Tag: city planning

• BARED: Howard Cohen, Context Development

  

  Howard Cohen was initially trained as an architect. But throughout his schooling he gradually became more interested in urban design and city planning. So after graduating in the late 1960’s from the University of Manitoba with a degree in architecture, he took a job within the planning department at the City of Winnipeg. There he helped to author the “Downtown Winnipeg Plan” and quickly earned the reputation as one of the most creative people in the department.
  

  But after about a year and a half on the job, he decided that he wanted a change in scenery and so he quit and took off to Europe with his wife. Upon returning, with no money to his name, he managed to strum up two potential job opportunities; both of which were, thankfully, not in Winnipeg. One was an architecture job in New York City and the other was a planning position for a neighborhood on the east side of downtown Toronto known as Trefann Court.

  Since planning had become more interesting to him than architecture, Howard decided to fly to Toronto for the job interview. He vividly remembers staying at the Sutton Place Hotel – which is today being converted to condos – and walking down Bay Street to City Hall for his interview. He also remembers being so nervous that he had to smoke a joint prior to, in order to calm his nerves. The interview was with the chief planner, deputy chief planner, and with local residents from the area. They offered him the job on the spot.

  He accepted the position in 1970 and stayed at the City of Toronto until 1978. Howard was contemporaneous to figures such as John Sewell – the former mayor of Toronto who was also heavily involved in Trefann Court. Howard features prominently in John’s book: “How We Changed Toronto – The inside story of twelve creative, tumultuous years in civic life, 1969-1980.”

  Interestingly enough, during his time at the City, some of the land use policies that Howard was championing were actually quite contentious within the development community. For instance, Howard believed that Toronto’s downtown residential neighborhoods – neighborhoods such as Cabbagetown – should be preserved, and not razed and turned into replicas of St. James Town. This is an outcome that I am sure most of us today now appreciate.

  However, this is not to say that he was anti-development. Howard also firmly believed that high-density residential should be encouraged throughout the core of the city. We take this for granted now, but he remembers being called a zealot at an Ontario Municipal Board hearing because of his belief that people may actually want to live at the corner of Bay Street and Dundas Street. This was supposed to be a place for working and shopping, but definitely not living.

  Towards the end of his tenure at the City, Howard had become for all intents and purposes the chief planner of Toronto. He was the guy. However, without the actual title he was starting to get restless and decided to look elsewhere for opportunities.

  In 1972, the federal government formed a new Crown corporation known as the Harbourfront Corporation. This was after having expropriated over 100 acres of derelict industrial land along Toronto’s waterfront. The mandate was to revitalize the central waterfront, but after failing for 5 years to make anything meaningful happen, responsibility was ultimately turned over to local leadership.

  Shortly thereafter, Howard left the City and became the first head of Harbourfront Corporation. As coincidence would have it, he was offered the position on the same day that David Crombie – who was mayor at the time – called him to formally offer him the role of chief planner. However, Howard felt that there were more exciting challenges at Harbourfront and so that’s where he went.

  One of his first tasks at Harbourfront was to write the business plan that would set the course for the corporation and allow it to become self-sustaining. The model became about leveraging the value of the corporation’s land to not only create a thriving mixed-use community, but to also create a set of cultural institutions along the waterfront.

  The legacy of Howard’s work can be found in the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, the Harbourfront Centre outdoor skating rink, the Queen’s Quay streetcar, as well as a number of other initiatives ranging from cultural programs to development projects. Some of his development deals included the affordable housing built at Bathurst Quay, the Admiral Hotel, and the Queen’s Quay Terminal developed by Olympia & York – a pioneering mixed-use development that to this day serves as one of the most important anchors on Toronto’s waterfront. It was also through these development projects that Howard would increasingly get into the mindset of a developer – something that would obviously serve him well later on.

  Despite being a financial success, Harbourfront Corporation was ultimately disbanded, partly due to controversy over some of the high-rise towers being developed along the waterfront. At this point, Howard was 44 years old and had spent his entire working career in the public sector. With the experience he had gained at the City and at Harbourfront Corporation, he decided that it was time to move over to the private sector and make some money. He went to work for a developer.

  Howard landed at Murray Goldman’s development company – the Goldman Group – and would spend 4 years there as President. He didn’t necessarily have all the finance and marketing chops, but he did have a lot of other relevant experience. Perhaps his best known project of this era is the Castle Hill townhouse complex at the foot of Casa Loma.

  After stepping down from the Goldman Group in the early 90’s, Howard then turned to consulting. This was a period of time when many in the industry were licking their wounds, but Howard managed to amass a diverse set of clients, including Innis College at the University of Toronto and the nascent Design Exchange. Initially hired as a consultant in 1992, Howard would later get asked to head up in the Design Exchange in 1994. He would spend 2 years in this role and raise over $7 million in donor money during one of the worst recessions in recent history.

  As his consulting business chugged along, Howard would later reconnect with an architect by the name of Lloyd Alter. Lloyd had done some work for the Goldman Group when Howard was there and they decided to join forces and create a larger consulting business known as Cohen & Alter. Business was good for the two of them. They were busy.

  They hadn’t really planned on getting into the development business, but then one day an agent came knocking with a small piece of land on Niagara Street. It was located in today’s King West neighborhood. Barbara Hall was mayor at the time and the city was starting to talk about new policies to open up “The Kings” to revitalization. “The Kings” being the two shoulders of downtown Toronto: King Street West and King Street East.

  Toronto was still in a recession at the time and nobody wanted the site. It was also fairly non-consensus to think that people would want to live in these gritty old parts of downtown. Only zealots believed this to be true. So the agent told Howard and Lloyd that they could option the site for $1 – basically tie it up for free.

  This was the birth of 20 Niagara.

  Since the recession had also left architects without work, they managed to get Peter Clewes (today of architectsAlliance) to defer his fees on the project. The deal was that when the project got off the ground, everyone would get paid. It was the ultimate in bootstrapping.

  Around this same time, Howard and Lloyd met Tom Schwartz, who would become a kind of mentor and advisor to the aspiring developers. Tom, who today is the President and CEO of CAPREIT, was already a successful developer through the founding of Intraurban Projects in 1976.

  Tom introduced Howard and Lloyd to a company called Equivest, which was owned by Gerry Schwartz (of Onex fame) and Stephen Gross. Equivest would become the financial backer for their fledgling project and set the stage for a go-forward funding model.

  Howard and Lloyd would also turn to a guy named Brad Lamb to sell the project. Brad had just started his own brokerage after working under Harry Stinson – a real estate broker turned developer who is perhaps best known for his cheesy late night infomercials. Brad had two employees at the time and would go on to personally sell 20 Niagara Street.

  20 Niagara launched in 1996.

  The project contained 30 condo units and was about 40,000 square feet. It took a year to sell the first 20 units – at some absurdly low price – and ultimately didn’t make any money for both Howard and Lloyd. Howard would spend the next two projects paying back the hangovers from 20 Niagara. It did, however, give birth to Context Development.

  Howard and Lloyd ended up parting ways after 20 Niagara, but the partnership of Howard Cohen, Stephen Gross, and Peter Clewes would go on to build some of the most design-forward and contextually sensitive projects in the city. The core philosophical beliefs were that housing of every varietal belongs downtown and that modern architecture has a place in the mass market. Again these principles may seem obvious today, but they weren’t as obvious in the late 90’s.

  Context Development would later develop adaptive reuse projects such as the Kensington Market Lofts and the Tip Top Lofts, award winning projects such as the Mozo, and wildly innovative projects such as the District Lofts (pictured above). This 14-storey “twin tower” condominium used Le Corbusier’s “skip-stop” system to create two-storey through units. Context would also go on to develop two buildings that I have personally called home – one of which I am sitting in right now as I write this post.

  For me, the story of Context has always had a particular resonance. As a trained architect who then entered the development business, Howard’s story showed me that I too could leave the world of architecture and do something positive for cities. He was a significant inspiration for me early on in my career when I was figuring out which path I wanted to take.

  Every developer brings their own background and sensibilities to their projects. And in the case of Howard’s projects, I know that Toronto is a better city because of it. Thank you, Howard.

  Image: District Lofts via Context

  ———————————————————

  This is the third post in my blog series called BARED (Becoming A Real Estate Developer). If you’d like to be featured in this series, send me an email or tweet me. The links are at the top of this page. Also, email subscribe to this blog to stay in the loop.

  2016.12.13

• Some thoughts on how we plan cities

  I came across this discussion on Twitter yesterday about how so many of the spaces we love in cities would not conform to today’s modern city planning practices:

  @jonahletovsky we could go all weekend tweeting pics of places that would contravene modern formulaic codes, and yet are amazing envts.

  — Gil Meslin (@g_meslin) October 29, 2016

  //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  This is a topic I’ve been thinking about lately and so it’s a timely discussion. In fact, I’ll often come across spaces in Toronto where I’ll think to myself: This is a really great space. But it’s highly unlikely that it could be built this way today. Naturally the question then becomes: What does this say about modern city planning?

  City planning is obviously important. But at the same time, we are almost certainly making mistakes and doing things that we will later regret. I say this not because I’m particularly critical of planning today, but because cities are enormously complex entities and it’s difficult to believe that we’ve figured everything out at this point.

  One thing I wonder about is if we aren’t over-planning and being too prescriptive about our cities. Some of you will probably argue the exact opposite. But hear me out.

  Vancouver is a city that has long been considered to be the gold standard in modern city planning. We talk about its podium + tower building typology. We talk about its “gentle density.” And we talk about its great public and recreational spaces, among many other things.

  But when I was there last month having dinner with a friend of mine, she said something to me that stood out. She said: “Brandon, Vancouver is a boring city. If it weren’t for my family being here, I would happily move to Toronto, New York, or somewhere else.”

  Cities are amazing places because they unleash human ingenuity. They allow new and unforeseen things to emerge. The challenge, I think, is to not sterilize that away when we plan and build. And all of us involved in the building of cities are probably guilty of doing that to an extent.

  2016.10.29

• 3 thoughts from Rem Koolhaas

  Earlier this year, architect Rem Koolhaas of OMA spoke with Mohsen Mostafavi (dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design) to close out the 2016 AIA convention. 

  I still remember my first architectural theory class where the professor told us all that Koolhaas was the most important living architect of our time. And today, if you think about all of the stars that have grown out from his firm – such as Bjarke Ingels and Joshua Prince-Ramus – it is certainly a defensible argument.

  Koolhaas is generally very critical of globalization and the market economy when it comes to creating good architecture. His view is that “pure profit motives” are leading to cities that are basically not designed.

  This is a fairly common belief within architectural circles, which is why many celebrated names would rather work on a museum over a residential condo project. The latter is too motivated by profit. It’s not architecturally interesting.

  I, on the other hand, have always believed in working within the confines of the market to try and promote great architecture and city building. I’m not saying that the market is perfect, but profitability is a constraint that every industry deals with. Architecture is no exception.

  That said, there are other things that I agree with Koolhaas on. Below are 3 verbatim highlights taken from a Fast Company article summarizing his talk with Mostafavi: 

  Communication needs an overhaul.

  “Architecture has a serious problem today in that people who are not alike don’t communicate. I’m actually more interested in communicating with people I disagree with than people I agree with.”

  "To have a certain virtuosity of interpretation of every phenomenon is crucial. We’re working in a world where so many different cultures are operating at the same time, each with their own value system. If you want to be relevant, you need to be open to an enormous multiplicity of values, interpretations, and readings. The old-fashioned Western ‘this is’ ‘that is’ is no longer tenable. We need to be intellectual and rigorous, but at the same time relativist.”

  Architecture’s greatest value in the future might not even be architecture.

  “Architecture and the language of architecture—platform, blueprint, structure—became almost the preferred language for indicating a lot of phenomenon that we’re facing from Silicon Valley. They took over our metaphors, and it made me think that regardless of our speed, which is too slow for Silicon Valley, we can perhaps think of the modern world maybe not always in the form of buildings but in the form of knowledge or organization and structure and society that we can offer and provide.”
  

  Preservation is a path forward.

  "We’ve tried to discover domains and areas in architecture which are not a simple vulgar multiplication of uninspired global projects. Recently, we have looked at preservation. The beautiful thing about preservation is you begin with something that already exists and therefore is already local. By definition, a preservation project is an homage to earlier cultures and mentalities to which you can add a new dimension, a new function, a new beauty or appeal. Almost every impulse signals that globalization needs rethinking or adjustment.”

  2016.08.04

• We’re eliminating parking minimums

  I’ve been writing about the hypocrisy of parking minimums for years now. Some posts here, here, and here. 

  To me, it doesn’t make sense to try and promote more sustainable forms of urban mobility while at the same time mandating a minimum number of parking stalls in every new development. 

  Do you want people driving or not driving? Pick one.

  That’s why I was happy to see the following action item in the province of Ontario’s five year plan to transition to a low-carbon economy and fight climate change (thank you Ken Wilcox for bringing it to my attention):

  

  I haven’t gone through the entire action plan and so this post is not a commentary on that. It is, however, a commentary on subsection 1.4. I believe it is the right thing to do and I’m stoked to see it in the plan.

  2016.07.12

• The Scarborough Subway Extension is a mistake

  Last weekend over dinner, a friend of mine asked me what I thought about the Scarborough Subway Extension debate going on in Toronto right now. Costs are coming in higher than initially projected and the usual back and forth is taking place. Transit blogger Steve Munro has a good post on this called Spinning a Tale in Scarborough.

  I haven’t written much about the Scarborough Subway, but I do have a strong opinion. I believe it’s a mistake. I am not saying that we shouldn’t be building higher order transit in Scarborough – we absolutely should – but it does not need to be an expensive subway line. There are more sensible solutions.

  Here are a few things to consider:

  Light rail transit (LRT) does not equal streetcar. As an avid user of the King streetcar, I’ll be the first to admit that something needs to be done to address the city’s busiest streetcar routes. They are broken. But this is not what was being previously contemplated for Scarborough. True LRT – which Toronto does not yet have – is far more effective at moving people.

  Scarborough Centre is seeing almost no new residential and commercial development. In fact, the “Centres” in general are not seeing much development. The largest share is happening downtown, along the central waterfront, and along the “Avenues.” We shouldn’t ignore this when making our investment decisions. Transit and built form go hand in hand. 

  

  I also do not buy the argument that we are building this subway in anticipation of demand 50 or 100 years from now. We are not in a position to be proactive about our infrastructure. We are desperately playing catch up and there are already lots of high growth and high density areas in the city which today are completely underserved by higher order transit. 

  Finally, a new subway line with low ridership will mean higher operating cost subsidies to keep it afloat. And at the rate that Scarborough Centre is growing today, this would likely continue for many years into the future. Not only is this debate about spending money today, it is about spending money well in the future, month after month.

  So let’s be clear: the Scarborough Subway Extension debate is about politics. It is not about transportation planning.

  2016.06.21

• Lessons on the transforming city

  

  Last week, Detroit hosted the 24th annual Congress for the New Urbanism. The theme was: The Transforming City. 

  I wasn’t there, but I would have loved to attend. So many interesting things going on, but so little time. Attention is scarce.

  For those of you who also did not attend, below is a copy of a speech that was delivered by Carol Coletta – senior fellow at the Kresge Foundation’s American Cities Practice. I found it on City Observatory. 

  The speech does a great job of addressing many of the common misconceptions that people have about cities. I can tell you that I heard many of them just this past weekend.

  Also, if you aren’t familiar with The Kresge Foundation, they are a large private philanthropic foundation based in Troy, just outside of Detroit. You might not recognize the name, but Kresge is the K in Kmart.

  And now Carol Coletta…

  ———————————————————

  Could there be a more apt place to observe “The Transforming City” than Detroit?

  On behalf of Rip Rapson and my colleagues at the Kresge Foundation, welcome to Detroit. If you travel to Detroit regularly, as I have over the past 15 years, you see that Detroit changes quickly.

  The speed of change here sometimes takes your breath away.

  How many of you have walked the Detroit Riverfront or ridden the Dequindre Cut?

  Visited the expanding Eastern Market?

  Seen the Q Line construction on Woodward?

  Eaten a meal at Selden Standard or Wright & Company, one of those meals so special that it deserves its own social media channel?

  Walked the streets of downtown or Midtown and discovered Great Lakes Coffee, City Bird, or the El-Moore Lodge?

  Or met Claire Nelson at the Urban Consulate, or any one of Detroit’s arts and civic innovators responsible for some of the most exciting urban work in the country?

  This is the Detroit you can see right outside this theatre.

  But there is another Detroit, one that is harder to see. It’s the Detroit that feels threatened by the pace of change in the city, suspicious of newcomers eager to be part of the change, and wondering when their loyalty to Detroit will be rewarded.

  Such feelings are not unique to Detroit. Every morning my Google Alerts brings a new batch of headlines from around the country detailing the gentrification battles.

  Because “new urbanism” is the butt of some of this criticism, I want to spend the next few minutes unpacking the myths and the realities of gentrification and what those of us who care about great places can do about it.

  First, let me share some numbers.

  In 1970, about eleven hundred urban Census tracts were classified as high poverty.

  By 2010—40 years later—the number of high poverty Census tracts in urban America had increased from 1100 to more than 3,000. (3165)

  The number of people living in those high poverty Census tracts had increased from 5 million to almost 11 million. And the number of poor people in high poverty Census tracts had increased from 2 million to more than 4 million.

  So over a 40-year period, the number of high poverty Census tracts in America’s core cities had tripled, their population had doubled, and the number of poor people in those neighborhoods had doubled.

  Given that record, I’ll bet a lot of people are hoping for a little gentrification– if gentrification means new investment, new housing, new shops without displacement.

  The idea that places might benefit from gentrification runs against the popular narrative. But here’s the really startling fact: only 105 of the eleven hundred Census tracts that were high poverty in 1970 had rebounded to below poverty status by 2010. That’s only ten percent! Over 40 years!

  A similar study of Philadelphia by Pew found almost exactly the same result in that city’s neighborhoods. There, ten times as many poor neighborhoods (164) experienced real declines in income as experienced gentrification since 2000.

  It is the lack of gentrification that we rarely count and never see. The deterioration happens too slowly for us to notice. But it doesn’t mean the deterioration isn’t devastating. In fact, the high poverty neighborhoods of 1970 lost 40 percent of their population in 40 years.

  You could make the case that poor people are displaced from poor neighborhoods because of their poor schools, their lack of jobs, their more chaotic public spaces, their lack of opportunity.

  Understand, this is not the fault of the people who live there. This is a public policy failure.

  But… when a combination of government intervention, philanthropic support, community development, and market forces combine to change a place as quickly as Detroit—even when that change means new residents, new jobs, and new places to live—it also rightfully generates concern.

  See, we are conflicted about change. Many of us wish we could fix place in time.

  But neighborhoods do change. You know that. You change them. And when change results in mixed income neighborhoods—in other words, when we achieve investment without displacement — it’s good for everybody.

  The research on this is quite clear: The ability of people to improve their economic status from one generation to the next is strongly correlated with mixed-income neighborhoods.

  Many of the public policy interventions to achieve economically integrated neighborhoods have supported poor people moving to wealthier neighborhoods. But that is an expensive, slow political slog that is hard to scale.

  But what if we flipped that script? What if… we could lure people with financial options about where they live to disinvested neighborhoods—resulting in the kinds of places that enable opportunity?

  And what if we also made a special effort to insure that the people remaining in low-income neighborhoods—people without options about where they live—what if an extra effort were made to insure they benefited from new people and new investment in their neighborhoods?

  The research tells us that mixed-income neighborhoods benefit poor people naturally. But can we double down to accelerate those benefits?

  Think of it this way: Can we get gentrification with broadly-shared benefits.

  I think so. But it’s not easy. Remember: Only 10 percent of high poverty neighborhoods “gentrified” over the past 40 years. And today we have triple the number of high poverty neighborhoods than we had 40 years ago.

  Clearly, mixed income neighborhoods won’t happen if we don’t work at it.

  So how can we do that?

  First, let’s acknowledge that, for the first time in 50 years, the market is moving in our favor. People (and jobs) are moving to cities. We need to see that as the opportunity it is to get mixed-income neighborhoods and not fear good, thoughtful development.

  That means we can’t let NIMBYs win the day. The same people who complain about high prices also complain when developers show up to build more supply. We have to make the connection between supply and demand for the protesters and the press.

  But attention must be paid to creating more mixed income housing. Our success on this has been mixed, and I’m struck by the comparison on methods used in NYC and in Portland, Oregon’s Pearl District to create more affordable housing in mixed income settings.

  As City Observatory reported today, The City of New York, one of the nation’s hottest housing markets, has had inclusionary zoning for the past 10 years. And over that time, the city has produced an average of 280 units per year for a total of 2800 units.

  In contrast, Portland took a very different approach. Portland used additional property tax revenue from construction in one neighborhood to subsidize affordable housing. Using just a third of such revenues from The Pearl District (along with Low Income Housing Tax Credits), Portland has built more than 2300 units of affordable housing—almost as many units as the much larger New York.

  Portland’s Pearl District is an example of a desirable neighborhood. The cost of desirable neighborhoods goes up. And it is the fear of rising costs, new investment, (and sometimes a changing demographics) that spawned the “just green enough” movement.

  Think about that: Disinvested neighborhoods lack access to parks and quality public space. But wait! Let’s not make it too nice for fear it will attract new investment. That’s craziness born out of legitimate frustration when prices start going up.

  The fact that buyers and renters are willing to pay more for quality neighborhoods means we need to build more of them, not fewer of them.

  How do we do that at scale?

  When Paul Krugman or—the American electorate willing—the next president calls for new investments in infrastructure to stimulate the economy, will we be ready with a plan that defines infrastructure as something more than roads and bridges?

  Why can’t “infrastructure” include new and redesigned parks and libraries, neighborhood community and cultural centers, trails and gardens—a reimagined civic commons? That’s the defining line I want to hear from our next president. I want so many desirable neighborhoods that people will have good choices at all price points.

  The way we live today is changing so fast. We are decoupling and recoupling. We have mothers raising kids alone, and people delaying childbearing—some forever—who want to help. We are sharing jobs, cars and homes. We are retiring later and living longer. And our lives, increasingly, are lived in public.

  We need to ready our cities for these changes. We need to figure out how to revalue what exists and give new life to the material, the buildings, the neighborhoods, the cities and the people we too often discard and write off.

  Equity does not sit in opposition to a thriving, appealing city. It is central to it.

  This is the work of CNU. This is your work. And that’s why I’m happy to be with you here in Detroit to celebrate and learn alongside you this week. Thank you for inviting me.

  2016.06.19

• What it takes to unlock infeasible development land (and some thoughts on parking)

  

  One of the questions that came up after my recent post about land pricing was: what is it going to take to develop underutilized land on the outskirts of city centers?

  So today I thought I would talk about a new development project that was also discussed at the Land & Development conference I recently attended. I think will begin to answer this question.

  The project today is known as the Rockport Weston Community Hub & Rental Building. And it’s going to include a community cultural hub, 26 live/work artist spaces, and 300 rental apartments. 

  It’s located in the Weston neighborhood of Toronto, which is designated as a “Neighborhood Improvement Area.” These are lower-income areas that the city considers to be “at-risk.”

  Given this, rents are naturally lower here than in other parts of the city, which means that it’s basically infeasible to develop here. There has been no large scale development in this community since the 1970s!

  To put some numbers to this, the developer said they were projecting rents somewhere around “two and a quarter.” So let’s assume for a second that the average apartment rents will be $2.25 per square foot. 

  At this rate, it means that a 600 square foot one-bedroom apartment will have a face rent of $1,350 per month. This may seem fairly high, but it almost certainly wouldn’t be enough to get a project like this off the ground under normal market conditions. At least, that’s the case here in Toronto with current cost structures.

  So what had to happen was a fairly complicated public-private partnership, which you can read all about here. But at a high level, there seems to have been 3 main economic factors that allowed this project to move forward:

  1) The developer was able to acquire the land for cents on the dollar. As I said in this post, land is expensive. So this helps a lot.

  2) The developer was able to make use of extra parking in an adjacent building. Assuming that underground parking could cost around $50,000 per stall, this is a huge cost savings.

  3) Lastly, the project is benefiting from the public invest made in the airport rail link that now quickly connects this site to both Pearson International and downtown Toronto.

  The moral of the story is that infeasible sites require some sort of subsidy or top up to make them work. Or, there needs to be an exceptional circumstance. Because if the rents aren’t there, nobody is going to build. It’s as simple as that.

  That said, here’s one idea…

  This discussion reminds me of a post I wrote a while back called, The hypocrisy of parking minimums. Frankly, I don’t understand why a city like Toronto still has parking minimums. If anything, we should have parking maximums.

  Underground parking is a huge cost that has to get carried by purchasers and renters in a new building. For example, let’s assume that 300 apartment suites would require 180 parking stalls (ratio = 0.6). Assuming $50,000 per stall, that’s a $9 million cost.

  So the second takeaway is that it’s probably time we took a good hard look at how we think about and plan for parking in our cities. Especially since the entire mobility space is being quickly disrupted.

  Image: Rockport

  2016.05.12

• The unbranding of this blog

  You’ve probably noticed that I have removed the Architect This City branding from this blog and gone to just my name. I like to refer to it as unbranding. (Though one could argue that a person’s name is still just another brand.)

  Already I’ve received a few emails from people telling me that they prefer the old look and feel of ATC and that there’s some level of brand equity there. But let me explain my thinking.

  First and foremost, this is a personal blog. I’ve written about that before. And it’s why it’s hosted at brandondonnelly.com. But along the way, as readership grew, I attached a name to it (ATC) and it started to become a kind of pseudo-independent brand. 

  When I would speak at events, people would introduce me as the founder of Architect This City, which always struck me as a bit odd because, again, this is just my personal blog. People also started asking me why I wasn’t turning ATC into some big company and started treating the blog as a media channel. You should see how many press releases I now find in my inbox.

  Of course, these are good “problems” to have. It means my writing is getting out there and I am thrilled about that. But I was starting to feel increasingly uncomfortable with the grey area between a personal and independent brand. I also felt like it was starting to impact my creative writing because I would sometimes wonder if I was going too personal on “Architect This City.”

  To reinforce that point, below is a snippet from a post that Fred Wilson wrote on his blog last summer. His 10+ year old blog has been a huge inspiration for me.

  “There is something about the personal blog, yourname.com, where you control everything and get to do whatever the hell pleases you. There is something about linking to one of those blogs and then saying something. It’s like having a conversation in public with each other. This is how blogging was in the early days. And this is how blogging is today, if you want it to be.”

  So I decided to clarify the brand. I wanted to make it clear that this blog is about my personal musings on city building, among the other things that I’m passionate about. And I wanted it to not pretend to be anything else.

  Ultimately, regular scheduled programming won’t really change for you. The content on this blog is still going to be heavy on city building, real estate development, design, planning and so on. And I will endeavor to create as much value as I can for all of you on a daily basis. (I am humbled by the number of people who now subscribe.) But hopefully it will end up feeling a bit more personal.

  Of course, now there’s the question of what do I do with the ATC brand (and social accounts). Do I let it die or do I spin it off into something else? I’m considering the latter. I’ve been obsessed for years with the idea of crowdsourcing and collecting meaningful real estate and city building activity, so maybe ATC will turn into some kind of open platform for that.

  But for now, I am feeling pretty excited about the unbranding of this blog. Hopefully some of you feel the same way.

  2016.04.08

• Have your say in the future of downtown Toronto

  I was recently on a call with someone living in California, but who is originally from Toronto. He told me that every time he comes back to Toronto to visit, it feels like the city has changed, grown, and become even more cosmopolitan.

  That is a great compliment, because every city today is in a competition to remain relevant. Which means that if a city is not changing, evolving, and adapting, then it is falling behind. Competition is fierce and it’s global.

  Toronto is fortunate enough to be experiencing rapid population growth and that is driving a lot of this change. But at the same time, it naturally raises questions about how to best manage and leverage that growth, particularly in areas like the downtown core where a lot of that intensification is happening.

  To that end, the City of Toronto has been working on a three year study called TOcore, that will, among other things, result in a new comprehensive plan for the downtown core. (I’ve blogged about this before and it has come up in the comments a few times.)

  Today, however, marks the start of their public engagement process. And so if you’d like to have your say (there will be implications for developers, architects, and other city builders), you can do that here. There’s an online survey, an email address, events you can attend in person and, of course, a hashtag: #DTadvice.

  But the tool I think is really neat, is their “Favourite Places” map. What it allows you to do is drop pins onto a map of downtown and describe your “Favourite Places” and places that have “Great Potential.” Notice that the focus is on positivity. There’s no pin for “Shitty Places.”

  I have a lot to say, so I’ve been flooding the map with pins. I would be curious, though, to hear what you would like to see happen in downtown Toronto – and so would the TOcore team.

  2016.04.05

• The Death and Life of Great Italian Cities

  

  I am sure that a lot of you know where the title of this post comes from. It’s a riff on one of the most important and influential books in the world of city planning: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs (1961).

  But when Jane Jacobs first wrote this book, there was no such thing as smartphones and nobody was “checking-in” to hipster dive bars on Foursquare. 

  So instead of leveraging big data, her analyses and arguments were based on observation. She walked the streets of New York and Toronto and figured out what made cities thrive and what made cities die. That was her brilliance.

  Today, however, we have data – lots of it. And so recently, a group of researchers set out to test Jane Jacob’s theories using mobile phone data. The study was called, The Death and Life of Great Italian Cities:
  A Mobile Phone Data Perspective.

  More specifically, they set out to test the following 4 essential conditions:

  “She [Jane Jacobs] argued that, to promote urban life in large cities, the physical environment should be characterized by diversity at both the district and street level. Diversity, in turn, requires four essential conditions: (i) mixed land uses, that is, districts should serve more than two primary functions, and that would attract people who have different purposes; (ii) small blocks, which promote contact opportunities among people; (iii) buildings diverse in terms of age and form, which make it possible to mix high-rent and low-rent tenants; and (iv) sufficient dense concentration of people and buildings.”

  To accomplish this, the team assembled and studied data from the following sources:

  • Mobile phone activity (specifically internet activity)
  • OpenStreetsMap Data
  • Census Data
  • Land Use Information
  • Infrastructure Data
  • Foursquare Data (Venues API)

  Ultimately, they determined that Jane Jacobs knew what she was talking about. The above conditions are essential to urban vibrancy and they apply to Italian cities, just as they did and do to American cities. But this test was valuable, because the more that we can measure and quantify cities, the better I think we’ll get at creating and promoting urban vitality. 

  Now imagine if you overlaid the findings of their report with residential and commercial rents. I bet you’d also find that there’s a strong business case for urban vitality.

  I’ve heard a number of people say that, eventually, every company will be a software/technology company. And I don’t think we’re far off from that reality. To me, this study feels like an early example of what that might look like for city building.

  On a side note, the picture at the top of this post is of the Spanish Steps in Rome. I took it on a weekend trip in 2007. I was living in Dublin at the time.

  2016.03.30