as well as the historic urban fabric which gives the city it’s walkable, urbane character.

  9. Shopping: Philadelphia has come a long way as a shopping destination. Conde Nast Traveler recently ranked the city as number 2 out of the best shopping destinations in the world. 3rd Street in Old City has become a hotbed for independent boutiques while Rittenhouse Square has attracted new chains such as Uniqlo, Theory, and Vince. More is on the way with a complete re-make of the Gallery shopping mall slated to start soon and the new East Market complex under construction. 

  8. The Pope is Coming:  In case you haven’t heard, Pope Francis will make his first visit to the United States – with a 3 day visit to Philadelphia in late September. The visit will coincide with the World Meeting of Families gathering. A crazy number of visitors (2 million?) are expected to descend on the city – causing Philadelphians to panic, complain, and attempt to rent their houses for ridiculous amounts of money. But this important visit will help raise the profile of the city on the international stage.

  7. Building Boom: There is probably more development happening in Philadelphia right now then any other time in recent history. The skyline is growing with additions by Norman Foster, Cesar Pelli , and Kohn Pedersen Fox. New apartment buildings, condos, and rowhouses are under construction across the city (rental vacancy rates are less than 2%). In addition the Barnes Foundation and the new Singh Center for Nanotechnology mark impressive additions to the city’s architectural landscape.

  6. Public Spaces: Philly’s public realm has seen massive investment over the last several years. A complete remake of the landscape outside of City Hall has become the new Dilworth Park. The designers of NYC’s highline have added two public spaces to the city (Race Street Pier and the new Central Green in the Navy Yard). And Schulkill Banks recently added a new boardwalk which the New York Times raved about when they ranked Philly as the number 3 city to visit in 2015. More is on the way with the first phase of the Reading Viaduct Rail Park expected to start soon.

  5. Waterfront: Philadelphia’s Delaware River waterfront has long been cut off from the city by interstate 95. Things have started to change recently, with new trails and pier parks recently added to the working waterfront. Even Penn’s Landing, the city’s much maligned waterfront attraction is seeing improvements – including the tremendously popular Spruce Street Harbor Park – a pop-up park featuring floating beer barges, shipping container food stands, and tons of hammocks.

  4. Food: Philly is one of the best food cities in the United States. So much is happening right now in the city’s dining scene, it’s hard to keep track of the latest restaurant openings. Neighborhoods such as Fishtown and East Passyunk have emerged as hot dining districts with BYOB chef driven restaurants. More can be gleaned from the Washington Post which recently summarized the dining scene better than I can.

  3. Pop-up Gardens: One of the best reasons to visit Philly in the summer is the opening of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society Pop-Up gardens. The wildly popular beer gardens, began several years ago as an initiative to remake underused or vacant lots into useful public spaces. This summer, 2 gardens – one on 15th and South and one at 9th and Wharton have been transformed into vibrant spaces for eating, drinking, and hanging out.

  2. Le Bok Fin: Speaking of temporary uses, the most recent addition to Philly’s pop-up (or iterative placemaking) scene is a rooftop bar called Le Bok Fin. Situated on the 8th floor of an old vocational high school in South Philly (and named after the school’s restaurant – which in turn is a play on one of Philly’s most famous French restaurants). This is the first iteration of development at what is planned to become an amazing new center for creatives inside the old school – being led by Lindsey Scannapieco and her team at Scout LTD. Check out Le Bok Fin for incredible views of the city skyline (especially at sunset).

  1. Bike Share: While a little late to the party, Philly recently launched it’s own bike share program – which is proving to be a huge success. Dubbed Indego, the new bike share is easy to use, has 60 stations, more than 600 bikes and is becoming one of the best ways to hop around town. Check one out and go explore Philly!

  Image: Alex Feldman

  2015.08.14

• Taller and skinnier

  Tall buildings will sway in the wind. And when they get taller and skinnier, the swaying becomes more pronounced.

  In seismically active cities, such as Tokyo and Taipei, “tuned mass dampeners” are often used near the top of tall buildings to offset the swaying caused by an earthquake.

  But tuned mass dampeners are also found in cities like New York, so that developers can build even taller and skinnier.

  Below is a diagram from the New York Times showing what one looks like and how it works. The example tower is 111 West 57th Street.

  

  Basically the masses are tuned to oscillate at a different frequency than the rest of the tower. So when the wind blows and the tower is moving one way, the weights are moving in the opposite direction and forcing the tower back towards some sort of equilibrium. 

  Neat. Structures was one of my favorite classes in architecture school.

  2015.08.13

• The impact of laneway housing in Vancouver

  In 2009, Vancouver created policy and legalized laneway homes. (If you’re not up on laneway housing, click here. I’ve written too much about this topic.)

  Since then, the number of laneway homes built in Vancouver has steadily increased to the point where roughly 350 new homes are built every year. 

  Here’s a chart I found showing the number of laneway home building permits issued in Vancouver since 2009 (the year to date number for 2015 is up to and including June):

  

  This is pretty interesting in its own right.

  But as soon as I saw this chart I started wondering how these numbers fit into the overall new home construction landscape. So I decided to dig up the City of Vancouver’s Statement of Building Permits Issued for June 2015.

  As the chart above shows, the number of laneway dwelling units built (well, permits issued) was 221 as of June 2015. But what’s really fascinating is that this numbers exceeds the number of building permits issued for single family dwellings, which was only 192!

  Also super interesting is the significant spread in building permit value. 

  For single family dwellings, the total value was $156,086,861 (or $812,952 per dwelling unit). On the other hand, for laneway dwellings the total value was $36,478,785 (or $165,062 per unit).

  Now to be fair, if you add single family dwellings with a secondary suite into the mix, you get a total count of 608 new dwelling units (as of June 2015). But at 221 new units, laneway dwellings still make up a meaningful portion of the new construction market.

  So while laneway houses might seem fringe for Toronto and other cities right now, they’re really not that fringe. In fact the numbers above start to show that they can be a viable source of new and relatively affordable single family housing.

  Eventually other cities will realize this too.

  2015.08.12

• Making alpha-bets

  

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  On Monday, Google broke the internet when it announced that it was reorganizing itself into a holding company structure called Alphabet.

  That means that Google, Inc. will now become a subsidiary, along with many other companies, of Alphabet Inc. and all shares of Google will automatically convert into the same number of shares in Alphabet.

  This is huge, but also something that was likely inevitable given the passions of the founders. Apparently Larry Page has been thinking about this move for years.

  As it stands pre-Alphabet, Google (with its main internet products) is basically a cash cow funding all of Google’s other experiments. But this muddied the waters and made it difficult for investors to clearly see how much the main internet products were making and how much the founders were spending on self-driving cars, delivery drones (Project Wing), and other new ideas.

  Now everything will be separate.

  But what’s really exciting about the reorganization is that it sets the stage for Alphabet/Google – which is arguably already one of the most important companies in the world – to become even more impactful in a wide variety of industries and disciplines, some/many not traditionally associated with tech. Each wholly owned subsidiary will have their own CEO and the founders rightly believe, I think, that this overall structure will afford them more “management scale.”

  Within Google will remain search, advertising, maps, YouTube, and the Android mobile operating system. But already Alphabet is the parent company of the following other businesses:

  • Calico, an anti-aging life extension company
  • Sidewalk, a smart cities company whose mission is to improve life in cities
  • Nest, an “internet of things” company that makes connected devices for your home
  • Fiber, a company that offers super fast internet
  • Google Ventures (venture capital) & Google Capital (private equity)
  • Google X, which is the lab developing self-driving cars and delivery drones (Project Wing)

  If you can’t tell, I’m bullish on all of this. The approach really resonates with me and I can’t wait to see what Alphabet becomes. If you’d like to read the full and official blog post announcement, click here. 

  Cheers to trying new things and making big bets.

  2015.08.11

• 1 bedroom condo for sale

  

  I’m hijacking Architect This City today to help my mother out and try something new.

  She is looking to sell her 1 bedroom condo in the Radiocity Condominiums, located at 285 Mutual Street in Toronto. It’s called Radiocity, not because the developers thought New York was cool (my pet peeve), but because the site used to be the headquarters of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) way back when.

  The 2-tower complex is located north of Carlton Street, between Church Street and Jarvis Street, and is adjacent to Canada’s National Ballet School (designed by KPMB Architects). It’s close to College Park and Yonge & College.

  It was completed/registered in 2005 and won a number of design awards, including one from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. Notable about the design is the way it integrates townhouses at the base, a public courtyard (with public art) between both towers, and the Ballet School. (A deal struck with the developer and the CBC allowed the school to buy their portion of the land for $1). 

  The buildings were developed by Context Development and designed by architectsAlliance, which is actually the same developer-architect duo behind the building I currently live and own in. I’m clearly a big fan.

  The suite is about 560 square feet. It has 9’ exposed concrete ceilings. It has one full bathroom (tub), with a stacked washer and dryer. The bedroom is about 10’ x 10’ and is setback from the outside windows and enclosed with 3 x translucent sliding doors from C-Living. (I had them installed myself and they’re much better quality than the sliding doors you’ll find in most new builds.) The kitchen and living area is open concept, and there’s a north facing balcony that overlooks a quiet private courtyard. You basically get a view of trees, greenery, and the city. The suite is located on the 7th floor.

  Here’s the floor plan:

  

  And here are a few photos. They are all the right proportions and haven’t been stretched to make the space look bigger 🙂

  

  The building has 24-hour concierge, visitor parking, and 3 floors of amenities. The amenities include a gym, aerobics room, party room, saunas, media room, boardroom, multiple lounges, 2 x guest suites, a party room, and a billiard room. 

  College subway station is a 7 minute walk (600m).

  

  The Loblaws grocery store at Maple Leaf Gardens (which is awesome and also includes an LCBO) is a 5 minute walk (400m). Though I’m fairly certain you could do it in 4 minutes.

  

  And you’re a 6 minute walk to Ryerson University (500m).

  

  The asking price is C$349,900. The maintenance fee is $426.64 per month and the property taxes are $2,039.19 per year.

  It’s a private sale, but she is willing to cooperate with buyer’s agents (2.5% commission). It’s currently furnished, but you can have it either way you want (unfurnished or furnished).

  If you have any questions or would like to book a viewing, please send her or me an email. If you’re an agent just looking for a listing, please don’t. Thanks for reading. Regularly scheduled programming will resume tomorrow.

  Image at the top of this post is from architectsAlliance.

  2015.08.10

• The world in 2050

  The United Nations recently released its 2015 version of World Population Prospects. It looks as if they put out and revise this report every 5 years.

  The Economist then took some of their data and assembled it into the following charts:

  

  It’s obviously extremely difficult to predict what will happen in the world by 2100, but to the extent that forecasting is possible, the world’s population is expected to reach somewhere around 11.2 billion people. Today it’s 7.3 billion.

  The bulk of this growth is expected to happen first in Africa, and then in Asia. By 2100, Africa’s share of the global population is expected to grow to 39% and Asia’s share is expected to decline to 44%.

  If you’ve been following population trends, most of this shouldn’t come as a surprise to you. The meaningful population growth happening in the world today is happening in the developing world. 

  That’s why architects, such as Rem Koolhaas, have been studying cities like Lagos (Nigeria) since the late 1990s and early 2000s. Below is a photo from a book/research project that I love called Mutations (2000). I pulled it from my bookshelf this morning.

  

  It’s interesting to think about what all of this will mean for the global economy and for global governance. 

  The United States is about to be alone when it comes to advanced economies with a globally competitive population. Europe is shrinking, which leads me to believe that a strong EU is likely important. And we now have lots of megalopolises with big populations, but with very low income levels.

  Nigeria is the largest economy in Africa, but per capita income is somewhere around $3,000.

  2015.08.09

• BIG coming to Toronto’s King West

  

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  Earlier this week a press release went out announcing that Allied Properties REIT (TSX:AP.UN) had established a joint venture with Westbank to redevelop 489 – 539 King Street West here in Toronto.

  “What is so exciting here is that Allied has over time assembled 620 feet of frontage on what is fast becoming one of the most interesting streets in Toronto,” said Ian Gillespie of Westbank. “With this scale, we have a unique opportunity for world-class city building.”

  Westbank is relatively new to the Toronto market. Their first project was the Shangri-La Toronto in 2012. But since then they’ve entered the city in a big way with high profile projects like the redevelopment of Honest Ed’s at Bloor and Bathurst.

  But what excites me the most about this King Street project is that they’ve selected Bjarke Ingels Group as the design architect. I’ve written about BIG a few times before and I’m a huge fan of their/his work. So I’m pumped to see what gets proposed here. It will not be typical.

  There are a few heritage buildings on the site. And it looks like some (but not all?) will be preserved. 

  Based on this post and discussion on UrbanToronto.ca, it’s not clear whether 489 King Street West will be preserved and incorporated into the new build (as was the case with a previous design). I sure hope it is though.

  2015.08.08

• New York’s 8-figure apartments

  Whenever you’re starting to feel like real estate prices in your city are getting out of hand, just turn your attention to New York. It’ll make you feel better.

  The New York Times published an interactive overview of the Manhattan real estate market today. It was spurred on by the fact that the average residential sale price in Manhattan just hit $1.7 million (a new record) and that there’s a growing number of 8-figure apartments being bought up.

  Last year half a dozen apartments sold for more than $50 million in the One57 tower at 157 West 57th Street. (The New York Times calls this building the “undisputed center of Manhattan residential extravagance.”)

  Here’s one of their diagrams showing the number of residential sales over $10 million in 2009 and then in 2015:

  

  And here’s another one of their diagrams showing the bottom and top 10% of the current market:

  

  It’s interesting to see the clustering in certain areas and also the lack of clustering at the high end around the top of Central Park.

  2015.08.07

• Those troublemakers

  

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  Jennifer Keesmaat is the Chief Planner of Toronto. She was hired for this job in 2012.

  She has a Masters in Environmental Studies (Politics and Planning). She is a Registered Professional Planner with the Canadian Institute of Planners. And she was also the founder of 2 (city) planning firms prior to taking the position of Chief Planner for Toronto.

  So presumably, she was hired for this job because she possesses some sort of expertise in the realm of planning. I also presume that she is expected to make her opinions known to other people so that informed planning discussions can occur and decisions can be made.

  So I find it curious that in some circles, and in the media, Jennifer Keesmaat is being branded as a “troublemaker.”

  A lot of the recent chatter stems from the fact that Keesmaat was at odds with Mayor Tory during the Gardiner Expressway East debate (quote via Toronto Life):

  Eventually Tory had enough and pulled Keesmaat into a meeting where he basically told her to zip it. “The mayor has said it is perfectly appropriate for staff to make their opinions public, as Ms. Keesmaat has done,” wrote his communications chief, Amanda Galbraith, in a statement. “It is not appropriate for city staff to campaign against councillors or the mayor on social media or through other public platforms.” Keesmaat counters that she never campaigned. “I stated an opinion,” she says simply.

  But the “troublemaking” didn’t just start with the Gardiner East. Pretty much since the moment she took the position of Chief Planner and launched her own blog (ownyourcity.ca), she was dubbed a shit disturber. (Those bloggers!)

  But if you ask me, these criticisms stem from an old and outdated way of thinking.

  The last thing we need from government is less transparency and more politicking. We should be working towards more, not less, information. Even if that information doesn’t butter our metaphorical bread.

  What do you think?

  I think this will make for a great discussion in the comment section below.

  2015.08.06

• Advancing green building technologies, one condo suite at a time

  This evening I had a fascinating conversation with Subhi Alsayed of Tower Labs. If you haven’t yet heard of Tower Labs, I would encourage you to check them out. Here’s their mission statement:

  Our mission is to facilitate the adoption of green building products, technologies and practices through pilot and demonstration projects in highrise buildings; and accelerate the evolution to a low-impact, sustainable urban environment.

  What they do is test out new green building technologies in one-off condominium suites. And since they were founded by both MaRS and Tridel (which is one of, if not the largest condo developer in Toronto), they have plenty of opportunities to do just that.

  This is important because the real estate industry is notoriously slow at innovating. I’ve written about this many times before. Whenever you try and introduce something new, there’s always a lot of change management that goes along with it. The construction trades, to use one example, need to get their heads around it. And until they do, they’re going to charge a premium for it.

  So by creating a one-off test case, everybody gets to see how it works, how it is built, and, most importantly, how it actually performs in the real world.

  One of the projects that they’re working on is something called NetZED, which stands for Net Zero Energy Dwelling. As the name suggests, it’s a condominium suite that produces as much energy as it consumes. 

  The way it works is by trading energy. At night when the sun isn’t out and the panels on the roof aren’t able to produce energy, the suite “borrows” electricity from the building. But during the day when the sun is out, the suite powers itself and then returns any borrowed electricity to the building. Click here to learn more about the suite. It’s being built in the Aqualina Condos on Toronto’s waterfront.

  

  I find all of this incredibly exciting. Not only because they’re working towards a more sustainable future, but also because they’re applying their efforts towards the multi-family building typology (towers). Given that most of the world now lives in cities, this is an important building typology to make even more sustainable.

  Image: Tower Labs

  2015.08.06