It was pure luck, but we couldn’t have timed this last week any better. It started snowing in the mountains around Salt Lake City on Tuesday, and it felt like it didn’t stop until Saturday. On Wednesday morning, which was peak powder, the main resorts… Read More
All posts tagged “climate change”
Sorry, you can’t build that kind of housing here — downtown or the distant suburbs
Between 2016 and 2021, and according to this recent report from Statistics Canada, the population of the Toronto CMA (Census Metropolitan Area) grew by over 274k people: The population of the Montréal CMA grew by nearly 188k people: And the population of the Vancouver CMA… Read More
Redfin experiment shows how home buyers react to flood-risk data
This is a fascinating little experiment: From Oct. 12, 2020 to Jan. 3, 2021, Redfin ran an experiment on 17.5 million of its users across the US. As prospective homebuyers entered the site, Redfin assigned them randomly to either a group that was shown flood-risk information on each… Read More
Wineries are a leading indicator for climate change
We have talked about this before on the blog, but wineries continue to be a great leading indicator for our changing climate. Above is a chart from the Financial Times showing the official start dates of vendange for two wine regions in France. The Champagne… Read More
[Video] City building to achieve our carbon emission targets
Today was the SvNSpeaks event that I blogged about last week. As a reminder, the conversation was about how best to remove overly prescriptive and rigid development policies in order to better achieve our climate change goals. John Lorinc and I ended up agreeing on… Read More
SvNSpeaks: How to remove overly prescriptive and rigid development policies
This event poster has reminded me that, every now and then, I probably need to pull out a cooler headshot. In any event, next week I’m going to be a guest on SvNSpeaks, along with John Lorinc, talking about the obstacles that overly prescriptive and… Read More
Sustainable living means living in a city
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just published its latest climate change report. Available here. As a follow-up to this report, Dezeen spoke with Hélène Chartier of the sustainable urbanism network C40 Cities. And she makes some very good points about the… Read More
Price of carbon permits has fallen
At the beginning of this year, I predicted that we would see the price of carbon continue to rise, and in particular the price of EU carbon permits. Well the year is still young but so far the opposite has been happening. Back in January,… Read More
Optimistic and excited
With seemingly so much happening in the world these days — everything from COVID to climate change — it is perhaps easy to feel a little discouraged about the current state of affairs. But I am an optimist. And as I mentioned on Twitter a… Read More
Built form and climate impact
Building height and density are not one and the same. You can have tall buildings configured in a low-density way (think post-war towers in the park). And you can have low/mid-rise buildings configured in a high-density way (think Paris and Barcelona). This is one of… Read More