Tag: nighttime economy

• What would you do if you were Mayor?

  

  Let’s assume that you’re Mayor of your city and that, for whatever reason, you have no need to pander to voters. You’re a benevolent dictator. You can do whatever you think is best overall for the city and it will just happen. What would you do? This is more or less the question I asked on Twitter this morning, and I think it’s only fair that I answer my own question. So here is a non-exhaustive list of items that came to mind while thinking of Toronto:

  • Substantially increase the pay of public sector workers throughout the city and bonus them based on measurable outcomes. Forget things like time limits on development applications; instead align incentives. For example, if we’re trying to get more shovels in the ground on affordable housing, incentivize people based on building permits issued. I’ll never forget what Roger Martin told me while I was at Rotman. When he became Dean of the school, Rotman was a whatever business school that wasn’t faring all that competitively in the rankings. One of the problems he discovered was that the school’s professors were getting paid far less than those at Wharton, Harvard, Stanford, and so on. So if you were a star, why would you ever want to teach at Rotman? He immediately matched the salaries of those top-tier schools and then, not surprisingly, the top-tier talent arrived. You get what you pay for.
  • Immediately price roads and congestion, and direct, to the fullest extent possible, the funds toward transit and cycling infrastructure. At the same time, the planning and building of transit would be depoliticized. There would be a reccurring funding stream and a plan that we’re continually building out. Minimize protracted debates. Never stop building. There’s a lot of talk this mayor election about solving traffic congestion. I have yet to see a plan that will actually work. Accurately pricing congestion likely won’t be popular, but I can guarantee you that it will be highly effective.
  • Ensure that property taxes are sustainably covering the costs of operating the city and then, at a minimum, peg all future increases to CPI.
  • Make any new housing development less than 12 storeys as-of-right. That would mean, no rezoning process and no site plan approval; just straight to building permit.
  • Empower the private sector to build affordable housing through incentives and subsidies. Affordable housing isn’t feasible to build on its own, which is why nobody is doing it. Inclusionary zoning also won’t get us there. Make developers want to build it and they’ll do it.
  • Liberalize licensing and cut red tape to empower small entrepreneurs across the city in various industries. A perfect example in my mind is street food. Toronto is the most diverse city in the world with some of the best restaurants, and yet the only thing you can buy on the street is a stupid hot dog. If we empowered small entrepreneurs to setup shop on our streets, we would easily have the best street food scene in the world. And I am positive that there are countless other latent opportunities in this city that are being held back by dumb and archaic rules.
  • Make dramatic improvements to our public realm with an eye toward becoming the most beautiful and livable city in the world. Finally pedestrianize Kensington Market, remove the elevated Gardiner Expressway, make it so that we can swim in the Lake, build beautiful public washrooms all across the city that are actually open and aren’t gross, and the list goes on. And yes, “beauty” should be requirement so that we don’t end up with shit like this.
  • Focus on art, design, culture, and innovation as central pillars of Toronto’s brand. Miami is a good example of what this approach — along with favourable taxes and nice weather — can do for a city. I’ve said this before, but here’s just one example: Toronto is in many ways the birthplace of the cryptocurrency Ethereum. Why is nobody talking about this? Why are we not celebrating and leveraging this? It’s a missed opportunity. Broadly speaking though, I think just having and doing three things can be effective in promoting new ideas for these pillars: have reasonably affordable housing, be a city that young people want to live in, and remain open and tolerant to immigrants.
  • Stop thinking of the night-time economy as a nuisance and instead think of it as a powerful economic development tool. I recently responded to this “night economy survey” that the City of Toronto released and the obvious bias is that nighttime things are seen as a terrible nuisance. In other words, “tell us how do we make all of this less annoying for grouchy voters.” My response was to extend last call to 4am and to start thinking of it as an opportunity to draw in young people, tourists, and whoever else. This complements my previous point.

  This is, again, a completely non-exhaustive list. But if I had to summarize the overall ambition, it would be to make Toronto a truly exceptional and remarkable city. We should never be happy with mediocrity.

  What else would you do? Leave a comment below.

  Photo by Aditya Chinchure on Unsplash

  2023.04.09

• Legendary literary hangouts in New York City

  

  The New York Times’ recent celebration of the city’s “legendary literary hangouts” is an important reminder of one of the great features of city life. Cities have a way of mixing different people together and inspiring the creation of great things. And sometimes that happens rather informally. (That’s one of the reasons why there’s tremendous value in the nighttime economy.) Tina Jordan writes: “You might think of them as solitary creatures, furiously scribbling or typing alone, but as long as there have been writers in New York City, they have socialized together in an assortment of bars, restaurants, apartments and clubs.”

  For the full thing, click here.

  2021.08.27

• What intersection in Toronto would you say is the epicenter of the nighttime economy?

  When I was a lot younger and growing up in Toronto, the place to go out at night was in the Entertainment District, centered around Richmond St West and Adelaide St West. This is where all of the bars and clubs were. Thinking back, the concentration of nighttime activities in this area was pretty incredible.

  Those of you who are familiar with Toronto will know that this area isn’t the same nighttime epicenter that it once was and that it’s been this way for many years. The scene shifted westward and down to King St. It also went from larger clubs and venues to smaller bars, restaurants, and lounges. Tastes change, I guess.

  So if you had to choose one intersection to be the epicenter of nightlife in Toronto right now, I think you could easily argue that it’s King St West and Portland St. (Disagree with this take? Leave a comment below.)

  But why this intersection? Why did the nighttime economy land right here?

  Part of it was surely development pressures in the Entertainment District, which forced a broader move. I also think that these areas tend to become victims of their own success. Clubs and bars generate a lot of noise and that makes some people grouchy.

  But I think you could also argue that the intersection of King and Portland has some very specific urban qualities that lend itself to becoming a kind of heart for nightlife.

  It helps that it is the only north-south street that intersects King between Bathurst and Spadina. However, I think the more important point is that both Bathurst and Spadina are fairly broad arterial avenues (certainly that is the case for Spadina). These intersections aren’t as hospitable to pedestrians and so they create a natural break in “the strip.”

  The result is that Portland, which is a much smaller street, became the heart. The intersection feels much more like an urban room. Leave one bar and another one is right in front of you. That’s one of the things about cities. Intimate spaces, rather than big ones, are often what attract people.

  2021.08.22

• Ride hailing in Toronto

  Earlier this year, the University of Toronto Transportation Research Institute (UTTRI) published this report on the impacts of ride hailing services in the City of Toronto.

  And then today, the Ryerson City Building Institute leveraged it to opine on how “on-demand tech” might improve transit going forward. That’s how I discovered it.

  What is clear from the report is that ride-hailing services — which they refer to as Private Transportation Companies (PTC) — are driven by two dominant use cases: 1) going out at night and 2) commuting to and from work.

  Friday and Saturday nights are by far the busiest periods for PTC travel, with the peak usually happening around midnight on Sunday morning. About 13,100 trips per hour, mostly concentrated in the core.

  

  Overall, it is estimated that Toronto does about 176,000 daily PTC trips (as of March 2019). That places it behind New York and Chicago in terms of the size of the market. But Toronto also didn’t complete its first PTC until 2014. Here’s a comparison chart:

  

  Another diagram that I found interesting was the proportion of shared ride trips by neighborhood. It shows that much of the inner suburbs are hailing shared rides — sometimes as high as 45% of all trips. This is interesting because it is people effectively gaming the system.

  

  Because the population densities are lower in the suburbs than in the core, you’re a lot less likely to get paired with other riders when you select that option. So what tends to happen is that you end up getting a private ride for the price of shared ride. I know I’ve played the odds before.

  If you’d like to download a full copy of the report, click here.

  2019.11.20

• New York City’s $35 billion nightlife economy

  

  The Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment in New York City recently commissioned this report on the city’s nightlife economy. The study was completed by Econsult Solutions, the North Highland Company, and Urbane Development. (Full disclosure: I was a teaching assistant for the President of Econsult while at Penn.)

  Here’s what they found:

  The total economic impact of this industry is the sum of its direct, indirect, and induced economic impacts, as well as the ancillary spending impacts that are adjacent to nightlife activity. In 2016 (the most recent year where standardized datasets were available), the nightlife industry supported 299,000 jobs with $13.1 billion in employee compensation and $35.1 billion in economic output. This economic impact also yielded $697 million in tax revenue for New York City.

  They also found that, between 2011 and 2016, the nightlife industry has outpaced the city’s overall economy. Nightlife establishments grew by a 2% annual growth rate. Jobs in the nightlife industry grew by a 5% annual growth rate. And nightlife wages have been rising by 8% annually – about double the average for the city.

  I am a firm believer in the value of the nighttime economy. So I’m happy to see more people paying attention to it as of late. For the full report, click here.

  Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

  2019.01.30