Tag: chicago

• Consistency over intensity — rethinking Toronto’s low-rise neighborhoods

  

  Toronto’s chief planner, Gregg Lintern, published this piece in the Toronto Star over the weekend where he argued that “expanding housing options in [Toronto’s] neighbourhoods is the missing piece of the growth puzzle.”

  What he is saying is that if we’re going to have any chance at reasonably accommodating the 700,000 or so people who are expected to move to this city over the next three decades, we’re going to have to evolve our low-rise neighborhoods. That includes more retail, more amenities, more density, and yes, built form that houses multiple units.

  I immediately thought that this was meaningful progress in the right direction. It is acknowledgement that things need to change and that our low-rise communities need to change.

  But others felt that this was a case of soft-serve ice cream, arguing that there’s “danger in praising incremental, belated change when dramatic change is what’s needed.” I also see this point.

  To quote the late architect Daniel Burnham, “make no little plans.” But this is arguably a little easier to subscribe to when you’re rebuilding after a great fire has decimated your entire city (he was instrumental in the rebuild of Chicago following its fire of 1871).

  The unfortunate reality today, at least in this environment, is that bold vision isn’t often rewarded politically. The status quo bias is simply so great. Change is painfully slow. That’s why we rely so heavily on pilot projects when it comes to city building.

  So while I too am a fan of bold vision, I also see value in what Simon Sinek and others refer to as consistency over intensity. Small, repetitive, and compounding actions can have powerful long-term results. You just have to keep going in the right direction.

  And I think that many of us, or perhaps most, will agree that the right direction is rethinking our low-rise neighborhoods.

  Photo by Tungsten Rising on Unsplash

  2022.07.31

• Why traffic fatalities are lower in Canada than in the US

  

  We’ve talked about this before. If you live in New York City, you’re probably about a third as likely to die from a transportation-related accident as compared to the average American. And if you live in Paris, you’re probably about a third as likely to die from a transportation-related accident as compared to the average New Yorker.

  These stats might feel a bit intuitive to you. Both New York and Paris are big and dense metros with high public transit ridership. And that usually translates into less car accidents. As for the divide between these two cities, Paris is in Europe. It’s old. Most of its streets were built before the car had been invented. And all of these things are generally good for pedestrians. Makes sense.

  But David Zipper asked a good question today: So what’s going on with Canada? Canada is not in Europe (though some might argue that it sits culturally somewhere between the US and Europe). It’s not that old. And it generally has a car-oriented landscape just like the US. So why is it that in 2020, Americans were 2.5x more likely than Canadians to die in a car crash? The trend lines are also diverging between these two countries. Between 2010 to 2020, US road deaths increased 19% on a per capita basis, whereas Canada’s rate declined by about the same rate, according to David.

  Ultimately, we are probably going to need Malcolm Gladwell to write a book about this so that we can really figure out what’s going on. But in the interim, David does propose a few possible explanations ranging from Canadians buying slightly smaller vehicles to Canadians being slightly more law-abiding than Americans and so less likely to run people over. But one of the most persuasive explanations for me is that maybe our urban landscapes aren’t actually the same.

  More than a third of Canadians live in our three biggest cities: Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. And this number would be even higher if you looked at the full urban catchment areas of each. Either way, this is a significantly higher concentration than in the US, where about 13% of Americans live in the metro areas of New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

  Part of this difference is because the US has almost 9x more people and has many more big cities to choose from. But it doesn’t change the fact that, despite our reputed love for things like forests and beavers, Canadians are actually quite urban. And as we have discovered, that’s a good thing for pedestrians.

  Photo by Jamshed Khedri on Unsplash

  2022.07.01

• The car versus transit job access multiple

  I haven’t seen this sort of data before and it’s an interesting way of looking at job access, transit connectivity, and overall built form:

  

  The above is a table from New Geography (using data from the University of Minnesota). And what it shows is how many more jobs, across the US, can be accessed within a 30-minute commute by car versus by transit. For example, what this data tells us is that, on average across the US, there are about 56x more jobs that can be quickly accessed by car versus by transit.

  But there is also huge variation across the 50 largest cities in the US. On the top end is Detroit, where there about 130x more jobs that can be accessed by car (again within 30 minutes). This isn’t at all surprising. Also not surprising is the fact that New York is on the lowest end with only 5.6x as many car-versus-transit jobs. This is one of the reasons why I spoke yesterday about NYC being such an ideal candidate for something like NYC 25×25.

  What a lower number tells us is that the city is far less reliant on personal vehicles and almost certainly has a higher urban density. That’s why you see cities like New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Chicago near the top of this list. And in my opinion, this is where you want to be. The goal should be to minimize this multiple.

  I haven’t seen a dataset like this before, but I’m now curious to see how it varies globally. It feels like something that more of us should be monitoring. Because we know that there are strong links between jobs access and the overall economic performance of a city.

  2022.05.14

• Toward more multi-family housing

  This recent article by Brookings is a good reminder of the all too important link between land use policies/patterns and GHG emissions. Because electric vehicles are cool and all, but they’re still not as efficient as just walking around and/or taking transit.

  As has been argued before on this blog, we need to not only electrify our transport network, but we also need to change how we get around. And probably the best way to encourage a modal shift, is to plan and build our cities differently. Something that is simple, but not easy.

  It also turns out that people who live in multi-family buildings tend to consume less energy (on a per capita basis) than those in single-family houses. So there are numerous benefits to encouraging denser housing on top of transit and within mixed-used communities.

  With all of this in mind, here are some interesting charts from the above Brookings article.

  

  This first one shows new housing permits in the metro areas of Atlanta, Chicago, and Washington DC, according to their urban, suburban, or exurban status. Here, Chicago is an outlier, with the “urban core” (defined as Cook County) now making up about half of all new housing.

  If you look at the entire study period, the number is less. The urban core accounted for about one-third of new housing permits in Chicago, and only 15% of permits in Atlanta and DC. But in all cases, housing permits in the urban core have been increasing since the 2008 financial crisis.

  

  

  But here’s the other thing. Looking at these next two charts, there appears to be a clear trendline toward more urban housing typologies. The first of these next two is showing single-family housing permits as a percentage of all new housing. And the second is structure type over time.

  Atlanta is still building mostly single-family housing, but less of it. And based on these charts, Chicago has already passed its inflection point. DC is not far off. Every city region is of course going to be different, but it does look like there is some kind of broader housing shift underway.

  2022.01.07

• The birth of electronic music

  What We Started is an interesting documentary about the birth and history of electronic dance music (EDM), starting with house music in Chicago and techno music in Detroit.

  Personally, I view EDM as being distinct from house & techno, and it’s generally not my favorite kind of electronic music. But that’s besides the point. EDM is now wildly popular. It has crossed over into the mainstream and bled into many other genres.

  What’s fascinating about the story of electronic music is that it’s a reminder that new ideas and new movements tend to start out on the fringe. Electronic music came from hobbyists experimenting in their garages, basements, and in warehouses. It was people tinkering with something that they were passionate about.

  And let’s face it, that’s the only way this genre of music could have gotten started because no record label would have signed an electronic DJ back in the 1980s. It was weird and underground, and in the early years, the US mainstream media was openly hostile toward it.

  It reminds me of a blog post that Chris Dixon wrote back in 2013 called, “what the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years.” New ideas start on the margin.

  The other fascinating thing about this story is that the emergence of new ideas are often tied to a particular time and place. Think tech and Silicon Valley. In the case of techno, which is often described as being sharper, faster, and more precise than house music, it feels right that it originated in a city like Detroit.

  Detroit was extremely musical, but it was also high-tech. It was machines and assembly lines and that clearly created fertile ground for a new genre of music that relied on, well, machines.

  2021.02.07

• Toronto jumps 9 spots in Kearney’s 2020 Global Cities Outlook ranking

  “…the pandemic and its aftermath have also created a rare openness to doing things differently. Seizing this opportunity won’t be easy, or a short-term affair. But if we can be certain of anything, it’s that cities will adapt and evolve, and that they have the potential to come back stronger.”

  – Kearney 2020 Global Cities Report

  The Kearney 2020 Global Cities Report is out and it incorporates two main rankings: their Global Cities Index (GCI) and their Global Cities Outlook (GCO).

  The former is intended to be a snapshot of where things stand today and the latter is intended to be a forecast of where things might be heading.

  Here’s their GCI:

  

  And here’s their GCO:

  

  Note: The big mover in their GCO is Toronto, jumping nine spots to take second place behind London.

  The full report can be downloaded over here.

  2020.12.03

• Counties won by Biden generated 70% of America’s GDP in 2018

  

  Here is an interesting look at the economic geography of the recent US election. Similar to what they did for the last presidential election, Brookings has just analyzed each candidate’s aggregate share of US GDP broken down by the counties that they won. That’s what the above diagram represents. The blue and red tiles are showing the relative size of each county’s economy.

  In 2016, Clinton won 472 counties with nearly 66 million votes. These counties accounted for about 64% of US GDP at the time. Trump, on the other hand, won 2,584 counties with nearly 63 million votes. But these counties represented only about 36% of US GDP. (Note that Trump won the election with fewer total votes. This is the electoral college at work.)

  When Brookings published the above findings, votes were still outstanding for 11 counties. Most of them low-output. Still, Biden has won 477 counties with well over 75 million votes. These Democratic counties now account for about 70% of overall US GDP. Virtually every big economy county went to Biden in this last election. Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, and so on.

  This is a big deal because it shows the great economic divide that exists in the US, as well as in many (most?) other countries around the world. This is the urban vs. rural divide. Places with very different economic bases and, therefore, very different sets of priorities.

  Diagram: Brookings

  2020.11.11

• A child of catastrophe

  

  It used to be the case that cities had a habit of catching fire and burning down. Toronto had the Great Fires of 1849 and 1904. Chicago had the Great Fire of 1871. And the same can be said about many other cities. In fact, you probably weren’t considered a real city until you had some sort of “Great Fire.” But as Derek Thompson points out in this recent Atlantic article about urban comebacks, disasters have a way of forcing positive change:

  The 21st-century city is the child of catastrophe. The comforts and infrastructure we take for granted were born of age-old afflictions: fire, flood, pestilence. Our tall buildings, our subways, our subterranean conduits, our systems for bringing water in and taking it away, our building codes and public-health regulations—all were forged in the aftermath of urban disasters by civic leaders and citizen visionaries.

  As Charles Dickens famously described, British cities in the early years of the Industrial Revolution were grim and pestilential. London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds—they didn’t suffer from individual epidemics so much as from overlapping, never-ending waves of disease: influenza, typhoid, typhus, tuberculosis.

  It’s somewhat unfortunate, but oftentimes we need something to break before any action is taken. There’s a bias toward the status quo. Otherwise, it becomes a question of, “what did we do last time? Well that worked just fine. Let’s do it again.” But hopefully all of this makes you at least a little optimistic about the future. Because history has taught us that when faced with adversity, we don’t typically turn our back on our cities. Rather we turn around and make them better.

  Photo by Tomek Baginski on Unsplash

  2020.09.11

• Chicago’s Winter Dining Challenge

  

  This has been a summer of cycling, playing tennis (poorly) on Toronto’s public courts, and eating and drinking on sidewalks — sometimes with, get this, no fencing. But winter will arrive in this part of the world at some point and that will mean having to rethink our patios. I’m certain that we’ll be doing everything we can to extend the season this year because we are already seeing that take place in other cities.

  Last month, the City of Chicago launched, in partnership with IDEO, BMO Harris Bank, and the Illinois Restaurant Association, a competition called the Winter Dining Challenge. The goal is exactly what I just described. It’s to solicit creative ideas for how Chicago can make outdoor dining feasible all throughout the winter. (Chicago and Toronto have similar winters.)

  Domes, pods, and heaters are likely to feature in the submissions, which makes me wonder at what point are you basically now considered to be “inside” as opposed to “outside.” Presumably fresh air needs to factor. But I should really reserve judgement until the top ideas are selected. If you’d like to submit an “idea, concept, or startup,” you have until September 7, 2020 at 11:30 PM PT. Here’s the link.

  Photo by Austin Neill on Unsplash

  2020.09.02

• The ride-hailing red herring

  There’s a lot of data/speculation out there about the impact of ride-hailing apps. Many dense urban centers are claiming that they have increased traffic (slowed average speeds) and pulled people away from public transit. The University of Toronto published this study last year. And the WSJ recently published this chart for Chicago:

  

  To be honest, I’m not sure how much of the above is a result of ride-hailing apps, overall urban growth, e-commerce deliveries, public transit disinvestment, or other factors. But what is clear is that ride-hailing is pretty convenient and most (if not all) cities are seeing massive growth in this space.

  But all of this feels to me like a bit of a red herring. People will obviously choose what is most convenient and relatively affordable. And congestion was a problem well before people started using these apps (demand > road supply). The only solution I have seen work is to price congestion/roads.

  2020.02.15