Tag: new orleans

• Measuring downtown recoveries using mobile phone data

  The School of Cities at the University of Toronto and the Institute for Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley have been using mobile phone data to track the recovery of 62 downtowns across North America. This work has been being published at downtownrecovery.com, but it has also been widely cited.

  First, to be clear on how this works, the data they are collecting is not dependent on people actually making calls or actively consuming data on their phone; instead it is simply based on people having a phone with them and being physically located in one these 62 downtowns. It also covers the period between January 2019 and November 2022, and includes cities with least 350,000 people.

  I’m not exactly sure how long the phones need to be in a particular place or how they treat time in their data, but the unit of measure is something that they call a “Point of Interest.” This includes things like restaurants and shops, so presumably this data isn’t just saying, ” I went downtown and sat in my office for 8 hours.” It could also be, “I went downtown and ate good pasta.”

  I say this because, based on my understanding of the data, having a high Recovery Quotient (RQ) could mean a number of different things. It could mean that more people are back in the office, but it could also mean that the downtown isn’t a monoculture and that it has other things going on besides just work.

  In any event, here’s what they have found:

  

  The headline finding is that San Francisco has the lowest RQ at 31% and Salt Lake City has the highest at 135%. There does appear to be a bias toward higher recoveries with mid-sized cities, and one of the reasons for this is that these recovery quotients appear to be correlated with average commute times:

  

  Some of the other strongly correlated explanations, include the percentage of jobs in professional, scientific, and technical fields:

  

  And the number of days that events were shut down during the pandemic (note the Canadian cities on the right below; welcome, New Orleans):

  

  I suppose one way to grossly oversimplify these findings is to say that some people have been avoiding going downtown if they can’t quickly drive there (and have to take transit), if their job more easily allows them to work from home, and if things were shut down for too long during the pandemic. Because if it was, they maybe forgot about all of the fun things that typically happen downtown.

  Image: The School of Cities

  2023.04.24

• Lincoln Road’s $67 million makeover (and Business Improvement Areas)

  

  Lincoln Road is one of my favorite parts of Miami Beach. Supposedly the pedestrian-only street attracts some 11 million visitors a year. But I have noticed that the street has lost some of its mainstays to areas such as Wynwood. This is probably why the city and local property/business owners struck a deal this past summer to makeover the street based on a design by Field Operations.

  The deal works like this: The City of Miami Beach is going to pay for the entire US$67 million makeover. This money will come from city and county taxes, as well from bonds. In return, property owners in the Lincoln Road Business Improvement District (BID) have agreed to tax themselves an additional 25% in order to pay for promoting and programming the street.

  Obviously everyone believes that they will come out ahead as a result of this makeover. An improved Lincoln Road means more foot traffic, more sales, and more tax revenue. There’s also talk of expanding the boundaries of the BID, which would generate additional funds. Right now the district is bounded by Alton Road on the west and by Washington Avenue on the east.

  For those of you who aren’t familiar with Business Improvement Districts, they are essentially defined areas where additional taxes are levied in order to fund projects and improvements that help overall economic development within the district. It is a structure that is used all around the world and it is one that was actually pioneered here in Toronto.

  Here we call them Business Improvement Areas, and the first ever was the Bloor West Village BIA, which was established in 1970. There are now 83 BIAs in the City of Toronto. The first BID in the United States was the Downtown Development District in New Orleans. It was established in 1974. There are now over 1,200 across the U.S.

  If you’d like to learn more about the improvements planned for Lincoln Road, here’s a copy of the master plan that was submitted to the City of Miami Beach’s Historic Preservation Board. The link is from The Next Miami.

  Rendering: Field Operations

  2019.10.03

• The Hong Kong window ledge

  

  My friends at the architecture practice Valente Rodgers told me something fascinating about the Hong Kong real estate market last night. Both partners worked as architects in Hong Kong for a number of years.

  In Hong Kong, you’re allowed to deduct certain projecting windows from your calculation of Gross Floor Area. 

  This is provided they’re a certain height above the finished floor level, they don’t project beyond certain distances from the outer face of the building’s structural elements, and so on. The precise measurements seem to vary depending on things like the building’s use.

  Since space is such a precious commodity in Hong Kong, it shouldn’t surprise you that lots of developers and architects take advantage of this. The result being a proliferation of these projecting window ledges all across the city. 

  It’s a phenomenon that happens in many cities when a perfectly legal loophole is found in the land use policies.

  In Toronto it used to be solariums. You could also deduct these from your overall GFA, which means a lot of them them got built in condos and apartments of a certain vintage.

  In New Orleans it was the camelback house. These were houses with a single storey toward the street and a second storey toward the rear of the property. This was done because property taxes were assessed based on the height of the house as it met the street. Pushing the density toward the rear of the lot meant homeowners weren’t taxed more. 

  I find these outcomes fascinating because they have absolutely nothing to do with architectural intent and everything to do with trying to optimize within a given framework.

  But what’s even more interesting about the Hong Kong example are some of the downstream externalities.

  Firstly, it sounds to me like these projecting windows have become a normal part of underwriting projects in Hong Kong. Meaning, if you don’t factor in these projections, you’re effectively giving up free GFA. (Can anyone familiar with the HK market confirm this?)

  However, building these projections also means you can’t do unmodulated and clean floor-to-ceiling windows. And if that’s the desired aesthetic, somebody has got to be willing to pay for that “luxury.” So arguably there’s a socioeconomic dimension to having and not having this ledge.

  Secondly, because space comes at such a premium, these ledges are fully taken advantage of and furniture makers have responded by designing pieces that can dovetail with them.

  Below is a photo of a bedroom in Hong Kong that I found on bohemia.life:

  

  This may be a custom bed and I don’t know how deep that window projection is, but it begins to show you how valuable these ledges can be from a space perspective.

  I think we should try and come up with a name to describe these sorts of built form phenomena. If you have any ideas, please drop them in the comments below. And if any of you are familiar with the HK market, let me know if I’m off the mark with any of the above.

  Photo by Jason Wong on Unsplash

  2017.08.12

• Planning for the unplanned

  

  I was listening to The Urbanist (Monocle Radio) last night while I was making dinner and there was a segment on Moscow’s “illegal retail kiosks.” These are small scale retail structures that were built without formal planning permissions and so the city decided to demolish them. 

  There was lots of backlash. Photos here.

  Now, I’ve never been to Moscow. So I can’t really comment on the attractiveness and usefulness of these kiosks. But I suspect that these illegal retail kiosks, many of which seem to have been located around metro stations, contributed quite a bit to the city’s urban vibrancy. Retail is hard to get right. It doesn’t work everywhere.

  All of this got me thinking about our tendency to sterilize and overplan cities. I’m not saying that planning is bad. It’s not. But I do think we should acknowledge that we don’t know everything about the future and that human ingenuity will undoubtedly unlock new things we never thought would be beneficial.

  So how do we plan for the unplanned? Perhaps it starts with accepting the off-center. Here’s a quote from Anthony Bourdain (it’s all over the internet, but I can’t seem to find the original blog source):

  I think that troubled cities often tragically misinterpret what’s coolest about themselves. They scramble for cure-alls, something that will ‘attract business,’ always one convention center, one pedestrian mall or restaurant district away from revival. They miss their biggest, best, and probably most marketable asset: their unique and slightly off-center character. Few people go to New Orleans because it’s a ‘normal’ city — or a ‘perfect’ or ‘safe’ one. They go because it’s crazy, borderline dysfunctional, permissive, shabby, alcoholic, and bat shit crazy — and because it looks like nowhere else. Cleveland is one of my favorite cities. I don’t arrive there with a smile on my face every time because of the Cleveland Philharmonic.

  There’s value at the margins.

  2016.09.19

• Revisiting the Gardiner East debate

  Last week I argued that the eastern portion of the Gardiner Expressway (Jarvis Street over to the Don Valley Expressway) should be torn down and replaced by an enlarged Lake Shore Boulevard.

  To quickly summarize, here’s why I support removing the Gardiner East:

  • Now is the time to do it (before we develop the surrounding area and it becomes both more expensive and more difficult to do it).
  • It would go a long way to stitching our disconnected downtown back to the lake and realizing our ambitions for the revitalization of the waterfront.
  • Unlocking the full potential of our waterfront is hugely important.
  • In my opinion, the only way to build a big, well functioning city, is on the backbone of public transportation. And this—the tearing down of the Gardiner East—could represent that paradigm shift.
  • It is a portion of the Expressway that has relatively low traffic volumes.
  • It’s the cheapest option on the table.

  Somewhat surprisingly though, a lot of people disagreed with me. They told me that adding anything to our already long commutes would be simply unconscionable and that they would not support it, no matter how much it improved our waterfront.

  So in the spirit of avoiding confirmation bias (that is, only seeking out things that reinforce an already established belief), I thought I would share the following article: “Like It or Not, Most Urban Freeways Are Here to Stay.” It’s from Atlantic Cities and there are 3 key take-aways that I’d like to point out.

  First, I thought it was interesting that the interstate system in the United States was, from the onset, always conceived of as a solution to urban congestion. I always thought it was about connecting the country, but that, apparently, was a secondary goal.

  Second, cities all across North America are engaging in the same debate about what to do with their aging highways. Detroit is debating. New Orleans is debating. And so is Syracuse. Toronto is not alone. But we could be alone in taking the lead on this issue.

  Third, the author basically acknowledges that, while not ideal, we’re stuck for the time being with all these freeways and that the better solution is going to be a really tough slog:

  “This is not an easy assignment, seeing as how cars are purchases we make with our hearts, more than our heads. Logic won’t convince Americans to change their ways. What will? Maybe, over time, prohibitive fuel prices and withering tolls, and, most importantly, investment in useful and convenient public transit. Only when the carrot is irresistible, and the stick stings too sharply to bear, will the shift begin, and it will take years to play out.”

  And while I would agree that it’s not going to be easy, that’s par for the course with anything truly worthwhile. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. But they’re not. And that’s why there are leaders and there are followers.

  People in Toronto like to talk about how our City sometimes lacks vision. Well, here’s our chance. I’m not worrying about what the commute is going to be like tomorrow, because I know there’s an even better solution for that problem. I’m worried about something even bigger. I’m worried about the kind of city we’re all going to leave behind to our children.

  2014.02.20