Tag: buffalo

• What happens when you eliminate parking minimums? Lessons from Buffalo.

  

  Back in 2017, the City of Buffalo introduced something known as the “Green Code.” It was the first overhaul of its zoning code in over 60 years. I wrote about it here. One of most notable changes as part of the Green Code was the complete elimination of parking minimums. Which is another topic that has gotten a lot of air time on this blog.

  Now that it has been a few years, Buffalo provides an interesting case study: What do developers do once you eliminate parking minimums in a mid-sized city? I mention mid-sized because I think the size of the city is relevant here. There is a common argument that you can’t eliminate parking minimums unless you’re in a big and transit-rich city. “This isn’t [insert big city]. People drive here.” I am sure that many of you have heard this before.

  But is that really the case? Here is what Daniel Baldwin Hess & Jeffrey Rehler found when they studied the development response to removing parking minimums in Buffalo:

  • The study looked at 36 major developments in the first two years after parking minimums were eliminated
  • In aggregate, the 36 developments built 21% less parking spaces than what was previously mandated, likely demonstrating that the old zoning code was resulting in an excess supply of new parking
  • Mixed-used developments (of which there were 14, generally consisting of residential + retail) built 53% less parking than what was previously required
  • One exception to this trend is that single-use projects (both residential and commercial) built either the same or more parking (most of these projects were in the suburbs outside of the downtown core)

  What this suggests to me is that the previous zoning code was maybe appropriate for what the market was demanding (for parking) in suburban locations. Maybe. But it was certainly overshooting what the market was and is willing to accept in more urban locations in Buffalo. Mixed-used (i.e. being able to support retail at grade) is likely a good measure of the project’s urbanity.

  Perhaps more importantly, I think this study shows that developers are incentivized to build what the market wants — no more and no less. Building parking that nobody wants is bad business. As is building too little parking such that you can’t rent or sell your space(s). A Goldilocks parking ratio is what you’re after, but it is constantly changing and finding it can be a bit of an art. Eliminating parking minimums is a good way to let the market try and figure it out.

  Photo by Seth Yeanoplos on Unsplash

  2021.08.14

• The story of Florence Casler

  Curbed has a section on their website dedicated to “deep dives on cities, architecture, design, real estate, and urban planning.” It is called Longform. And they have some great stories, including this one on “the female powerhouse [Florence Casler] who developed 1920s Downtown LA.”

  Florence was born in 1869 in Welland, Ontario, about 25 kilometers south of Niagara Falls. She married an American — a plumber — and eventually settled in Buffalo, New York. After her husband left to pursue riches in the gold mines, she became a licensed plumber and took over the business.

  Eventually this love of plumbing grew into a love of building, and somehow she found herself, with her daughters, in Los Angeles at the beginning of the 20th century.

  By the 1920s, she had become a dominant force in the real estate business. Some 60 buildings are credited to Florence and she is thought to be largely responsible for ushering in a new era of multifamily apartments in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, many of her buildings have since been demolished.

  As one of the first women in Los Angeles to head a development and/or construction business, I think this is a wonderful story worth telling. For the full Curbed article, click here.

  2019.04.09

• Car-dependent spatial structure

  Earlier this week a 58 year old woman named Dalia was struck and killed by a car near the University of Toronto’s downtown campus. This tragedy has everyone talking about and questioning how to make our roads safer, though the answers are not difficult to find. Here is an excerpt from a piece that Richard Florida penned following the incident called, Toronto’s Deadly Car Crisis:

  Today, more Torontonians die from being hit by cars than from being killed by guns. In 2016, nearly 2,000 pedestrians and 1,000 cyclists in the city were hit by cars. Of these, 43 resulted in fatalities. On average, a pedestrian in Toronto is hit every four or five hours, and a cyclist every eight or nine. This means that Toronto’s rate of pedestrian deaths was 1.6 per 100,000 people in 2016 — worse than in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, Washington, D.C., Portland, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Buffalo. It has risen to 1.7 deaths per 100,000 people in 2017 and is on track to rise still further to 1.8 deaths per 100,000 this year. And, children and the elderly face the greatest risk of being struck and killed by a car. The problem is only getting worse. Across Canada, pedestrian fatalities increased by more than 10 percent between 2010 and 2016; at time when they decreased by more than 25 percent in European countries like Norway, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.

  The broader issue is what he refers to as Toronto’s “car-dependent spatial structure.” And it is detrimental to not only our public safety, as we saw this week, but also to our ability to grow as a global city. The Greater Toronto Area is projected to reach 10 million people by 2041. I agree with Florida that, for a number of important reasons, we are going to need to commit ourselves to a new model for growth.

  2018.06.14

• The long and narrow of property affordability

  

  Lots sizes and dimensions vary from city to city, as well as from neighborhood to neighborhood. They come in many different shapes and sizes from long and narrow (common in Toronto) to rectangular or even wide and shallow. Charlie Gardner wrote a terrific post on this last year where he used Bing Maps to illustrate some of these differences. Tokyo, for instance, is shown as having more rectangular lots (32′ x 38′), whereas Buffalo is shown as having more long and narrow lots (30′ x 175′). Charlie then asks: why the prevalence of inefficient long and narrow lots? These dimensions obviously produce long and skinny houses.

  As he rightly points out in his post, there are economic reasons for this. Assuming you’re starting with deep blocks and lots, then there’s going to be a natural tendency toward subdividing and going long and skinny. That’s because the key dimension is frontage onto the street. The more frontages you create, the more front doors can be built, the more lots with access to the Mississippi can be created, etc. And that’s how you end up with 10-12′ wide row homes, which also helps to address overall housing affordability. This is not a new phenomenon.

  To further demonstrate this point, let’s look at how this phenomenon has translated into the condo market – specifically the mid-rise condo market here in Toronto. In this case street frontage morphs into window frontage (access to light). That’s now the guiding dimension. In a 1 bedroom apartment, that dimension might be something around 6-7m. That allows you to have both a bedroom and a living room with a window. So it makes for a great 1 bedroom or 1 bedroom + den apartment. (I’m ignoring corner suites for this thought exercise.)

  However, a tension often arises when you begin to look at larger suites, such as 2 bedrooms and 3 bedrooms. The obvious response would be to simply give over more window frontage. So instead of 6-7m, the suite may get 10m. This would allow you to create a split 2 bedroom apartment (both rooms get windows) with a living room in the middle. This would be considered a highly desirable floor plan.

  But up until now we’ve been ignoring the depth of the apartment. And as is the case with lot dimensions, this can have an impact on the amount of street/window frontage that gets designed. We’ve talked a lot about mid-rise buildings before on this blog and one of the challenges here in Toronto is that the 45 degree angular plane guideline produces deep floors on the bottom of the building and narrow floors on the top. Given this, it would not be unheard of to end up with 12m apartment depths on some of the lower floors.

  The counter argument would be that nobody is forcing these larger floor plates. Simply carve the building back. But the economic reality is that the margins are so thin on mid-rise buildings, that it would be inconceivable to give up this floor area. You have to max out the envelope.

  Why does this matter? Well let’s assume that the average downtown Toronto condo will cost you $857 per square foot. Using back of the envelope math, that means that the above 6m x 12m apartment (1 bedroom) could cost around $663,000 (774 square feet x $857 psf). And that the above 10m x 12m apartment (2 bedroom) could cost around $1,106,000 (1,291 square feet x $857). 

  These are obviously big numbers. Question becomes: Who will be able to afford these?

  So naturally the design exercise becomes about reducing the size of the apartments and often this means reducing the amount of window frontage. Of course when you do this, it means that one or more of the bedrooms will need to be pulled back from the front windows, which is how you end up with inset / recessed bedrooms (indirect light) and long and narrow apartments. These are often pejoratively referred to as “bowling alley suites”, but they are driven by a push for greater affordability.

  Again, this is not a new phenomenon. It is simply a trade-off that gets made. It’s the long and narrow of property affordability.

  2017.01.08

• The Buffalo Green Code

  At the end of last year, Buffalo, New York approved the first major overhaul to its zoning code in 63 years old. 

  It is officially called the Buffalo Green Code Unified Development Ordinance, but, not surprisingly, most people seem to be just calling it the Buffalo Green Code. Its name should give you clues as to what it is trying to accomplish.

  Here’s a snippet from a City Journal article by Aaron M. Renn:

  The Green Code is a so-called “form-based code,” encouraging mixed uses. Buffalo will be only the third major city in the U.S. to adopt a citywide form-based code. The goal is to encourage development of buildings in a more traditional, Main Street style.

  As an older city, Buffalo is already built like this in many areas. But past zoning choices have had lingering negative consequences. “Sixty years ago planners sought to replace the city with a suburban auto-dominated (dominated, not oriented) model,” says Brendan Mehaffey, Buffalo’s executive director of strategic planning. “Most of the city as built was non-conforming with the existing development. Through urban renewal and other programs, planners sought to replace the city’s built environment block-by-block.”

  Perhaps one of the most noteworthy changes being ushered in with the Green Code is the complete elimination of parking minimums. This change makes Buffalo the first city in the United States to remove this requirement on a citywide basis.

  The Green Code also dramatically simplifies the current code, taking it down from 1,802 pages to 338 pages.

  I haven’t yet gone through the Green Code in detail (you can do that here if you’d like). But already other cities are starting to look to Buffalo as a model for how to rewrite their own zoning codes.

  2017.01.06

• Are there enough nerds in Miami?

  

  I was browsing through my online reading list this morning (as I do every morning), and I stumbled upon this Dezeen article talking about a big new 6.5 million square foot development being proposed in Miami’s Park West neighborhood. 

  The goal of the project is to transform Miami into “Florida’s Silicon Valley.”

  This sort of thing is happening all around the world. From Buffalo to Lisbon, cities everywhere are betting on tech, startups, and entrepreneurship to grow their economy in the 21st century. And I personally think that’s really exciting.

  But as I was reading the article, I couldn’t help but think of an old essay that Paul Graham wrote back in 2006 called, How to be Silicon Valley. (Paul Graham is a famous Silicon Valley entrepreneur/investor).

  In his essay Graham argues that to be or to replicate the model of Silicon Valley in your city, you basically need two types of people: rich people and nerds. The idea, of course, being that the nerds work on the cool new ideas and the rich people then fund them.

  Using this logic, he specifically calls out Miami as a city where few startups happen and as a city not likely to become another Silicon Valley. Though there’s lots of money and rich people in Miami, there simply aren’t enough nerds. In Graham’s words: “It’s not the kind of place nerds like.”

  But that was back in 2006. 

  The iPhone didn’t even exist yet. Things have since changed. Now there are successful tech companies like Snapchat (valuation north of $15 billion) that are based out of cities like Los Angeles. And I think you could argue that Los Angeles and Miami do share some similarities.

  So while it may have seemed far fetched in 2006 for Miami to become a startup hub, is that really the case today?

  Image: Dezeen

  2015.06.14

• Top 10 freeways without a future

  

  Sunset by liu han-lin on 500px

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

  Last year The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), which is based out of Chicago, published a report called, The 2014 Freeways Without Futures. It listed the top 10 freeways across North America that are in need of removal, replacement, and revitalization. You can download the full PDF report by clicking here.

  Here’s an introductory snippet from the report:

  The 2014 Freeways Without Futures Report lists the top opportunities in North America for replacing aging urban highways with boulevards or avenues that connect to the networks of streets. They are presented in no particular order of rank. As in previous reports, the criteria for the 2014 list is based on a number of factors: the age and design of structures, redevelopment potential, potential cost savings, ability to improve both overall mobility and local access, existence of pending infrastructure decisions, and community support.

  And here’s the list of freeways without a future:

  1.  I-10/Claiborne Overpass, New Orleans
  2.  I-81, Syracuse, New York
  3.  Gardiner Expressway, Toronto
  4.  Route 5/Skyway, Buffalo
  5.  Inner Loop, Rochester New York
  6.  I-70, St. Louis
  7.  I-280, San Francisco
  8.  I-375, Detroit
  9.  Terminal Island Freeway, Long Beach
  10.  Aetna Viaduct, Hartford

  Not surprisingly, the Gardiner Expressway is on the list. CNU is in agreement with the “remove” option currently being contemplated by Toronto City Council and will be doing their part to support the Gardiner East petition that Stephen and I created. Thank you for that 🙂

  2015.05.28

• 4 design strategies for your cold-climate waterfront

  

  Sugar Beach in Toronto by christophmarten on 500px

  Since we’ve been discussing waterfronts lately, I thought I would share this post from ArchDaily talking about 4 ways that cold-climate cities can make the most of their waterfronts.

  They are:

  1. Plan for winter sun
  2. Create plazas that block wind
  3. Break up outdoor spaces with comfort stations (not sure why they just have to be stations)
  4. Design for active winter programming

  These, of course, aren’t new design strategies. Cities have been built around their climates since, probably, the beginning of cities. It wasn’t until more recently that we started basically ignoring local climates and focusing more on what mechanical systems can do to make us feel comfortable.

  But I think that was a mistake. I don’t think that mechanical systems are bad though. I just think that there’s a lot that we can do first – without mechanical systems – to address local climates.

  If you’ve ever sat on a patio during a swing season (i.e. right now) where the wind was blocked and you were in the direct sun, you already know that there’s a lot that can be done without relying on active systems.

  But the other thing I like about this post is that it acknowledges the fact that winter waterfronts require just as much, if not more, design attention than a warm-climate waterfront.

  Saying that we’ll (insert cold-climate city name here) never be Miami or Barcelona or Sydney is just giving up.

  2015.05.18

• 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

• Civic leaders, here’s why people need to love your city

  I was planning to write about something else today, but then I saw Fred Wilson’s post on revitalizing urban cores and I had to switch topics, because I think he makes a great point about turning around declining cities:

  I’ve been asked by civic leaders from places like Newark, Cleveland, Buffalo, and a number of other upstate NYC cities that have suffered a similar fate how they can do the same thing. They all talk about tax incentives, connecting with local research universities, and providing startup capital. And I tell them that they are focusing on the wrong thing.

  You have to lead with lifestyle. If you can’t make your city a place where the young mobile talent leaving college or grad school wants to go to start their career, meet someone, and build a life, all that other stuff doesn’t matter.

  It’s exactly the same point I made in my post entrepreneurship as economic development strategy. You can throw as much money as you’d like at startups, but if young people don’t want to live in your city then you have a serious problem.

  Fred goes on to talk about Tony Hsieh’s (founder of Zappos) initiatives in downtown Las Vegas:

  When Tony moved Zappos from the suburbs to the former City Hall in downtown Vegas a few years ago, he decided to invest $350mm in a massive urban revitalization project. He set aside $200mm to purchase land at bargain prices and the other $150mm to invest in three areas, arts and culture, small businesses (restaurants, cafes, bars, markets, boutiques, etc), and tech startups. $50mm is going into each area.

  It’s an example of leading with lifestyle, urbanism and city building, rather than purely economics. And I think it’s the way to go. But to be clear, I’m not suggesting that the focus should be on large capital projects, such as stadiums and infrastructure. I’m not convinced those are the most effective catalysts. There’s no silver bullet here.

  Instead, I think the answer is in building, from the ground up, a real sense of community and place. People need to love your city. That’s easier said than done though.

  2014.03.16