Tag: development

• Dear City Council

  Kate Downing was formerly a planning commissioner in the City of Palo Alto. She recently resigned from her position and, about about a day ago, she posted her resignation letter on Medium. It has since gone viral.

  The reason it has spread so quickly, I think, is because it addresses the very same issues that so many cities around the world are facing: a lack of housing supply and eroding affordability.

  As a developer, I obviously have a vested interest in this matter. But to the extent that I can put that aside, I really do believe that our goal should be to build inclusive, rather than exclusive, cities.

  For instance, when I think of great cities such as New York and Toronto, I think of their history of taking in a large number of immigrants and then empowering them to climb the socioeconomic ladder. There’s something magical about that. One of my best friends likes to talk about this potential as “immigrant hustle.”

  But when we sterilize our cities by allowing only the incumbents to survive, I believe we place that socioeconomic potential in jeopardy. So for that reason, I am reposting Kate’s entire letter. I have bolded the points that stood out for me. Let me know what you think in the comments.

  ———————————————————

  Dear City Council Members and Palo Alto Residents,

  This letter serves as my official resignation from the Planning and Transportation Commission. My family has decided to move to Santa Cruz. After many years of trying to make it work in Palo Alto, my husband and I cannot see a way to stay in Palo Alto and raise a family here. We rent our current home with another couple for $6200 a month; if we wanted to buy the same home and share it with children and not roommates, it would cost $2.7M and our monthly payment would be $12,177 a month in mortgage, taxes, and insurance. That’s $146,127 per year — an entire professional’s income before taxes. This is unaffordable even for an attorney and a software engineer.

  It’s clear that if professionals like me cannot raise a family here, then all of our teachers, first responders, and service workers are in dire straits. We already see openings at our police department that we can’t fill and numerous teacher contracts that we can’t renew because the cost of housing is astronomical not just in Palo Alto but many miles in each direction. I have repeatedly made recommendations to the Council to expand the housing supply in Palo Alto so that together with our neighboring cities who are already adding housing, we can start to make a dent in the jobs-housing imbalance that causes housing prices throughout the Bay Area to spiral out of control. Small steps like allowing 2 floors of housing instead of 1 in mixed use developments, enforcing minimum density requirements so that developers build apartments instead of penthouses, legalizing duplexes, easing restrictions on granny units, leveraging the residential parking permit program to experiment with housing for people who don’t want or need two cars, and allowing single-use areas like the Stanford shopping center to add housing on top of shops (or offices), would go a long way in adding desperately needed housing units while maintaining the character of our neighborhoods and preserving historic structures throughout.

  Time and again, I’ve seen dozens of people come to both Commission meetings and Council meetings asking Council to make housing its top priority. The City Council received over 1000 signatures from Palo Alto residents asking for the same. In the annual Our Palo Alto survey, it is the top issue cited by residents. This Council has ignored the majority of residents and has chartered a course for the next 15 years of this city’s development which substantially continues the same job-housing imbalance this community has been suffering from for some time now: more offices, a nominal amount of housing which the Council is already laying the groundwork to tax out of existence, lip service to preserving retail that simply has no reason to keep serving the average Joe when the city is only affordable to Joe Millionaires.

  Over the last 5 years I’ve seen dozens of my friends leave Palo Alto and often leave the Bay Area entirely. I’ve seen friends from other states get job offers here and then turn them down when they started to look at the price of housing. I struggle to think what Palo Alto will become and what it will represent when young families have no hope of ever putting down roots here, and meanwhile the community is engulfed with middle-aged jet-setting executives and investors who are hardly the sort to be personally volunteering for neighborhood block parties, earthquake preparedness responsibilities, or neighborhood watch. If things keep going as they are, yes, Palo Alto’s streets will look just as they did decades ago, but its inhabitants, spirit, and sense of community will be unrecognizable. A once thriving city will turn into a hollowed out museum. We should take care to remember that Palo Alto is famous the world over for its residents’ accomplishments, but none of those people would be able to live in Palo Alto were they starting out today.

  Sincerely,

  Kate Downing

  2016.08.11

• For the love of compactness

  I’m in Provincetown, Cape Cod right now. One of the things that is great about this town is the scale of it. It’s compact and many of the streets feel like laneways or alleys (I’m obsessed, I know). It’s all about pedestrians here. Even the main drag, Commercial Street, is effectively a pedestrian street – though it’s not technically closed to cars most of the time.

  There’s something liberating about being able to get where you need to go by walking or biking or skateboarding. And all of those things are done here. I enjoy the inherent efficiency that compactness brings. That’s why I was excited to learn this morning about the following proposal at 24 Mercer Street in Toronto (via Urban Toronto):

  

  It’s a 12 unit, 17 storey building on a 195 square metre lot. The proposed FSI is 16.8. And it will have zero parking. I would be incredibly curious to know what the construction costs will be and how the overall project pencils out. But regardless, it’s exciting to see someone trying to make use of such a tight site. I would love to see more of this in Toronto and I am certain we will.

  What do you think about projects like this? Some of you may call this “poor planning,” but I see the efficient use of resources.

  2016.07.29

• Low cost energy efficient homes perched atop of surface parking

  A regular of this blog recently suggested (in the comments) that I take a look at the London-based design firm ZED Factory. ZED stands for Zero Energy Development.

  The first project that caught my attention was ZED Pod. ZED Pod is a small, low cost energy efficient modular home that is designed to sit atop of surface parking lots. In other words, it’s a way to repurpose under-utilized surface parking without compromising existing parking ratios. All you really need are the air rights. And since the “land” is cheaper, the homes can be cheaper. They can also be easily relocated if the parking lot were to get developed in the future (though they are designed as permanent structures).

  

  In some ways, there is something perverse about the way that driving and parking have such a profound impact on the urban landscape. Even when it’s buried underground and hidden from sight, the structural column grid needed to layout efficient parking will often carry up through the building impacting suite layouts. We’ll even restrict housing supply when parking requirements can’t be met. Should it be parking or people who come first?

  But cars aren’t going away. And ZED Pod is a clever way of dealing with an existing urban condition – however suboptimal it may be. I found the concept interesting and I thought you all might as well.

  Image: ZED Factory

  2016.07.28

• Two open real estate development positions

  

  I recently alluded to some life changes on this blog. Well, I am now ready to share: I am leaving my development position at CAPREIT.

  I wasn’t intending to leave. I wasn’t looking to leave. And frankly, I felt conflicted. But sometimes life has a funny way of presenting opportunities that you just have to say yes to. As my mother likes to tell me: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” More on this in a later post. Stay tuned.

  What I would like to talk about today are the opportunities that this may create for some of you. There are now two open development positions at CAPREIT. Both positions would be based in downtown Toronto (St. Lawrence Market).

  The first opportunity is essentially a Director level role where you would be responsible for growing the development team at CAPREIT. You should be able to lead a team, identify new development opportunities, create pro formas, assemble/manage consultant teams, secure development approvals for complex urban infill sites, and generally lead projects and people through the entire development lifecycle. For more information and to apply, click here.

  The second opportunity is at the Coordinator level. You would be reporting day-to-day to the above person and you should have working knowledge of the development process. For more information and to apply, click here.

  I would just like to add that in both cases you would be working on some very exciting urban infill projects and you would be joining an organization with great people and a great corporate culture. I mean this sincerely. If you have any questions about the two roles, feel free to reach out to me directly. And if you’re in the market, consider applying.

  2016.07.14

• The back-end of our cities

  I love cities. We all love cities right now. 

  Everyone, for good reason, seems to be fixated on both people returning to cities (like those narcissistic Millennials) and people urbanizing for the very first time. This latter scenario is happening rapidly across the developing world and in many cases – but not all cases – it is helping to lift people out of extreme poverty.

  But by most measures, urban areas represent only about 2-3% of the world’s land area, despite housing over 50% of our population. So here’s an interesting thought for this morning: What is happening and what will happen with the remaining 97-98%?

  In this recent talk by architect Rem Koolhaas, he attempts to dissect the future of living, loving, and working through the lens of architecture. However, he starts by saying that architecture is, in fact, too slow to properly capture the zeitgeist of any time period. It is, “an unbelievably slow art.” That said, Koolhaas has a remarkable ability to identify what is happening (see Delirious New York) and then call it out in a way that you probably haven’t thought about. 

  In the above talk, he hones in on the impact of Silicon Valley – certainly the spirit of our time – on the rural landscape outside of our cities. Interestingly enough, he also talks about how the tech industry has begun to borrow terminology from architecture in order to describe itself.

  Screenshot from the video:

  

  Despite their ethereal appearance, technology giants still have large physical footprints for servers, production, logistics, and so on. But there’s no reason – or way – to accommodate them inside of our cities and so they cluster outside, in the 97-98% areas. These are places like the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, which is the home of Tesla’s new Gigafactory.

  Because of sheer scale and because there’s no need for them to possess much in the way of humanistic qualities, these are spaces which are void of architecture, urbanism, and, in some cases, a light spectrum beyond what is absolutely necessary for the specific function of the building (discussed in the video).

  Of course, the periphery has long serviced the core. But Koolhaas’ thinking has, as it often does, made me consider this phenomenon in a slightly different way. He paints a picture of a spiky world where we are all crammed into sensor and app-driven cities (the front-end), all of which are then powered by big mechanistic boxes that many of us may be naive to (the back-end). In some ways it feels like the Matrix. What we see and experience could just be the tip of the iceberg.

  Architecture may be unbearably slow, but as a society we have always built what matters to us most at the time. At one point it was places of worship. But today, at least for part of our landscape, it is boxes not intended for us to really experience. Maybe that’s not really architecture. Maybe it is simply the back-end for our cities.

  2016.07.03

• The urban wealth pendulum

  Jeffrey Lin, who is an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, recently published the following chart:

  

  I found it in this Washington Post article. And it’s packed full of fascinating information.

  The chart compares the socioeconomic status in US cities (y-axis) against “distance from city center” (x-axis) in 1880 and then in recent years (1960 to 2010 census data). The orange circles represent the 1880 data and the red and blue lines represent the recent census data.

  What this chart and research tells us is that in 1880, rich people overwhelmingly lived in the center of cities. And as you moved further away from the city center, socioeconomic status fell off pretty precipitously. This makes sense given that, at the time, it was hard to get around and travel long distances.

  However, in the post-war years, the exact opposite became true. We began driving and wealth decentralized. This should surprise no one. 

  But what’s interesting is how this appears to be reversing. In 2010 (the red line), there’s a sharp increase in socioeconomic status for people living basically right in the center of cities. And for the 30 – 60 km range, there has been a decrease in socioeconomic status essentially from the 1960s onwards. 

  The important takeaway here – which is spelled out in the Washington Post article – is that the neighborhoods which appear to be in high demand today are also in very short supply:

  “We have 80 years of essentially zero production of neighborhoods with these qualities,” Grant says. “We’ve spent the last 80 years building car-oriented suburbs. Then when the elites decide they want to go back into the city, there’s not enough city to go around.”

  This is one reason why supply matters.

  2016.06.29

• Building new, better cities

  Earlier today my friend Saadat sent me the following tweet:

  @donnelly_b you need to apply to this: https://t.co/NrYmO1D1ge

  — Saadat Qadri (@saadatqadri)

  June 27, 2016

  //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  It’s a link to a new research project by Y Combinator – the famed Silicon Valley seed accelerator. They want to explore the possibility of building new and better cities.

  I don’t have the time for something like this, but if any of you are city experts (I know a lot of you are) and you’re based in or willing to be based in San Francisco (I think they are flexible on this), you should absolutely consider applying to be their full time “Cities Researcher.” The deadline is July 30, 2016.

  Here’s a taste of what they are thinking about…

  There are many high-level questions we want to think through, for example:
  

  – What should a city optimize for?

  – How should we measure the effectiveness of a city (what are its KPIs)?

  – What values should (or should not) be embedded in a city’s culture?

  – How can cities help more of their residents be happy and reach their potential?

  – How can we encourage a diverse range of people to live and work in the city?

  – How should citizens guide and participate in government?

  – How can we make sure a city is constantly evolving and always open to change?

  
  

  And there are tactical questions we want to dig into, for example:

  – How can we make and keep housing affordable? This is critical to us; the cost of housing affects everything else in a city.

  – How can we lay out the public and private spaces (and roads) to make a great place to live?

  – Can we figure out better zoning laws?

  – What is the right role for vehicles in a city?

  – Should we have human-driven cars at all?

  – How can we have affordable high-speed transit to and from other cities?

  – How can we make rules and regulations that are comprehensive while also being easily understandable?

  – Can we fit all rules for the city in 100 pages of text?

  – What effects will the new city have on the surrounding community?

  The convergence of city building and tech is something that I’m deeply interested in. I also think it’s inevitable. And I think that Toronto – thanks to our robust real estate industry – is in an ideal position to be a leader in this space. So I would love to see someone from here take on this job.

  But even if you’re not from Toronto, you should still apply because it’s an exciting initiative 🙂

  2016.06.27

• Positivity at a public meeting

  I’ve been reading the blog 5 Kids 1 Condo for, I think, about a year now. It’s written by Adrian Crook who is a single dad of 5 kids, living in a 2 bedroom condo in downtown Vancouver. And his blog is about just that.

  A few days ago he posted a video of himself speaking at a public meeting in support of a new purpose-built rental building at 18th and Commercial Drive in Vancouver. The proposal includes 110 secured market rental units; 37% of which will be 2 or 3 bedroom apartments. (More information on the project, here.)

  It’s rare to see people come out in support of a project at a public meeting. Usually people only show up when they’re grouchy and upset. So today I’d like to share his speech (click here if you can’t see the video below).

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-ENWu__HdM?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

  I’m curious to know what was shouted right at the beginning after he said that he was in favor of the proposal. I listened a few times but couldn’t figure it out. 

  In any event, Adrian’s speech touches on a number of important points that transcend this specific development proposal and that are relevant to many of the topics that we discuss here on this blog.

  2016.06.26

• Market vs. subsidized

  Miriam Zuk and Karen Chapple of the University of California, Berkeley, recently published a research brief called Housing Production, Filtering and Displacement: Untangling the Relationships. 

  It’s a nuanced look at the impact of both market-rate and subsidized housing production on affordability and displacement within the San Francisco Bay Area.

  The report is essentially a response to the debate around whether increasing market-rate housing production alone can address affordability and displacement concerns, or whether the only way to do it is through subsidized housing. What they found was that both matter, but…

  “What we find largely supports the argument that building
  more housing, both market-rate and subsidized, will
  reduce displacement. However, we find that subsidized
  housing will have a much greater impact on reducing displacement
  than market-rate housing. We agree that market-rate
  development is important for many reasons, including
  reducing housing pressures at the regional scale and housing
  large segments of the population. However, our analysis
  strongly suggests that subsidized housing production is even
  more important when it comes to reducing displacement of
  low-income households.”

  If you’re interested in this topic, I recommend reading the full brief. It’s only 12 pages. I particularly liked the information around filtering and how new housing steps down over time to ultimately serve lower-income households.

  2016.06.23

• 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