Tag: old urbanist

• The long and narrow of property affordability

  

  Lots sizes and dimensions vary from city to city, as well as from neighborhood to neighborhood. They come in many different shapes and sizes from long and narrow (common in Toronto) to rectangular or even wide and shallow. Charlie Gardner wrote a terrific post on this last year where he used Bing Maps to illustrate some of these differences. Tokyo, for instance, is shown as having more rectangular lots (32′ x 38′), whereas Buffalo is shown as having more long and narrow lots (30′ x 175′). Charlie then asks: why the prevalence of inefficient long and narrow lots? These dimensions obviously produce long and skinny houses.

  As he rightly points out in his post, there are economic reasons for this. Assuming you’re starting with deep blocks and lots, then there’s going to be a natural tendency toward subdividing and going long and skinny. That’s because the key dimension is frontage onto the street. The more frontages you create, the more front doors can be built, the more lots with access to the Mississippi can be created, etc. And that’s how you end up with 10-12′ wide row homes, which also helps to address overall housing affordability. This is not a new phenomenon.

  To further demonstrate this point, let’s look at how this phenomenon has translated into the condo market – specifically the mid-rise condo market here in Toronto. In this case street frontage morphs into window frontage (access to light). That’s now the guiding dimension. In a 1 bedroom apartment, that dimension might be something around 6-7m. That allows you to have both a bedroom and a living room with a window. So it makes for a great 1 bedroom or 1 bedroom + den apartment. (I’m ignoring corner suites for this thought exercise.)

  However, a tension often arises when you begin to look at larger suites, such as 2 bedrooms and 3 bedrooms. The obvious response would be to simply give over more window frontage. So instead of 6-7m, the suite may get 10m. This would allow you to create a split 2 bedroom apartment (both rooms get windows) with a living room in the middle. This would be considered a highly desirable floor plan.

  But up until now we’ve been ignoring the depth of the apartment. And as is the case with lot dimensions, this can have an impact on the amount of street/window frontage that gets designed. We’ve talked a lot about mid-rise buildings before on this blog and one of the challenges here in Toronto is that the 45 degree angular plane guideline produces deep floors on the bottom of the building and narrow floors on the top. Given this, it would not be unheard of to end up with 12m apartment depths on some of the lower floors.

  The counter argument would be that nobody is forcing these larger floor plates. Simply carve the building back. But the economic reality is that the margins are so thin on mid-rise buildings, that it would be inconceivable to give up this floor area. You have to max out the envelope.

  Why does this matter? Well let’s assume that the average downtown Toronto condo will cost you $857 per square foot. Using back of the envelope math, that means that the above 6m x 12m apartment (1 bedroom) could cost around $663,000 (774 square feet x $857 psf). And that the above 10m x 12m apartment (2 bedroom) could cost around $1,106,000 (1,291 square feet x $857). 

  These are obviously big numbers. Question becomes: Who will be able to afford these?

  So naturally the design exercise becomes about reducing the size of the apartments and often this means reducing the amount of window frontage. Of course when you do this, it means that one or more of the bedrooms will need to be pulled back from the front windows, which is how you end up with inset / recessed bedrooms (indirect light) and long and narrow apartments. These are often pejoratively referred to as “bowling alley suites”, but they are driven by a push for greater affordability.

  Again, this is not a new phenomenon. It is simply a trade-off that gets made. It’s the long and narrow of property affordability.

  2017.01.08

• What’s next for Walmart?

  Today I was surprised to learn from Charlie Gardner’s blog that groceries now represent 56% of Walmart’s sales. This is a huge number that I frankly wouldn’t have expected. 

  Groceries have relatively low online penetration, which makes them great for brick-and-mortar retailers. I’ve written about this topic before in the context of big box stores and online shopping. But I clearly didn’t realize that it had become such a big segment for Walmart. 

  What’s also noteworthy about grocery shopping though, is that customers appear to be less likely to travel far distances for it, even for lower prices. This means that the radial impact of Walmart the supermarket is less significant and far tighter (~2 miles) than Walmart the discount store. Click here for that study.

  This is important because a big catchment area has been central to the Walmart model. They consume cheap land on the outskirts of cities and then offload the transportation costs (indirect costs) to consumers in exchange for everyday low prices (direct costs). Studies show that we, consumers, typically undervalue indirect costs.

  Charlie argues in his post that this does not mean that we should write off big box retailing. And I would agree. The Walmart Express concept may have failed, but they are clearly looking for ways to rethink their model. Urban stores will need to form part of that.

  2016.02.23

• The decline of US homeownership

  Charlie Gardner (aka the Old Urbanist) recently published an interesting pair of posts (here and here) about the decline of homeownership in the United States.

  What really stood out for me, though, was this chart (showing the percentage of household real estate equity):

  

  And this conclusion:

  “The implied conclusion here, that a dramatic expansion of debt has been necessary just to maintain the illusion of a stable homeownership rate (setting aside the explosion of debt in the 2000s necessary to support an increase in homeownership), puts an even more negative spin on the figures from the preceding post.  In short, a decline in homeownership has until the past few years been masked by shifting demographics and an increase in household debt.”

  What I would now be curious to see is the above chart in terms of household equity value. Because I wonder to what extent rapidly appreciating home prices (as a result of cheap credit) are having an offsetting affect on declining equity percentages.

  2016.01.26

• Who should zone cities?

  

  The Old Urbanist has just published an informative post called “Where Zoning Went Wrong.” In it, he talks about some of the defining characterstics of American city planning and suggests that the delegation of planning authority from states to local municipalities is what has caused many of the challenges that city builders now face.

  But before we get into that discussion, let’s outline the characeristics. By way of Edward Bassett’s handbook on zoning (1922), the Old Urbanist outlines 9 characeristics of American planning. They are:

  1. Approval of the exclusion of commercial activity from residential zones
  2. Failure to disapprove of the exclusion of multifamily from residential zones
  3. Extreme deference to localities
  4. Insistence on a “comprehensive” plan
  5. Irreconcilable conflict between planning and zoning
  6. Heavy reliance on legal process as a substitute for sound policymaking
  7. Rejection of aesthetic concerns
  8. Concern with protecting the wealth of well-to-do homeowners
  9. Lack of comparative focus

  If you’re a planner or city geek, some of these items will be familiar to you – particularly the first one. Single-use zoning (or Euclidean zoning) is widely criticized as being hugely detrimental to cities, which is why mixed-use is so much in vogue right now. We’ve realized that there are tremendous benefits to creating neighborhoods and precincts where people can live, work, play, and learn. And not just do one of those things.

  But one point that somewhat surprised me was number 3: the deference to localities. The Old Urbanist’s argument is that around the world – from Germany to Japan – state and federal governments play a much more active role in city planning as compared to the US. And that the result is a different kind of city. As one example, most other countries don’t have single-family detached-only residential zones. The US does.

  Now, you could argue that it’s partially cultural. The US is all about individualism, whereas many other countries around the world have a greater sense of collectivism. But as the Old Urbanist suggests, it could also be because local municipalities are more prone to NIMBYism, which can ultimately lead to downzoning and more restrictive land use policies. Interesting.

  It was surprising to me though because I’m a firm believer in strong cities. They drive the economy and I generally believe that they deserve to look after themselves. And so could it really be that they need higher levels of government to keep advocacy groups and community opposition in check?

  Immediately I thought of the planning environment here in Toronto and Ontario. The Places to Grow Act, which is largely responsible for the intensification we’re seeing across the region, is provincial legislation. And “the Board” (OMB) that hears appeals arising from the municipal planning level is also provincial. So in other words, provincial decisions trump municipal ones.

  Many people believe that the OMB should be abolished. But probably an equal number of people believe that it’s critical to keeping development moving in Ontario. And, given our discussion here, it could be keeping our land use policies in check.

  But at the same time, I wonder if there isn’t a way to structure local planning such that it doesn’t succumb to individual interests and instead keeps the greater city building agenda at the forefront. If you have any thoughts on this, I’d love to hear from you in the comment section below.

  Image: Old Urbanist

  2014.07.29

• Why the homeownership rate is higher in Mexico than in the US

  If you check out the “What I read” page that I recently added to Architect This City, you might notice a blog by Charlie Gardner called the Old Urbanist. I discovered it a few months ago (when he added ATC to his blog roll) and it’s good stuff.

  Last week he posted this interesting piece comparing homeownership rates and house sizes in both Mexico and the US. His finding is that there’s a fundamental mismatch in America in terms of the size of housing and the size of households. One and two person households now represent more than half of the market, and are on the rise, and yet 40% of houses in the US have 3 bedrooms.

  Because of this mismatch, he’s arguing that households are being poorly served by the US housing market and that it’s driving down homeownership levels. It currently sits around 65%, which is a drop from over 69% during the mid 2000s. Contrast this to Mexico, where there’s a greater number of one and two person households and the homeownership rate is 80%! Oh, and where only 6% of homes are financed using a mortgage.

  So what the Old Urbanist is suggesting is that we need to embrace smaller homes. He doesn’t explicitly say it, but he mentions the opportunity to redevelop laneways and alleys, which many of you will know I fully agree with. It’s a great post and I suggest you have a read if this topic interests you.

  2014.03.20