Tag: cities

• The global pyramid of wealth

  Every year the London-based property consultancy Knight Frank publishes something called The Wealth Report. And it’s one of those reports that I could go through for hours. 

  It includes a ton of really fascinating stats that speak volumes about where in the world wealth is being created and how it’s moving around. And of course there are a lot of connections between wealth, real estate, and city building.

  Below are 3 diagrams that really stood out for me in the 2015 version. 

  The first diagram shows which cities have the most Ultra High Net Worth Individuals (UHNWIs). An UHNWI is defined as an individual with assets exceeding US$30 million, but excluding personal assets and property (such as one’s principal residence). Click here to see the full size image (I know the numbers are small).

  

  Not surprisingly, London (4,364), Tokyo (3,575), Singapore (3,227), New York (3,008), and Hong Kong (2,690) are at the top of the list. But I was a little surprised – albeit happily surprised – to see Toronto (1,216) come in at #2 in North America, beating out Mexico City (1,116), Los Angeles (969), and Chicago (827). 

  The second diagram shows you how many square meters of luxury property (apartment) you can buy for US$1 million in a bunch of different cities around the world. 

  In Monaco (top end), that’ll buy you 17 square meters (183 square feet) and in Cape Town (bottom end), that’ll buy you 208 square meters (2,196 square feet).

  

  The third and last diagram is what they call the global pyramid of wealth. It’s a pyramid of everyone in the world and then the number of millionaires, UHNWIs (see above), centa-millionaires, and billionaires. And if you do the math, the top of this pyramid comes nowhere close to 1% of the global population.

  

  It’s fascinating (and exciting) to see where and how global wealth is concentrating. But it should also make you think about rising income inequality. I know it does for me.

  2015.08.18

• Brian Curtner – 1951 – 2015

  

  The world cannot find a cure for cancer soon enough. Earlier today Quadrangle Architects here in Toronto published the following news release. For those of you not from Toronto, Quadrangle is one of the most important architecture firms in the city.

  It is with great sadness that we share with you that Brian Curtner, our co-founder, colleague and friend, passed away from cancer on August 15, 2015 at the age of 64.

  As an architect, Brian has been widely recognized for exemplary designs that include the award-winning BMW showroom at the foot of the Don Valley Parkway, Corus Entertainment’s state-of-the-art headquarters on Toronto’s waterfront and 130 Bloor Street West in Yorkville – all innovative responses to complex urban challenges. Equally important to his projects was Brian’s unique ability to build long-term working relationships and turn them into friendships that spanned decades.

  Balancing entrepreneurship and commitments to family and friends, Brian was instrumental in creating a highly successful architecture practice, combining business acumen with design excellence, technical expertise and client service which continue to define Quadrangle today.

  Together with his family, we will honour Brian’s life and achievements with a memorial celebration in the near future. We will communicate more details as soon as arrangements have been finalized. In the meantime, Brian’s family welcomes donations to either the Temmy Latner Centre for Palliative Care at Mount Sinai Hospital or Sunnybrook Hospital’s Odette Cancer Centre, in his memory.

  In the coming days, please visit our website for additional information. Details will also be available regarding a website being created in memory of Brian.

  For any inquiries please connect with Elle Fitzpatrick.

  

  Top image from Quadrangle’s Instagram; bottom image from here.

  2015.08.18

• 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.

  ———————————————

  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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• A site-specific light installation on Wabash Avenue

  

  A Kickstarter project called The Wabash Lights has just reached its funding goal of $55,000 to implement what it is calling the beta version of its project. 

  The project is a site-specific and interactive LED light installation on the underside of the elevated train tracks that run along Wabash Avenue in Chicago.

  The lights are completely customizable (color, patterns, pulses, and so on) and they will be controllable via web and mobile. So anyone walking down the street will be able to have some fun with the lights.

  Here’s a video from the creators explaining more about the project:

  [vimeo 131322692 w=500 h=281]

  It’s a clever idea and I can see the lights becoming just as recognizable as Chicago’s bean.

  But the true success measure will be whether or not it draws people to the area and it changes the composition of the street. Elevated structures aren’t great for street life. That’s why I fought (unsuccessfully) to have the elevated Gardiner Expressway East removed here in Toronto.

  It’s interesting to hear the one woman in the above video talking about how Wabash isn’t really a street you go to. It’s just the street between Michigan and State that you have to pass through. That’s how I feel about most parts of Lake Shore Blvd in Toronto.

  Here’s how CityLab described it in their writeup about the project:

  “While the L tracks are as iconic to Chicago as some of its skyscrapers, their presence overhead doesn’t necessarily bring in the foot traffic compared to other nearby streets.”
  

  But something like The Wabash Lights could really make a difference.

  2015.08.03

• A Spanish social media town

  I am a big fan of Twitter.

  I use it more than any other social network and any other app on my phone (according to my battery usage). In fact, I’m such a fan that I recently started buying shares. I don’t own a lot and the Canadian-US exchange is awful right now, but I do plan to continue buying (I like dollar cost averaging).

  Twitter isn’t the darling of Wall Street like Facebook is. And I think the biggest weakness of Twitter is that it’s difficult for new users to really “get it.” Facebook solved this problem early on by recognizing that new users had to connect with X number of friends right away so that they received value immediately and the next time they visited.

  But I digress. That’s not the focus of this post.

  This morning a friend shared a Medium article with me that was written by the Laboratory for Social Machines at MIT. The article is about a small town in Spain called Jun (pronounced “hoon”) that has transitioned to using Twitter as the dominant platform for communication between government and citizens.

  The initiative first launched in 2011 and since then the mayor, José Antonio Rodríguez Salas, has been trying to get every resident onto Twitter. All 3,500 residents are even encouraged to go into the town hall to have their Twitter accounts verified. This way government employees know for sure that they’re dealing with an actual resident of the town.

  Here’s a simple example of what this means for government-citizen relations (the folks at MIT translated everything to English):

  

  In the above example, a citizen tweeted the mayor informing him that a street lamp was out. The mayor then responded, tagged an electrician, and said it would be fixed the following day. Sure enough the electrician went and fixed it the following day, and then tweeted out a photo of the lamp.

  This is great. And Twitter was made for these kinds of interactions. Facebook was not.

  Here in Toronto we have @311Toronto, which I have tweeted many times before with problems and they do respond quickly (far quicker than if you try and call them). But I still think there’s room for us to improve transparency and engagement across the board.

  All of this is a perfect example of how technology and cities are colliding in a big way. In today’s world I really think you need to be able to think across disciplines.

  2015.08.01

• Laneways and ravines

  

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

  I have a new mission for this summer: To explore more of Toronto’s ravines.

  Last week I had a fascinating conversation with Steve Heuchert of the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA). Most developers in this city would probably cringe when they hear those words. Because often when the TRCA gets involved it means your project is about to get more complicated.

  But if you take a step back and look at the larger city building equation, our ravines are a remarkable and unique feature of the Toronto area landscape.

  And unless you live near one or are fortunate enough to have a home that backs onto one, I suspect that for many of us this city’s ravines are a somewhat forgotten layer of the urban fabric. We drive by them. We pass through them on the subway. But they don’t really register in the way that they should.

  And so if you think about it, our ravines actually share many similarities with our laneways (alleys). We know they exist, but we could be doing a lot more to truly celebrate and integrate them into the rest of the city. They are missed opportunities.

  The challenge with our ravines though is finding the right balance between preservation and increased usage. But this isn’t something that a great landscape architect couldn’t help solve.

  So today’s thoughts are: How do we increase ravine awareness? How do we improve access and expand their uses? How might we craft our ravines to become an interconnected open, green, and cultural network within the city? And how do we better position the ravines as part of Toronto’s overall city brand?

  If you’re interested in this topic, check out this talk that Steve Heuchert did last year. It was part of an event that Megan Torza of DTAH organized called RavinePortal.

  2015.07.29