Tag: globe and mail

• Casey Neistat needs to make a YouTube video about cycling in High Park

  I love High Park. It’s the second largest green space in the City of Toronto and right beside the Junction neighborhood. But there are some problems. Despite having a subway line on its northern boundary, we’ve gotten the built form along its edges all wrong.

  There’s very little functioning retail. The densities and heights are not nearly high enough. The streets aren’t great walking streets. And we’ve even gone and created undignified bus stops like this one here.

  On top of all this, we’re now doing this silly thing where police are ticketing cyclists for riding around the park with too much vigor and enthusiasm. I’m sure somebody called to complain and this is all reactionary politics, but an even bigger reaction has now been set off.

  For those of you who haven’t been following or aren’t from Toronto, hundreds of cyclists took to the streets this week to peacefully protest what has been going on in High Park.

  The Globe & Mail then followed it up with this important piece calling for an end to cars inside the park. The boundaries currently house about 5 km of roads and almost 600 parking spots.

  We ride. pic.twitter.com/2Fjw8P0jR8

  — James McLeod (@jamespmcleod) August 11, 2022

  Given all this, I figured now is probably a good time to revive one of Casey Neistat’s original YouTube videos called “bike lanes.” The story is that he gets a ticket for not riding in a bike lane. And so he films a video of himself only riding in bike lanes — even if there are obstacles in his way.

  It’s an awesome video with nearly 30 million views. And I’m sure that many of you have felt like doing exactly what he does when faced with this same situation. I know I have.

  2022.08.12

• Mississauga is the only major city in Canada that lost people in the last census

  The Globe and Mail published an interesting article this weekend talking about how Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto, is the only major city in Canada to have lost people in the last census. Here are the population changes for the top 10 largest municipalities in the country:

  

  There is a simple explanation for this and it is one we have talked about a number of times before on the blog. Many/most of our low-rise single-family neighborhoods are actually losing people. Empty nesters are becoming over-housed and young people aren’t backfilling in quite the same way.

  

  Mississauga has a lot of these neighborhoods and is heavily geared towards this kind of built form. But they are certainly not alone. The same phenomenon is happening in places like Toronto; there is just enough other growth to offset these negatives so that the headline number still remains positive.

  However, this is slowly changing. Toronto is working to “expand housing options” in its low-rise neighborhoods; it is considering how to better intensify its major streets; and it is re-introducing small–scale retail uses so that people living in a house can easily walk to a corner store for milk.

  It is a shift in mindset. But I believe that this trend will only continue, and eventually it will make its way to the suburbs.

  Images: The Globe and Mail

  2022.07.17

• 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 rigid development policies are creating for our climate goals. This is obviously a really important topic. Because if we were singularly focused on reducing carbon emissions, we wouldn’t be building the way we are building today.

  For more information and to register for the virtual event, click here.

  2022.06.22

• The great housing supply debate continues

  The great housing debate continues: Are we building enough housing, or are we not?

  Right now the media is talking about a new report from the Union of B.C. Municipalities, which is claiming that cities in British Columbia are actually building enough housing to keep pace with population demand.

  Between 2016 and 2021, the province’s population grew by 7.6% and the number of new dwellings grew by 7.2%, according to the report. So supply appears to be lining up with demand.

  One problem with this robust analysis is that many people, including the Housing Minister, don’t agree. Here’s an excerpt from the Globe and Mail:

  “The overly naive analysis comparing housing to population growth to declare the adequacy of our housing supply fails to understand that housing and population growth are intimately related,” said statistics analyst Jens von Bergmann, a regular decoder of housing statistics for Vancouver and Canada. “It’s a slap in the face of those who have been pushed out, or those who failed to move here, because of the unavailability of housing.”

  And on a related note, here is a recent piece by Shawn Micallef (Toronto Star) talking about why the left can’t get Toronto’s housing right.

  2022.03.24

• Canada is a suburban nation

  Statistics Canada has started releasing some of the results from its 2021 survey and there is a new classification that is now being used in its analysis of Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs). Instead of organizing city regions jurisdictionally, it is now using a new functional classification that is based on travel times to downtown.

  This has resulted in five new geographic categories: Downtown, Urban Fringe (<10 min to downtown), Near Suburb (10-20 min to downtown), Intermediate Suburb (20-30 min to downtown), and Distant Suburb (over 30 min to downtown). Below is chart from a recent Globe and Mail article that summarizes these classifications, but keep in mind that percentage growth is different than total population growth (the next chart from New Geography covers this one).

  

  This is more granular than their previous approach, which used to be fairly binary: city core vs. the suburbs. But at the same time, it reflects a very suburban and monocentric view of cities. Downtown is in the middle. People generally need to drive to said downtown for things like work and entertainment. And so how long does it take to do that?

  

  Though in all fairness, this lens is our reality. When you apply the above classification and look at Canada’s 41 largest metropolitan areas, only 4.7% of us live in a downtown and only about 28.5% of us live in what is presumably an urban setting (downtown + urban fringe). And the numbers are actually less urban in a CMA like Toronto, where 11.5% live in the urban core (downtown + urban fringe) and 88.5% live in the suburbs, whether near or distant.

  However, one could argue that we are at least becoming slightly more urban. Only 11.5% of Torontonians might currently live in the urban core (2021), but 16% of our growth from 2016 to 2021 went to it (see above chart). Of course, this is an incremental kind of shift. About 84% of our population gain also went to the suburbs, with the vast majority of it going to distant suburbs (a 30 minute commute in Toronto is nothing after all).

  As Wendell Cox points out in this recent New Geography article, Canada remains a suburban nation.

  2022.02.27

• Weekend link roundup — Ukraine and gas supply to Warren Buffet and Canadian housing supply

  I spent much of this morning reading about and listening to discussions about what’s happening in Ukraine and so, instead of a typical post this morning, I’m just going to share a mélange of links.

  • Monocle 24 Foreign Desk episode talking about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Speakers are Ukrainian MP Lesia Vasylenko, former NATO chief Richard Shirreff, Russian journalist Ekaterina Kotrikadze, and Russia expert Mark Galeotti. I found this helpful in better understanding some of the dynamics at play here and what might happen going forward — though, of course, who knows. All of this is both deeply sad and frustrating. [Link]
  • Discussion in Bloomberg Green about the feasibility of the EU shutting off Russian gas right now, as opposed to through a protracted transition. Currently, the EU satisfies about 20% of its total energy needs through gas and about 40% of it comes from Russia. [Link] Also, a chart showing Russian natural gas exports, by destination. [Link]
  • Warren Buffet published his widely read annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders this weekend. He likes to deliver news like this on a Saturday so that people have time to digest it before the markets reopen on Monday. The overall message was one that we have heard before: BH has a lot of cash (~$144 billion to be exact) and they’re not finding very many compelling opportunities in which to deploy it. [Link]
  • To add to the above, here is a longish Q&A session with Buffet’s partner, Charlie Munger. He continues to be worried about excess money in the system and high inflation. [Link]
  • Construction has been recently completed on a Mies van der Rohe design from 1952 that had been forgotten and buried in some archives. Originally commissioned to be a fraternity house at Indiana University, the building is now the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design. This is a supremely cool story, particularly for an architecture school. [Link]
  • Yet another simple example by Bobby Fijan on how highly restrictive zoning codes and design guidelines don’t always produce the end results that we might want. Different times and different contexts in this example. But it’s interesting to think about how best to promote design excellence in our cites. Is more creative market freedom the answer? [Link]
  • My friend Randy Gladman, who is senior vice-president of development advisory at Colliers here in Toronto, published an opinion piece in the Financial Post last week about the hidden costs of inclusionary zoning. It is consistent with the ad nauseam discussions that we have been having on this blog for the past few years, but it of course remains an important read. [Link]
  • Steve Pomeroy of Focus Consulting makes an argument in the Globe and Mail that elevated home prices in Canada isn’t primarily the result of a supply deficit. Using recent census data that allegedly shows that housing supply in Vancouver actually kept pace with demand (over how long of a period?), Pomeroy instead points to the other typical culprits: strong demand, low interest rates, unused homes owned by non-residents, and so on. This one likely deserves a dedicated post at some point. [Link]

  Ironically, the post turned out to be wordier than my usual ones.

  2022.02.26

• Free roads or free-flowing traffic?

  

  If you are a longtime reader of this blog, you’ll know that I am a supporter of road pricing. I believe it’s the only way to realistically solve the problem of traffic congestion and I believe that underpricing roads (such as not charging for them) isn’t fair and equitable to taxpayers, especially given our need to shift to more sustainable forms of mobility.

  Todd Litman’s recent opinion piece in the Globe and Mail is a good reminder of these points:

  Also, new highways are far more expensive than most people realize, typically costing tens of millions of dollars for each kilometre of lane. Considering land, construction and additional operating expenses, the cost-recovery price for additional highway capacity – the toll required to repay its incremental costs – is typically 50 cents to $2.00 per vehicle-kilometre, far more than what motorists pay in fuel taxes.

  The law of demand is a fairly simple economic concept. It states that price and quantity demanded have an inverse relationship. The more you charge for something, the less demand there will be. And the less you charge for something, the more demand there will be.

  So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that when you underprice road and highway usage, you get lots of demand — oftentimes too much demand. As Litman argues in his article: “You can have free roads or you can have free-flowing traffic, but it is not economically feasible to have both.”

  Photo by Denys Nevozhai on Unsplash

  2021.12.04

• The tricks with masterplanning

  Alex Bozikovic of the Globe and Mail recently made a good point in one of his articles about how challenging it is to properly “placemake” when it comes to large-scale masterplanned projects. This blog post is not at all intended as a commentary on any one project, but I would like to acknowledge that, for a variety of reasons, places do often need time, layers of history, and some patina on them in order to really settle in. When you build big, it can be easy for things to end up feeling sterile.

  It is also true that tastes can change over time (as we have talked about before), though you could argue that this change is driven by the settling in process. Spaces start to get rethought, reconfigured and recast, and that can make them more desirable.

  But it’s not just about time. What else is going on here that makes masterplanning so tricky? Four things immediately come to mind. If you have any others, please share them in the comment section below.

  One, a lot of the old stuff that we love is now illegal and no longer possible. Here is a great example from Paris that I wrote about. But there are countless others. Another example from Toronto might be the corner retail stores that used to dot our residential neighborhoods. In my opinion, these are wonderful additions. They create urban vibrancy. But today they are generally legal non-conforming uses.

  Two, great urban experiences often happen at the micro scale. Things like the perfect patio with a great view of the street and full afternoon sun. Or that intimate side street lined with beautiful homes. These are some of the moments that make cities great. But when you’re masterplanning at the master scale, it is perhaps easier for more of these intimate details to get lost.

  Three, any new community needs to be seeded. Cities and communities are nothing without people. And so what will be the anchors? What will bring people here? How are we going to animate its streets and public spaces? These can be tricky problems to solve and they often take time (and density).

  Four, masterplanning likely equals fewer feedback loops. I recently came across this great line from Chris Dixon: “Composability is to software as compounding interest is to finance.” Composability is the ability to mix and match software components. And the idea here is that open source software allows new software to get built on top of existing stuff (just like interest on top of interest). This way the world never needs to solve a problem twice.

  I’m not sure what the pithy line should be for city building, but cities also compound. We are constantly building on top of the efforts of others, except when we’re largely not, and we’re designing a whole bunch of new stuff all at once, as is typically the case with masterplanned projects. This isn’t inherently wrong, but building a community from scratch will always be more difficult than adding on to one that is already successful.

  2021.12.03

• Releasing the shackles on mid-rise development

  

  I love mid-rise buildings. I think they are an incredibly livable scale of housing, which is why I am looking forward to moving into Junction House when we begin occupancies next year. But as we have talked about many times before on the blog, the mid-rise economics are challenging in this city, which is why we also don’t have any other Avenue-style mid-rise projects in the pipeline right now. We haven’t been able to find land where the math works.

  Here are two excerpts from a recent Globe and Mail article — titled “Toronto’s mix of planning rules limits growth of mid-rise housing” — that speaks to this dynamic:

  For well over two decades, Toronto’s official plan has called for transit-oriented intensification along the “Avenues,” much of it expected in the form of mid-rise apartments that can be approved “as of right” – meaning without zoning or official plan appeals. Such buildings are often seen as more livable and human scale than 50- or 60-storey towers.

  Yet, ironically, the highly prescriptive Mid-Rise Guidelines – combined with skyrocketing land, labour and building costs, as well as timelines that can run to six years for a mid-sized building – have turned these projects into pyramid-shaped unicorns, often filled with deep, dark and narrow units dubbed “bowling alleys.”

  “The economics are so frail,” says architect Dermot Sweeny, founding principal of Sweeny & Co., who describes the angular plane requirements as “a massive cost” because they make the structure more complicated and expensive while reducing the amount of leasable or saleable floor space.

  The critiques extend beyond the industry. Professor of architecture Richard Sommer, former dean of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Landscape, Architecture and Design at the University of Toronto, describes the controls in the guidelines as “very crude.” “They’re built around a mindset of deference to low-rise communities.”

  My opinion is that, at a minimum, we need to revisit the “guidelines” that govern these kinds of projects and we need to make this scale of development “as-of-right.” In the same way that laneway suites work, where you simply apply for a building permit, we need to make it just as easy for mid-rise housing. There just too many barriers and too many opportunities for something to come up that could hold up the entire project for months or years.

  Building at a variety of scales is important for the fabric and vitality of our cities. Unfortunately, I have all but made up my mind that small doesn’t work unless it’s as-of-right. I would love to build another laneway house and I fully expect that to happen at some point in the near future. But I just can’t seem to get my head around another mid-rise building right now. I wish that wasn’t the case. And it’s certainly not because of a lack of effort.

  2021.06.25

• Penthouse at 388 Richmond Street West sells for $2.4 million

  My friend Christopher Bibby — who is a real estate agent here in Toronto — is in the Globe and Mail today talking about how Toronto-area buyers have returned to downtown. The article is by Carolyn Ireland and in it Bibby cites two of his recent deals: A large 2 bedroom suite at 168 King Street East that just sold for $1.2 million and an even larger penthouse at 388 Richmond Street West that just sold for $2.4 million.

  (Sidebar: 388 Richmond Street West is one of my all-time favorite buildings in the city and was developed by Howard Cohen nearly two decades ago. For more on Howard, check out this post I wrote back in 2016.)

  These are two examples of buyers who want to live in the city. Of course, there are countless others who are making moves right now. As Bibby points out in the article, the mood has certainly shifted from what we were seeing last year in the condo space. Condo buyers today are even starting to comb through expired listings in the hopes of finding off-market deals.

  I view this kind of real estate activity as a leading indicator for what’s to come in the the city. Rental activity is naturally going to lag until people starting returning to offices en masse and downtown life fully resumes. It’s more of a short-term “buying” decision. But as a condo purchaser, it’s easy (and probably better) to look through the short term.

  I think that’s what people are doing right now and they’re saying to themselves, “yeah, I want to be in the city.” I know that’s how I feel.

  2021.04.07