Tag: development

• Dublin 2007

  

  In 2007, I spent the summer working in Dublin, Ireland for a boutique real estate consulting firm called Urban Capital. (For those of you who are from Toronto and know the industry, there’s no connection between the Urban Capital in Dublin and the Urban Capital in Toronto.)

  At the time, they were working with a number of government agencies on the development of masterplanned communities, as well as on specific development projects. Real estate was booming and everyone wanted to be a part of it – including the band U2.

  But as you all know, the following year (2008) wasn’t kind to the real estate industry and, in particular, to Ireland. That year the country fell into recession for the first time since the 1980s and became labeled as one of the “PIGS.”

  I really wish I had started this blog by that point because it would be interesting to look back today on my posts from that summer and see how I was thinking about the Dublin real estate market. I remember having many Guinness-fueled discussions about whether the bull market could continue.

  In any event, the Irish economy is coming back.

  This year GDP is expected to grow by 5.4%, which would make it the fastest growing economy in Europe. National debt is also falling. At the end of 2013 it stood at €215 billion or about 123% of GDP. And at the end of 2014 it had fallen to €203 billion or about 109% of GDP. The national debt is expected to fall below 100% of GDP by 2018.

  At the same time, Ireland also got permission to pay off its bailout loans early. That’s a good sign.

  I’m thinking and reading about all of this today because I was looking through my photo collection this morning and I stumbled upon a folder titled “Dublin 2007.” The photo at the top of this post was the terrace that I had outside of my apartment in the Docklands area. I don’t think I used it once that summer. 

  And here’s a photo of my bedroom. It must have been the curtains that sold me on the apartment.

  

  I had a great time in Dublin that summer. It’s a fun and young city and I remember being incredibly impressed by the quality of city building that was going on. I’m sure that wasn’t lost in the Great Recession.

  2015.04.26

• Waterfront Cities of the World comes to Toronto

  

  This morning I was interviewed for a Montreal-produced TV show called Ports D’Attache. The English version of the show is called “Waterfront Cities of the World” and it airs on Discovery. 

  Here’s a list of all the cities they’ve visited in the first 4 seasons and here are all the shows from the first 2 seasons in English (which you can watch online for free).

  Rather than a travel show, it’s a look at the “spirit and soul” of each waterfront city through the lens of “local personalities.” There’s definitely a lot of fodder for city geeks and so I thought you all might find the series interesting.

  Toronto was the last stop of season 5. The other cities from this season include Philadelphia, Budapest, Rome, Taipei and Kuala Lumpur, to name only a few of them. 

  I’m glad that they decided to come to Toronto and I’m delighted that they invited me to be on the show. The team was great and, if you haven’t already noticed, I love supporting this city.

  The show will first be released in French (with my comments dubbed over), but an English version will follow. Once that version is released, I’ll circulate a link.

  2015.04.25

• First crowdfunded real estate project opens in D.C.

  

  Want further evidence that technology and the internet are going to dramatically transform many “non-tech” industries such as real estate? 

  Take a look at 1351 H Street NE in Washington D.C (pictured above). It houses a hybrid retail store and restaurant and is probably the first truly crowdfunded real estate project.

  The project was completed using a platform called Fundrise, which I’ve written about before here on Architect This City. Their vision is to completely democratize real estate investment by removing middlepeople and outdated regulations that restrict who and how people can invest in real estate.

  To accomplish this, the founders of Fundrise went out in 2011 and bought the building located at 1351 H Street NE for $825,000. The goal was for it to act as their proof of concept. 

  They then spent a significant amount of time and money figuring out how to make it legal for small and local investors to participate in the project (as opposed to just accredited investors). It was ultimately done through a “local public offering” filed with the SEC.

  So how does it work?

  In the case of 1351 H Street NE, they first went out to the local community and asked them what they wanted to see. That’s how they ended up with a unique retail store / restaurant. It’s what the community wanted.

  Once this was established, they went out and issued 3,250 shares and crowdfunded $325,000 from 175 local investors. This was for an ownership share in both the building and the future business. The average investment amount was $2,000, but people were able to invest as little as $100.

  This is an incredible accomplishment. It takes real estate investment and development to a local level and really empowers small entrepreneurs to start businesses that may have been previously unfundable by traditional sources.

  I don’t know what you think, but I think this is the beginning of a powerful transformation. Many of the structures that are currently in place were formed at a time when it wouldn’t have been practical to crowdsource ideas and crowdfund money. But now that is very possible. It was just done.

  Image: Maketto 

  2015.04.23

• Ace Hotel coming to Toronto’s Fashion District

  

  Ace Hotel, LA by Dan Hogman on 500px

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

  The word on the street right now is that Ace Hotel will be opening up a location in Toronto’s Fashion District at 51 Camden Street. 

  Unlike its other outposts around the world, which entailed the renovation of a historic building, this one will be a new build. And according to HotelChatter, Shim-Sutcliffe Architects have been retained for the project.

  Already a demolition permit has been issued for the existing 3 storey office building:

  

  For those of you who may not be familiar with the Ace Hotel brand, the first hotel opened in Portland in 1999 when 3 friends transformed a halfway house into an affordable hotel for creative types. 

  Since then, the hotel has expanded to New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Palm Springs, as well as many other cities, and has become a kind of cultural institution for the creative class.

  I’m excited that they have (allegedly) picked Toronto for their next property and I’m excited that Shim-Sutcliffe will be (supposedly) designing it.

  2015.04.22

• Condo or rental apartment — does it matter?

  

  Community by Evgeny Tchebotarev on 500px

  Toronto is the condo capital of North America. For a number of years now, there have been more condos under construction in this city compared to any other in North America, including New York.

  But recently the real estate community has become incredibly interested in building multi-family apartments (also known as purpose-built rental buildings). Which is why about 7 months ago I wrote a post called, Rise of rental.

  It has been decades since Toronto built rental apartment buildings at any sort of scale. That means that our existing stock is generally pretty old and that condominiums – rented out by individual investors – have been almost exclusively fulfilling the need for rental apartments in this city.

  But given that purpose-built rental apartments are on the rise, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about them and about the consumer perspective. 

  And so here’s my question to you:

  If you were looking for a place to rent, would it make a difference whether it was a condominium (rented out by an individual investor) or whether it was a professionally managed apartment building? You can assume that the suite itself is identical.

  There are obviously many differences between both forms of tenure, but I’m curious to what extent that factors into the decision making process for consumers. It hasn’t really been an option in recent years, but that seems destined to change.

  I hope we can have a discussion in the comment section below.

  2015.04.16

• The new Toronto 2030 District

  

  Image: Financial District, Downtown Toronto, Canada by Yeonju SEONG on 500px

  Today I learned about something new called 2030 Districts. They are: “designated urban areas committed to meeting the energy, water, and transportation emissions reduction targets of the 2030 Challenge for Planning.”

  Toronto’s new 2030 District is downtown, which is bound by the lake in the south, Bathurst Street in the west, Dupont Street and Rosedale Valley in the north, and the Don Valley in the east. 

  It’s the first district outside of the US. The other established districts are in Seattle, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Denver, Stamford, San Francisco, and Dallas.

  The goals for Toronto’s district are as follows (quoted from 2030 Districts):

  • To cut district-wide emissions in half, including zero-emissions from new buildings by 2030.
  • Support a better understanding of where and why energy use, water use, and GHG emissions occur across the District.
  • Work in partnership with building owners, service providers and conservation groups to accelerate the adoption of best practices for building design and management.
  • Facilitate broad stakeholder dialogues to uncover and overcome systemic barriers to long term reductions in energy use, water use and GHG emissions.

  I’m looking forward to following and learning more about this initiative. I think many of us can agree that producing less, not more, GHG emissions in the future would be preferable. And we know that the bulk of it comes from both buildings and transportation.

  2015.04.08

• The high cost of poor land use

  

  London street of early 20th century Edwardian terraced houses by Bombaert Patrick on 500px

  Over the weekend The Economist published an interesting article called, Space and the city: Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost. The argument is that land isn’t scarce. It’s the land use policies we have created that are artificially limiting supply and driving up real estate values.

  In fact, land is not really scarce: the entire population of America could fit into Texas with more than an acre for each household to enjoy. What drives prices skyward is a collision between rampant demand and limited supply in the great metropolises like London, Mumbai and New York. In the past ten years real prices in Hong Kong have risen by 150%. Residential property in Mayfair, in central London, can go for as much as £55,000 ($82,000) per square metre. A square mile of Manhattan residential property costs $16.5 billion.

  And part of the reason this has become so prevalent is because of the shifts we’ve seen in our economy and the great return back to cities.

  In the 20th century, tumbling transport costs weakened the gravitational pull of the city; in the 21st, the digital revolution has restored it. Knowledge-intensive industries such as technology and finance thrive on the clustering of workers who share ideas and expertise. The economies and populations of metropolises like London, New York and San Francisco have rebounded as a result.

  So how do we get better at meeting real estate demand in our cities? The Economist has two suggestions.

  One:

  First, they should ensure that city-planning decisions are made from the top down. When decisions are taken at local level, land-use rules tend to be stricter. Individual districts receive fewer of the benefits of a larger metropolitan population (jobs and taxes) than their costs (blocked views and congested streets). Moving housing-supply decisions to city level should mean that due weight is put on the benefits of growth. Any restrictions on building won by one district should be offset by increases elsewhere, so the city as a whole keeps to its development budget.

  Two:

  Second, governments should impose higher taxes on the value of land. In most rich countries, land-value taxes account for a small share of total revenues. Land taxes are efficient. They are difficult to dodge; you cannot stuff land into a bank-vault in Luxembourg. Whereas a high tax on property can discourage investment, a high tax on land creates an incentive to develop unused sites. Land-value taxes can also help cater for newcomers. New infrastructure raises the value of nearby land, automatically feeding through into revenues—which helps to pay for the improvements.

  These recommendations will probably be unsettling for a number of people. 

  I would imagine that many communities would prefer to have planning and growth decisions happen bottom up, as opposed to top down. But I think there’s some truth to this recommendation and I don’t think it has to mean completely excluding bottom up feedback. Communities and individuals are naturally going to look out for their own self-interests. And so I think many would agree that there’s value in having a holistic urban strategy in place.

  Recommendation number two pertaining to land value taxes is a loaded one. So I’m going to save my specific comments for a dedicated post on LVTs. 

  But I will say that I don’t think trying to squeeze landowners into development via taxes is the most efficient and immediate way to address supply shortages. In advance of this, we should be examining the current barriers to development. Because we’re talking about hyper competitive global cities with perpetual supply deficits. And I don’t believe the problem is incentive-based. The problem is finding sites. The problem is finding ways to build.

  What do you all think? This is an interesting topic of discussion.

  2015.04.07

• Speed, price, and quality

  

  “Project-triangle” by Cosmocatalano – Own work. Licensed under CC0 via Wikimedia Commons.

  When I was in business school, one of my friends – who runs his own agency – explained to me the Project Triangle and the “pick any two” philosophy. 

  Whether you’re building a building or building a mobile app, projects can be typically broken down in terms of 3 constraints: speed, price, and quality. The “pick any two” philosophy is that – because these dimensions are interrelated – you can only really get 2 of these dimensions at any one time.

  So for example:

  • If you want a project done really quickly and you want it to be high quality, then it’s not going to be cheap. It’s going to be expensive.

  • If you want something done really quickly and you want it at the lowest price possible, then it’s not going to be high quality. It’s going to be low quality.

  • Finally, if you want something high quality and you want it done cheaply, then it’s not going to be done quickly. You might get it done, but it will be deprioritized by whoever is doing it.

  Few things in life are truly black and white, but I really like this framework. It acknowledges the fact that something has to give. It’s unsustainable to think you can always get super fast, high quality work at rock bottom prices.

  2015.04.04

• From seigneurial land tenure to condominium plans

  One of the things I noticed this past weekend when I was on my Porter Escape in Quebec City was that there’s still evidence of the seigneurial land use system. I saw it on île d’Orléans.

  Established in 1627 in New France, the seigneurial system was a feudal way of distributing land and creating subsistence farming for those who occupied it. It was ultimately abolished in 1854, but you can still see vestiges of it.

  With the seigneurial system, a typical farming lot was a long and narrow strip of land emanating from the water, which in this particular case was the St. Lawrence River. Here’s a map from 1641 showing what that looks like:

  

  The reasoning behind this spatial arrangement was rather simple. By having long narrow lots, it meant that you could maximize the number of farmers who had direct access to water. This was needed for navigation, but also for many other obvious reasons. This was an efficient layout.

  At the same time, the long strips meant that each farmer had access to a broad cross section of different kinds of land. They had fertile land for growing, land for their home, and frequently land with trees so that they had material to build, fuel to burn, and so on. It also meant that, despite the overall lot sizes, people actually lived fairly close to each other. It created communities.

  Of course, there’s a lot more to the seigneurial system than just its physical form and there are reasons it was eventually abolished. But today I just want to focus on spatial layout. Because I think there are parallels to how we continue to plan our communities.

  If you live in a city you’ve probably come across a narrow rowhouse, a narrow townhouse, and/or a long and narrow condominium – which many people like to pejoratively refer to as a “bowling alley” plan. In these cases, the width of the home could be somewhere between 10 and 13 feet.

  If you stop and think about this, it’s exactly the same spatial principles as the seigneurial land use system. But instead of maximizing the number of people with access to the St. Lawrence River, it’s about maximizing the number of people who front onto the street and who have access to natural light.

  In tight urban conditions, it’s not uncommon to have no “side yard windows.” In my case, I live in a condominium with 20′ feet of windows on one side only. The other 3 sides of my box have none. And that’s a fairly common urban condition.

  I find this interesting because as much as the world is rapidly changing, some things don’t actually change all that much.

  Image: Wikipedia

  2015.04.03

• Architect This City x Porter Escapes (in Québec City)

  Towards the end of last year I received a one line email from a reader asking me what I thought about Porter (the airline that operates out of Toronto’s island airport downtown).

  I followed suit and responded with one line: “I’m a big fan.” I then pasted a few links to posts I had written where I talked about Porter, the island airport, and why I think they are good for Toronto.

  It turns out that was the right answer 😉

  Because today I’m excited to announce a fun collaboration between Architect This City and Porter Escapes. This weekend I get to explore Québec City and do something I love to do, which is photograph cities, think about cities, and write about cities. (And eat poutine.)

  Here are my travel essentials for the weekend (I wish it was a better photo):

  

  The first thing I should tell you though is that Porter Escapes is different than simply Porter. Porter Escapes is their “packaged vacation” company, so it’s designed for people who want a simple way to book entire getaways (flight, hotel, activities, and so on).

  In my case, I’m going to be staying at the Château Laurier. I also have a bunch of activities planned out for Saturday during the day. Stay tuned.

  I had initially planned to squeeze in some snowboarding at Le Massif and try out the nicely branded train that goes from Québec City right to the mountain. But my back and shoulder are still tender from my spill in Banff.

  Still, I hope you’ll follow along on Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, and using #PorterEscapes. And if you happen to be in Québec City this weekend, let’s grab a pint and poutine.

  I’ve also been told that Porter Escapes will be launching a special promotion over the next few days for escapes specifically to Québec City.

  Note: I’m supposed to tell you that it’ll be at a price point that you should never expect to see again (i.e. it’ll be a steal).

  Happy Friday 🙂

  2015.03.28