Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.
I used Turo for the first time this evening. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Turo is like Airbnb, but for cars. It connects people who have cars with people who need rental cars. Here is a photo of ours at SLC:
The pickup was perfectly seamless. I got a text from an alleged human the day before. It said that they would leave the car on the second level of the parking garage next to baggage claim. And that I would get more precise instructions — such as where the key will be — after it was parked there.
I was also told that there would be a small charge to pay in order to exit the garage. And that the charge would obviously depend on how quickly I retrieve the car after they park it. In my case it ended up being US$10, but we also stopped for food on the way.
Overall, I’d say the pickup experience was easier and faster than your typical rental car. The car was as advertised. And thankfully, it was also there waiting for us. The two standout features for me are probably: (1) It was cheaper and (2) you get to pick your exact car.
This second one is important because sometimes you need a rental car so that you can drive it into a snow-covered canyon. And when faced with this situation, it can be helpful to know exactly what you’ll be getting — right down to the type of tires.
It is well known that Salt Lake City has some of the biggest blocks and widest streets in the United States. This is typically a challenge if you’re trying to create a walkable urban environment; however, it can also be an opportunity, because it means you have a lot of public space that you can do other things with.
It is for these reasons that SLC is working on something called the Green Loop:
And the idea is to turn a ring of downtown streets into a new linear park that looks something like this:
More specifically, the Green Loop wants to do the following five things (copied verbatim):
Develop a robust downtown urban forest
Serve as an active transportation corridor for walking and biking
Improve water quality through stormwater management
Create inviting social spaces that provide a variety of amenities and attractions
Create public front yards and gardens within the downtown that support the needs of all users
In my mind, albeit as a non-Salt Laker, this has the potential to be truly transformational for the city and as impactful as the High Line was for New York. So if you are a local, I would encourage you to complete this short project survey. It’s open until Nov 30.
Back in the spring, I wrote about a study that was done by the University of Toronto and the University of California, Berkeley that measured “downtown recoveries” using mobile phone data.
In other words, it looked at where people’s phones were lingering to try and determine if they were back in the office and doing things downtown.
The headline finding was that San Francisco had the lowest recovery quotient (RT) and that Salt Lake City had the highest, alongside cities like San Diego, Baltimore, and Bakersfield.
But why was there such a spread in recoveries?
One possible explanation was commute times. The cities with the lowest average commute times seemed to generally perform better in this study and have higher recovery quotients. But it’s maybe more nuanced than this.
Here is a recent Brookings article by Tracy Hadden Loh that looks at this same study. And to give just one example, she notes that San Diego’s airport happens to fall within the same zip code as its downtown. Meaning, airport traffic would have been picked up as downtown traffic.
The article also includes the above chart, showing the amount of downtown apartments built since 2019. I don’t think I knew that Chicago was so prolific.
As an add-on to yesterday’s post about ground floor retail in mixed-use developments, I thought I would provide a few illustrative and real-world examples to demonstrate some of the challenges that I was trying to describe.
Note that this post is not meant to be critical of any specific projects; instead, it’s intended to further explain some of the challenges facing developers, architects, policy makers, and everyone else involved in the built environment.
Let’s start in Toronto. Below is an aerial photo of Ossington Avenue. For those of you who aren’t familiar, this is one of the most desirable and coolest main streets in city. I mean, check out this recently completed office/retail building at 12 Ossington by Hullmark.
However, when the above townhouse complex was built (circa 2005), Ossington was not the street that it is today. In fact, it used to be pretty scuzzy. When I moved to the US for grad school in 2006, I don’t recall anyone going out on Ossington. Then when I returned in 2009, suddenly, everyone was going to restaurants and bars on Ossington.
So when this project was being planned, residential directly on the street, was probably the highest-and-best use, which is why that’s what was built. But looking at it today, it feels like a suboptimal outcome for one of the most desirable retail streets in the city. And now that it has been built, it’s unlikely to change anytime soon. Should retail have been mandated?
Here is another example from Toronto. This is the north side of High Park. In this case, the street (Bloor Street) is not a great retail street. It’s single-sided because of the park. There’s only a scattering of restaurants and small businesses. There are a lot of single-use buildings. And even some of the newish developments don’t have any ground floor retail.
In this particular instance, it’s certainly more of a stretch to force retail. But at the same time, I think there’s an argument to be made that the edges of Toronto’s primary urban park should do more. The buildings should be taller. The street walls should be more defined. And yes, maybe there should be more retail.
Now here’s a counter example from Paris:
This is the 7th and there’s absolutely no ground floor retail in sight and pretty much only blank and non-active facades. It’s hard to imagine retail opening up here today or anytime in the future — and that’s okay. The streets are still narrow and walkable. And the buildings are just what you’d expect from the capital. The point here: ground floor retail can’t and doesn’t need to go everywhere.
Finally, let’s return to Salt Lake City:
This is maybe the antithesis of our Paris example. 300 W is a wide street clearly designed for Toyota 4Runners. It’s hard to imagine a lot of people walking around here. Even though it’s relatively close to the central business district and it’s on the edge of the emerging and very cool Granary District. (This is The Post District.) But you know what, retail seems to work just fine here:
You just need to think about it in the right way. SLC’s wide streets and large blocks may not make for a broadly walkable environment. But they do give you the room to create your own internal street network and, of course, build a bunch of parking. And that’s what was done and needed here.
I also find it interesting to think at this sub-block level and consider how it might become a new network and layer to the city over time. Maybe Salt Lake needs its own version of Barcelona’s superblocks. And maybe this has already been considered.
So once again, ground floor retail is good. Everyone wants that cool coffee shop in the bottom of their building. But sometimes we miss the boat. Sometimes it’s unclear what we should do. Sometimes it’s not necessary or viable. And sometimes we get it just right. That’s, I guess, retail.
Earlier this year, Salt Lake City enacted new policy called the Downtown Heights and Street Activation Ordinance. As the name suggests, the ordinance addresses building heights, allows for taller buildings in the city, and works to improve ground floor animation. This is among other things.
We all recognize that blank walls (at street level) are suboptimal for urban vibrancy. But the thing about retail is that it doesn’t work everywhere. Even if we really want it everywhere, that may not be possible, at least in the short-term. Retail is usually a lagging indicator. The demand typically needs to be already in place for it to do well.
That said, in really central areas, the correct decision could be to just mandate it everywhere. And that is what SLC has done in its central business district:
However, things get trickier in transitional or emerging areas where you’re kind of just hoping that retail might someday work. From a development perspective, if we weren’t convinced that the retail would work and if we were being forced to build it, we would underwrite it very conservatively. This might mean applying zero (or even negative) value to it. This way if we can’t lease the space and it remains empty, at least it isn’t fatal. But it does mean that the rest of the project needs to carry this loss.
Of course, now you still have a ground floor animation problem. You have empty storefronts. Though one argument might be that at least you’ve provisioned for a future where retail does eventually work. And if this does happen, then somebody was clairvoyant and you’re happy that you built it. But if the area doesn’t ever support good retail, well then you’re stuck with an underperforming ground floor.
One alternative solution that can work on non-obvious retail streets is live/work. This way you build in some flexibility for the spaces to move toward retail (or other non-residential uses) if/when it becomes viable. But it’s not a perfect solution. It’s hard to make live/work suites entirely interchangeable. The ideal design parameters for retail are usually different than that of a home. Still, it can work reasonably well and provide needed flexibility.
It’s all very tricky. But at the end of the day, I think we can all agree that the objective is to limit blank and non-active faces on our principal urban streets. How we do that is the question. And sometimes it’s more art than science.
Here is an argument that Philadelphia-based Diana Lind recently made on her blog, The New Urban Order:
I believe we’re at the beginning of the end of private car ownership in American cities. This idea came from thinking about the next steps when our RAV4 dies in the coming year or so: not only shouldn’t we replace it, but we won’t want to replace it. Right now only about a quarter of Americans do not drive to work, and only 9 percent of Americans do not have access to a car at all. But I think that in the coming decade there’s going to be a ton of potential to convert people living in dense cities and neighborhoods away from private cars.
There are a number of reasons for why she believes this is going to be the case and, to quickly summarize, they are: remote work, declining birth rates, more old people, Uber and other services, and autonomous vehicles. And generally, I would agree that there is a strong case to be made here.
But one thing that she does not explicitly talk about is the relevance of built form in this move away from private car ownership. She does mention “people living in dense cities” (see above), but does this mean that we are to assume density will remain a prerequisite, as it mostly is today?
Urban density dictates so much of how we move around. When I was driving around Paris during the summer, I couldn’t wait to return our car and get back on foot. You should have also seen the gymnastics we pulled off to refill the tank. Driving in the city was annoying. Paris is designed for walking, taking the metro and, now, cycling.
On the other hand, when I land in Salt Lake City (Park City), the first thing I do is head to the car rental area. The city is getting better at trying to reorient itself, and there is a tram (Green Line) that runs from the airport through downtown, but it very much remains a driving city. And ideally you want something like a Toyota 4Runner that will take you through snow and up steep pitches.
So while I agree that, directionally, Diana is right, I think the question remains: What does this mean for individual cities and their built environments? In a city like Paris, it is obvious. Private car ownership is highly likely to continue declining. But in a place like Salt Lake City, I think it’s going to be much more challenging and take a lot longer.
This is an interesting article from Brookings that talks about the “myths of converting offices into housing.” What I especially like about the article is that it’s nuanced, and it directly addresses many of the myths that currently surround offices. The first one is that “offices are over.”
Regular readers of this blog will know that I don’t agree with this. And the article provides some good data points to support this:
Office utilization may be below pre-pandemic levels in many cities, but the data suggests that we have not yet hit a plateau. Utilization rates continue to increase, albeit gradually. So if we are to be more precise here, it’s not that some people will never return to the office, it’s just that it’s taking longer than I think many people expected.
That said, this is not the case in all cities. Downtown Salt Lake City, as we have talked about before, is the busiest it has ever been. Similarly, ridership on the Utah Transit Authority network is up 26% from pre-pandemic levels.
Europe is generally ahead of North America with utilization rates in the 70-90% range, according to JLL. And Asia is even further ahead with rates in the 80-110% range. Meaning that, similar to downtown Salt Lake City, there are (many?) cities in Asia where more people are in the office today compared to in 2019.
So I would not be so quick to claim that “offices are over.”
Every now and then somebody comes forward and proposes an urban gondola. The most recent one that I have heard about here in Toronto was this one from 2016 called the “Don Valley Cable Car.” But like many gondola proposals, it sort of just disappeared. Probably because it wasn’t entirely necessary. (I just checked their website and it is now down.)
However, there are rare instances where a gondola makes a lot of sense. Medellin, for example, has a very successful urban gondola system that my friend Alex Feldman wrote about, here on the blog, after a visit to the city back in 2014. In this case, the gondola was instrumental in connecting hill-side communities that were previously disconnected from the rest of the city.
Another less urbanized example is the one that Utah (Salt Lake County) is planning to build in Little Cottonwood Canyon. I wrote about this project back in March when I was there and, today, the Utah Department of Transportation announced their preferred mobility option. It is called Gondola Alternative B and, as far as I can tell, it is still the longest and most expensive urban gondola ever proposed.
Here are the details in graphic form:
To summarize, though:
The system is being designed to carry 1,050 passengers per hour, with cabins departing every 2 minutes.
The gondola itself is expected to cost $370 million, but when you add in a new parking garage for 2,500 cars, tolling infrastructure on the existing State Route, and other improvements, the total all-in capital cost is projected to be $729 million. The route itself is somewhere around 10 miles, so let’s call it $73 million per mile.
At the same time, the projected operating costs are relatively low at $8 million per year, so this option actually has the lowest 30-year lifecycle cost out of all the ones that were studied. The other alternatives included widening the existing roadway, enhancing the bus service, and adding rail. There was also one other gondola option, which was presumably called Gondola Alternative A.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that I have a thing for narrow streets. Which is why when I travel I sometimes (okay, oftentimes) bring a laser distance measuring device with me. I like measuring things so that I have dimensions that I can feed back into our own development projects. But perhaps most importantly, it allows me to appear as nerdy as humanly possible while traveling. Walking around with just a camera in hand isn’t enough. You need to try harder than that. And so far the narrowest street that I have come across was in Noto, Sicily at just over 1.3m wide.
If you also like to fawn over narrow European streets, you may enjoy this recent video by City Beautiful. In it, Dave Amos compares European cities, like Rome, to US cities, like Salt Lake City and Philadelphia, and then asks: Can the US build European-style street networks? His immediate answer is, “probably not.” And this is something that we have talked about before on the blog. Street networks tend to be really sticky. They’re hard to change. However, there is another possible solution: create new smaller mid-block streets. And that’s the focus of Dave’s video:
But if you think about it, this condition already exists in a number of cities. Here in Toronto, we have somewhere around 300 kilometers of laneways, which tend to range in width from 4 to 6m. These are European-scaled streets and amazingly they’re already in place! The only difference is that, today, they mostly serve a back-of-house function. They provide access to garages. However, that is quickly changing with the introduction of laneway suites. And so over a long enough time horizon, our laneways are going to inevitably flip from back-of-house to primarily residential.
Though maybe there’s even more we could do with this asset. European cities manage to fit retail, restaurants, patios, and more within 6m. Why not do the same with some of our narrowest streets?
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.
