Tag: avenues

• 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

• 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

• Dimensioning pedestrian happiness

  The area that stretches between the property line on one side of a street and the property line on the other side of a street is called a public right-of-way here in Toronto. It may be called something different in other cities and countries.

  In the example below (taken from Toronto’s Avenues & Mid-Rise Buildings Study), it includes the sidewalks, the car lanes, and the streetcar lanes. But it could also include other public elements. In this instance, the buildings on either side of the street are assumed to be built right up against their property lines.

  

  ROWs obviously serve an important public function. But their size also has important urban design implications. As a pedestrian, it feels different to walk on a narrow street than it does on a broad street.

  The width of a ROW can also be used to inform what the preferred height of the buildings along it should be. In the example above, they’re talking about a 1:1 relationship between the width of the ROW and the preferred height of the buildings.

  Given their importance, I thought it would be interesting to share this map of Toronto (dated 2010) showing ROW sizing throughout the city. The mustard colored lines in the core of the city represent 20 metres, the red lines 36 metres, and the purple lines 45 metres or more. The rest of the colors fall somewhere in-between. For the most part, the purple lines represent highways, although there are a few other instances of purple.

  

  What’s interesting – but not surprising – to see is how we basically kept expanding the size of our ROWs as Toronto grew outwards. This was obviously to make more room for cars on the road.

  But the other, perhaps more interesting thing about this map, is that it could also serve as a guide to pedestrian happiness. The mustard/yellow lines are where it’s most enjoyable to walk. And the red and purple lines are where it’s least enjoyable to walk.

  If you’re from Toronto, give this framework a try and see if it holds true.

  2014.09.23

• What makes midrise development difficult?

  A reader recently suggested that I do a post explaining why we aren’t seeing more midrise buildings going up in Toronto. Specifically, why are midrise buildings considered to be “too risky” for developers and what could be done to improve the situation? So today I’d like to focus on that topic.

  But first, let me say that I think Toronto is already in the midst of its midrise development era. The push for intensification first brought about towers, but we’ve come to realize that the tower isn’t necessarily going to serve everybody’s needs.

  Here’s what John Bentley Mays recently wrote in the Globe and Mail regarding midrise developments:

  With Duke, SQ, Nest and similar structures, we may be seeing the start of a promising design trend in Toronto’s multifamily housing market.

  And given that our Chief Planner, Jennifer Keesmaat, has been a vocal supporter of midrise, I think there’s no question that we’ll only see more and more of this type of development. Nonetheless, there are challenges. Here are a few that come to mind.

  1. Fragmented sites

  Because midrise developments typically target established main streets with smaller lot sizes, developers often have to contend with fragmented ownership in order to assemble a site. So instead of talking to one owner (say the owner of a large parking lot downtown), a developer may have to contend with a dozen owners who all need to get on board for the development to happen.

  2. Scale is too small

  Developers have a lot of fixed costs that don’t materially change whether you’re putting up a 50 storey tower or an 8 storey midrise building. Some costs are certainly variable, but there are overall economies to scale to having more units in which to distribute costs over.

  3. Community opposition

  The whole point of midrise intensification is to increase the housing supply in established neighborhoods. But along with this comes greater risk for community opposition. You may have a neighbor who’s been living for 30 years adjacent to where you want to build. And when you come along and try and build a 10 storey midrise building, they can get grouchy.

  4. Strict guidelines 

  To try and counteract community opposition (and promote good urbanism), the city has developed a number of design guidelines for midrise buildings. And while they’re well intentioned, they can be onerous for developers and designers. For example, the requirement to terrace down towards adjacent residential neighborhoods produces a lot of inefficiencies (though it does create spectacular terraces). Oftentimes you’ll end up with more unit types than you would in a large tower.

  All this said, I’m a big believer in the midrise building typology. At TAS, I’m involved in two such projects–DUKE and Kingston&Co. Both are exciting projects and both, I think, are at the forefront of a new development era for Toronto. Vancouver pioneered the podium + point tower typology. Toronto is about to do the same with midrise buildings.

  2014.03.30