Tag: city planner

• Missing middle housing shouldn’t have a maximum floor space index

  At the beginning of the year, I wrote this:

  The desire to add more housing to single-family neighborhoods will continue to pick up steam across North America. How exactly this plays out will be market specific, but in Toronto I expect to see new planning policies put in place, as well as supportive building code changes.

  And this continues to happen. Right now, the City of Toronto is working on making fourplexes permissible in all low-rise neighborhoods across the city.

  This is exciting. But it’s not done yet. And it’s not perfect.

  The biggest change that I think still needs to happen is around maximum densities. If we actually want to encourage more missing middle housing, we need to increase the permitted FSIs or, better yet, remove them all together.

  Urban planner Sean Galbraith does a good job of explaining this in NRU:

  

  I responded to the city’s multiplex survey last night and this was one of my main comments. If you’d also like to voice your opinion, you have until March 10, 2023. Here’s the link.

  2023.03.08

• The biggest challenge in revitalizing the Rust Belt

  

  Jason Segedy, who is the Director of Planning and Urban Development for the city of Akron, Ohio, recently penned a two-part series in the American Conservative about urban revitalization in the Rust Belt. Part two is specifically about the importance of new housing in “cities left for dead.”

  As I was reading through the piece, my first thought was that it would be a good follow-up to yesterday’s post on “winner-take-all-urbanism.” The contrast between alpha cities like San Francisco and Rust Belt cities like Akron is stark.

  The former city can’t build housing fast enough. And the latter city was forced to implement a citywide, 15 year, 100% residential property tax abatement program just to induce new investment. Any and all new housing is eligible.

  But as I got further down the article, I was struck by something else. I was surprised to hear Segedy say that, rather than market forces, community opposition is “perhaps the biggest challenge of all” when it comes to delivering new housing in these markets.

  Here is a longish excerpt that I would encourage you to read:

  Although you might think that people living in neighborhoods with a large number of abandoned houses and vacant lots would be thrilled to see new houses being built, you might be surprised to learn how often this is not the case. Sometimes neighbors prefer to have the vacant lot remain as green space. Sometimes they worry that the new housing will not be expensive enough, and will bring their property values down. Other times, they worry that the new housing will be too expensive, and will bring their property values (and taxes) up.

  When it comes to new housing, everyone is a critic. I have heard people complain that housing which they will never live in is too dense; that housing which they will never purchase is too expensive; that housing which they will never be inconvenienced by will generate too much traffic; and that housing which they will never look at is not architecturally appealing.

  After 23 years as an urban planner, I can honestly report to you that, contrary to popular belief, most people are strongly in favor of heavy-handed and draconian government regulation of private property—as long as it is someone else’s private property, and not their own.

  Residents and community activists who are opposed to new housing often demonize the real estate development profession as being “greedy”, overlooking the fact that their own home was developed by a developer, built by a builder, and sold by a realtor—most likely for a profit. This isn’t to argue that every development professional is a white knight, but it is important to remember that the vast majority of people who work in the real estate and construction sectors are not the enemy of neighborhoods. Without them, there would be no neighborhoods.

  According to Segedy, Akron has lost 32% of its peak population. Cleveland has lost 58%. And Detroit has lost 64%, leaving almost 1/3 of its land parcels vacant. (These are 2017 figures.) Surprisingly, this doesn’t appear to change how many people feel about new development. 

  No more new housing. We’re full. Unless, of course, that housing is for me.

  Photo by Nolan Issac on Unsplash

  2018.08.11

• Traffic signal inequality

  

  David Levinson, who is based Sydney and authors the Transportist – a blog you should follow if you don’t – has a recent post up about signalling inequity and “how traffic signals distribute time to favour the car and delay the pedestrian.” In it he provides some background into traffic signal coordination (introduced in New York City in 1922), as well some some suggestions for how we could and should be prioritizing pedestrians.

  Here is an excerpt from the article:

  There is a reason that traffic engineers don’t automatically allocate pedestrian phases. Suppose the car only warrants a six second phase but a pedestrian requires 18 seconds to cross the street at a 1 meter/second walking speed. Giving an automatic pedestrian phase will delay cars, even if the pedestrian is not there. And there is no sin worse than delaying a car.  But it also guarantees a pedestrian who arrives just after the window to push the actuator passes will wait a full cycle.

  Sometimes pressing the walk button appears to do nothing. I suppose that’s why some cities call it the “placebo button.” And in other cases if you don’t press the walk button you’ll never get a walk sign. That’s usually a strong indicator that you are located in an environment not intended for pedestrians. David’s article also has me curious about the relationship between traffic signals/pedestrian phases and urban form. I bet you could tell a lot about the latter simply by understanding the former.

  Image: Transportist

  2018.06.17

• Planners on bikes getting coffee

  Over the weekend, Jason Thorne, who is the General Manager of Planning and Economic Development at the City of Hamilton, tweeted this out. He said, if Jerry Seinfeld can do Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, then he was going to do Planners On Bikes Getting Coffee. And that’s exactly what he did in Barrie with their Chief Planner, Andrea Bourrie.

  I immediately responded by asking: Is this really a thing you are doing? Because if not, it is something you should absolutely start. He was kidding but I think the response he received on Twitter got him reconsidering if he should make it a thing. I think this is a great idea, and so I hope he does consider it. If you agree, maybe send him a tweet.

  I have a GoPro, gimbal stabilizer, and a bicycle. So if this doesn’t become a thing, maybe there needs to be a Developers On Bikes Getting Coffee.

  2018.06.05

• Uber Movement

  Uber just announced that it will be providing access to the (anonymized) traffic flow data generated from its over 2 billion rides. This new product is called Uber Movement and the goal is to help cities make better infrastructure decisions. Because indirectly, that also benefits them. 

  Here’s an excerpt from TechCrunch:

  “We don’t plan infrastructure, we don’t plan cities, we’re never going to do that,” explained Uber Product Manager Jordan Gilbertson in a briefing. Not controlling those aspects of Uber’s business means that it must do whatever possible to influence their improvement indirectly, which Movement can certainly help to do. More efficient transportation in a city in general means more efficient Uber service delivery, happier customers and better usage rates.

  You can request access to Uber Movement today. But the service will be made available first to city planners and policymakers, and then to the general public. I would be very curious to see what the data reveals for Toronto, as well as for other cities.

  2017.01.10

• Easier said than done

  Earlier this week I saw the Chief Planner of Toronto, Jennifer Keesmaat, tweet this out:

  New buildings shouldn’t maximize the envelope prescribed by guidelines, but employ creative designs within it. pic.twitter.com/l7axVB4Hke

  — jennifer keesmaat (@jen_keesmaat) March 3, 2016

  //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  I responded with the below quote retweet because I figured I should probably devote a blog post to this topic and not just a tweet.

  🤔 https://t.co/WqdaCCWkNi

  — Brandon G. Donnelly (@donnelly_b) March 3, 2016

  //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Now, I don’t know for sure, but I am guessing that her tweet was in response to the criticism from architects and developers that Toronto’s design guidelines are creating homogenous architectural outcomes. Some people – and I’ve written about this before on ATC – believe they’re too prescriptive.

  So today I’d like to talk about why playing creatively within the guidelines/zoning envelope, particularly at the mid-rise scale, is a lot easier said than done.

  Generally speaking, the value of land is dependent on what you can do with it or, in this case, what you can build on it.

  If all you could do was plant things on it, then the value of the land would be correlated with crop yields. If on the other hand you could build a building, it would be correlated, at least in theory, with the amount of space you could build and the rents you could charge for that space.

  Of course, this isn’t a perfect science. That’s why I said “in theory.”

  Landowners obviously want to maximize the value of their asset when it comes time to sell. So they, along with their brokers, will naturally try and stretch what is possible with the land. Why else do you think the best neighborhoods seem to magically grow new boundaries?

  When you combine this with the fact that mid-rise buildings are inherently less efficient to build and with the fact that their smaller size creates diseconomies of scale, it can be exceptionally difficult to find development sites where the numbers make any sort of financial sense. That is, even if you “maximize the envelope” and push rents or sale prices.

  So, with all due respect, not maximizing the envelope is almost unthinkable, unless you somehow managed to get a bargain on the land.

  Many of you will likely respond in the comments saying that all of this is simply a result of real estate developers being greedy capitalist pigs. But what we are talking about is no different than in any other competitive business environment. 

  Developers rent and sell products – albeit products that take an incredibly long time to make and bring to market. To make those products, there are a many costs, ranging from the cost of land to the cost of drawings. But hopefully within all of those numbers sits a profit margin that makes sense given the amount of work and risk that the developer has taken on. 

  Put differently, telling developers not to maximize the envelope is like telling a pizza maker to throw out 10-15% of her dough before she makes every pizza – even though she already (over)paid in full for the dough.

  If you’ve ever created a development pro forma, you’ll know that it’s not easy getting the numbers to work when you’re operating in a competitive market. This is not a knock against creative design. Trust me, I am a design snob. This is just business.

  2016.03.05

• Merry Christmas from post-tribe Toronto

  

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

  Merry Christmas and/or happy whatever you happen to celebrate around this time of year.

  Hopefully things have slowed down for you all and you’re relaxing with family and friends either at home or somewhere on vacation. I’ll be doing that here in Toronto and making pancakes for breakfast, because that’s what I like to do on Christmas morning.

  If you’re in the market for some long form reading material while you relax, I recommend you check out an article in The Walrus called, After the Troubles. It’s by Toronto-based planner Joe Berridge – who is a partner at Urban Strategies – and it’s the story behind his team’s Belfast City Centre Regeneration Strategy and Investment Plan.

  It’s a fascinating and entertaining read, and there are lots of comparisons between Toronto and Belfast. Here’s a little taste:

  “IT WOULD BE HARD to conceive of two cities more different than Belfast and Toronto. One old world, one new; one grand, one utilitarian; one barely ticking over, one growing like topsy. And of course, one tribal, the other the epitome of post-tribe. Belfast is 96 percent white—forget about Catholic-Protestant, that’s the critical urban statistic. And yet it’s important to remember that Toronto itself was once the largest Orange town in the world. (Wikipedia asserts that every mayor of Toronto since its founding was an Orangeman until Nathan Philips, a wonderful Jewish mayor, was elected in 1954.) Even the current mayor, John Tory, draws his name from a bunch of brigands and royalist cattle thieves in the Irish backcountry.”

  I spent a bit of time in Belfast when I was working in Dublin (2007) and so it was particularly interesting for me to read about his assessment of the city. Like Berridge, I found the city eerily empty during off-peak times. But it’s an architecturally rich city and a fascinating city for urbanists because of all that has happened.

  Though now we are talking about “after the troubles.” Things are progressing. And that strikes me as a positive thought while I make my pancakes on Christmas morning.

  2015.12.24

• The death of planning expertise

  

  Yesterday a friend of mine sent me this article written by a city planner talking about the death of planning expertise. The article talks specifically about the rise of “community participation” and how it has undermined the modern planning process. (I guess it’s not just architects who feel undermined.)

  …we have lost respect for “experts”—those who have knowledge and/or experience in a particular field—and have replaced it with a kind of “expertise egalitarianism” whereby everyone’s opinion is given equal weight. But it is not only that the layperson’s opinions are given equal weight, experts increasingly face outright hostility. Laypeople attack experts as being arrogant, elitist, and imposing, if not outright threatening, often because the expert insists he or she knows something the other does not. Even more ridiculous, rather than being viewed as helpful or even essential, expertise is viewed as harmful or even antithetical to community participation.

  But to be clear, the author is not arguing for technocratic rule. He simply believes that community input has reached a point where laypeople with only anecdotal evidence are given equal weight as planning experts, and that it’s miring the planning process and causing less than desirable outcomes.

  This topic is interesting to me for 2 reasons.

  First, it’s interesting because we’re basically talking about a form of decentralization, which, just so happens to be one of the macro trends being ushered in by technology and the internet. It used to be that we couldn’t decentralize. Communication costs were too high and the ability to share information in real time wasn’t possible.

  But today we can. So instead of, for example, only getting the news from one source (a newspaper, perhaps), we get it from millions of people on platforms like Twitter. We trust laypeople, just as much as we do “expert” reporters, to tell us and show us what’s happening in the world. Just yesterday I turned to Twitter to see what was happening with Toronto’s torrential rainfall (#TorontoStorm).

  And as a result of this trend, we’re seeing startups like Popularise that are, in some regards, trying to decentralize the planning process. The platform allows communities to decide what they want to see in their neighborhood and then share it. Think your neighborhood could use an organic grocery store? Great, you can spec that on Popularise.

  The second reason I find this topic interesting is because there’s a school of thought (let’s call it the “wisdom of crowds” school of thought, to name it after a book), which believes that in aggregation the opinions of many can actually be better than those of a few so-called experts.

  And in many ways I agree with this—though there are a number of prerequisites that need be met in order for this to hold true. For example, you can’t have groupthink taking place, which I think you could argue is what often happens with NIMBY movements.

  Nonetheless, there’s a shift taking place and it’s impacting not only the planning profession, but many others. In the end though, I don’t think it will make experts irrelevant. In fact, as industries continue to “open up” and as we harvest more and more data (that previously wasn’t available), I think we’ll all be surprised at how beneficial this ends up being. 

  Image: GSAPP

  2014.06.18