Tag: los angeles

• 2019 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate: Arata Isozaki

  This week it was announced that Japanese architect Arata Isozaki has received the 2019 Pritzker Architecture Prize. The prize is generally viewed as architecture’s highest honor. (You also get $100,000.)

  He’s the 46th laureate and 8th Japanese architect to receive the honor. (As a side note, the only Canadian on the list is Canadian-born American architect Frank Gehry.)

  Here’s an excerpt from the announcement:

  Not only did he extend efforts to physically reconstruct his native hometown [after World War II] with buildings including Ōita Medical Hall (1959-60) and Annex (1970-1972 Ōita, Japan), and the Ōita Prefectural Library (1962-1966 Ōita, Japan, renamed Ōita Art Plaza in 1996), but also redefined mutual exchange between eastern and western societies, allowing Japanese vision to inform European and American design, particularly in the 1980s.

  His first international commission outside of Japan was the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which was completed in 1986. He was also one of the first Japanese architects to start working in the West at this time.

  For the full media release, click here.

  2019.03.06

• The new American condo

  Every year since 1984, the National Association of Home Builders (in the United States) has commissioned a home with the goal of showcasing new trends and technologies in the industry. At the same time, it also serves as a kind of dream home. This is what one should aspire to achieve. The initiative is called the New American Home (TNAH).

  The first home was built in Houston by Village Builders. The architect was Booth/Hansen & Associates and the home was about 1,500 square feet. It cost $80,000. Last year the home was in Montverde, Florida and was about 10,690 square feet (6,676 square feet of air-conditioned space). Not surprisingly, these homes have grown over the decades.

  According to a recent New York Times opinion piece by Allison Arieff — called, The New ‘Dream Home’ Should be a Condo — the square footage of this New American Home has been steadily rising:

  

  This is, of course, reflective of what has been happening in the market as a whole. According to Arieff, the average size of a new U.S. home today is about 1,000 square feet larger than it was in 1973. The average space per human has increased from 507 to about 971 square feet. As our wealth has grown we have naturally become more consumptive.

  

  But as Arieff asks in her article:

  What if the next New American Home was a condo? And what if there was a new American dream, not of auto-dependent suburbia, but walkable urbanism?

  She then contrasts last year’s 10,000 square foot “Tuscan style” New American Home against this 6 unit urban infill condo project in Los Angeles, where the average home is about 1,800 square feet and the building in its entirety is around 11,000 square feet.

  Which one would you prefer?

  Charts: New York Times

  2019.03.03

• Tech and the North American office market

  CBRE recently published this report looking at the impact of the “high-tech software/services industry” on the North American office market. 

  Here are a few highlights:

  – Since 2010, tech has created ~1.1 million jobs in the US at an annual growth rate that is 3x the national average.

  – Seattle currently has the fastest tech job growth in North America. This is the first time in 7 years that San Francisco hasn’t been at the top of their list.

  

  – Silicon Valley, Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles all added more than 10,000 tech jobs from 2016 to 2017.

  – The biggest “momentum markets”, relying on 2016 and 2017 data, are Montreal, St. Louis, and Seattle.

  – Over the past two years (Q2-2016 to Q2-2018), Atlanta, Los Angeles, Orange County, Seattle, and Portland have all seen double-digit rent growth.

  One figure that also stood out for me was this one here showing the relationship between US venture capital investment and the average asking rent for office space in San Francisco.

  

  If you’d like to download the full report, click here. You’ll need to sign up for an account with CBRE, but it’s free to do that.

  2018.11.06

• Electric scooters in Los Angeles

  Bloomberg Businessweek just published this article summarizing the impact that Bird and its electric scooters are having on Los Angeles. Here are a couple of highlights:

  – Bird launched a year ago and is, today, valued at around $2 billion.

  – The company has around 15,000 scooters on the road in Los Angeles. We already know that this is making some/many people grouchy.

  – The cost to rent a scooter is $1 plus $0.15 a minute.

  – LA has an incentive program in place that allows Bird to expand its fleet within low-income areas. Still, their scooters tend to be concentrated in wealthier areas of the city.

  – Beverly Hills is trying to figure out how to handle/regulate these scooters and currently has a 6 month ban in place.

  – Supposedly, you can ride a Bird through West Hollywood but you’re not allowed to park it anywhere.

  The company is based in Santa Monica, so it’s not surprising that they have such a stronghold in the LA market. Still, there appears to be a lot of latent demand for this kind of mobility.

  

  According the US Department of Energy, almost 60% of vehicle trips in the US last year were less than 6 miles. And around 40% were less than 2 miles. 

  So these “last mile scooters” do appear to have a lot of utility. Do any of you regularly use an electric scooter to get around?

  2018.09.19

• A more distributed startup geography

  The Economist recently argued that Silicon Valley’s innovation hegemony is waning and that it is a product of two factors: there appears to be more innovation happening elsewhere (good news), but that innovation in general also seems to be harder to achieve (bad news). Here is an excerpt from the article:

  Other cities are rising in relative importance as a result. The Kauffman Foundation, a non-profit group that tracks entrepreneurship, now ranks the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area first for startup activity in America, based on the density of startups and new entrepreneurs. Mr Thiel is moving to Los Angeles, which has a vibrant tech scene. Phoenix and Pittsburgh have become hubs for autonomous vehicles; New York for media startups; London for fintech; Shenzhen for hardware. None of these places can match the Valley on its own; between them, they point to a world in which innovation is more distributed.

  Part of the problem, of course, is rising costs in the Bay Area. Everything from the cost of living to the cost of operating a business. The article cites a recent survey where nearly half of all respondents said they are planning to leave the Bay Area in the next few years. This is up from 34% only two years ago.

  I don’t doubt that rising costs are causing some people to look to other cities, as well as other countries in the case of draconian visa policies. But I am suspect of the claim that we’ve heat peak “innovation” – however you want to define that.

  2018.09.05

• The real reason people oppose new development

  

  A good friend of mine just sent me this fascinating research paper called: Opposition to Development or Opposition to Developers? Survey Evidence from Los Angeles County on Attitudes towards New Housing. It is a study out of UCLA that was published earlier this year by Paavo Monkkonen and Michael Manville.

  For the paper, they conducted a survey-framing experiment with over 1,300 people in Los Angeles County to test how strongly they felt about a number of common anti-housing sentiments; arguments such as traffic congestion, neighborhood character, and strain on local services. 

  However, they also introduced another argument: large developer profits. And interestingly enough, they discovered that respondents were 20 percentage points more likely to oppose a new hypothetical housing development when the survey was framed around the developer making a lot of money.

  Here is a table from the paper showing the various frames, as well as the percentage of people who supported, had no opinion, and who opposed. Note that under the “developer” frame, the opposition number is 48%.

  

  So their “takeaway for practice” is as follows: “Housing opposition is often framed as a form of risk aversion. Our findings, however, suggest that at least some opposition to housing might be motivated not by residents’ fears of their own losses, but resentment of others’ gains.”

  Photo by Cameron Stow on Unsplash
  

  2018.08.29

• North American cities with the most construction cranes

  Rider Levett Bucknall recently released its RLB Crane Index for Q3-2018. Here are the top 10 cities in North America (table via the New York Times):

  

  For the third consecutive reporting period, Toronto has taken the number one spot at 97 cranes – 85 of which are being used on residential projects. 

  I’m not at all sure how the study defines “mixed-use” projects. But given that Toronto only has 2 of them, it must not include projects with grade-related retail.

  Across North America, residential and mixed-use projects (whatever they are) make up approximately 70% of the total crane count. 

  I am surprised that Miami didn’t make the list.

  2018.08.17

• Toronto: 2000 vs. 2025

  Last week, Joe Berridge, Partner at Urban Strategies, gave a presentation at the Institute on Municipal Finance & Governance titled, Toronto: The Accidental Metropolis. I’ve seen Joe give similar presentations to this one before, and I always thoroughly enjoy his focus on Toronto’s position as a global city.

  Here is a slide from the presentation that projects out Toronto’s population to 2071 and compares it to the largest cities in the US.

  

  But the two slides that have been really making the rounds online are the following ones. The first is a rendering of what downtown Toronto looked like in 2000. 

  

  I remember this time clearly. Queen West seemed to end at Spadina. King West and Ossington weren’t things. And “Richmond and Adelaide” felt like the greatest club district in the world. (If you’re not from Toronto, these references will likely mean nothing to you. Sorry.)

  The second slide is a rendering of what Toronto will look like in 2025. The transformation is just incredible.

  

  I’ve seen some people comment that the Toronto of 2000 was relatively affordable; the Toronto of 2018 is unaffordable; and the Toronto of 2025 will be even more unaffordable with all of this new development.

  But I don’t understand that logic. Considering the growth rate shown in the first slide, imagine how unaffordable this city would be if we weren’t building new places for people to live and new places for people to work.

  For the full slide deck, go here. And for recent aerial photos of Toronto’s downtown core, check out my Instagram page.

  2018.06.24

• SoCal Googie

  

  I must have been sick for this lesson in architecture school, because I just discovered, through Curbed, that there is a subset of mid-century modern architecture known as Googie. It originated in Southern California in the 1940s and was all about the future, car culture, the Space Age, and the many other things that dominated the postwar years. Think starbursts, curvaceous geometric shapes, and bright colors. We all know the architecture. But did you know it was called, Googie?

  Supposedly the Googie movement was given its label by architecture critic Douglas Haskell, who used it in a derogatory way to describe criticize the architectural fashion at the time. Googie was the name of an actual coffee shop in West Hollywood designed by John Lautner. And that’s something that is noteworthy about Googie. It was a form of architecture for average buildings: coffee shops, gas stations, motels, and those sorts of things.

  There will always be critics who eschew that which is fashionable at the time. I suppose one could argue that if you’re being fashionable, then you’re not being timeless. Because fashion is about what’s current. And good architecture should be timeless, right? But there’s something so fascinating about a kind of built form that perfectly captures a particular time and place. Middle of the 20th century. Car-oriented Southern California. 

  Sometimes good architecture and design also needs a bit of time and distance in order to fully appreciate it. What was once garish may one day become treasured. Just give it a generation or two.

  Photo by ian dooley on Unsplash

  2018.06.16

• Going dockless

  A couple of months ago I wrote about Bird, the electric scooter sharing company that is trying to solve the last-mile problem. They are expanding across the US and it is seemingly wildly popular.

  But its popularity is also leading some people to call them a public nuisance. Perhaps the biggest contributor to that is the fact that the system is dockless. That is, when you get to your destination you can park the Bird wherever you want.

  That’s obviously a great feature for users (who wants to look around for a docking station?), but it’s also causing a proliferation of “Bird litter” in the cities and neighborhoods where they are widely used. 

  I am sure this will eventually get resolved.

  The other thing about going dockless is that you now have a charging problem. Where and when do these scooters get charged and by whom? Bird solves this problem through decentralized contract workers called “Bird hunters.”

  You register to be one and then Bird pays you $5 to $20 for every scooter charged, depending on how difficult the Bird is to find. And as you can expect, these scooters are getting left all over the place.

  I thought this was a clever solution. And apparently it is popular with high school students looking to earn extra cash. Some are making several hundred dollars a day by spending their evenings picking up and dropping off Birds.

  2018.05.22