Tag: san francisco

• 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

• Wealthiest cities in the world

  According to this annual survey by Henley & Partners (first chart from Bloomberg), these are the top 10 wealthiest cities in the world when you count the number of high-net-worth individuals (i.e. people with investable wealth greater than US$1 million):

  

  However, if you instead count billionaires, the top city flips from New York City to the Bay Area (which includes San Francisco and all of Silicon Valley). This isn’t all that surprising.

  Also not surprising is the precipitous decline in the number of HNWIs residing in Hong Kong. From 2012 to 2022, the number declined by 27%. That said, a bunch of other cities fared even worse. The city that lost the most millionaires over this same decade was Moscow. It declined by 44%.

  For those of you wondering about Toronto, we placed 12th, just after Chicago, with 105,200 millionaires, 193 centi-millionaires, and 18 billionaires:

  

  The next city in Canada on the list is Vancouver, and following that is Montreal:

  

  

  It is interesting to see how much further behind Montreal places with these metrics given that it is an urban region with about 1.6x the population of that of Vancouver’s.

  Also interesting — given its size and global importance — is Paris (18th when it comes to HNWIs):

  

  However, when it comes to seasonal draw, Paris is second only to Miami, which appears to be the undisputed global destination for rich people in the winter. Paris has 126 centi-millionaire residents, but during its peak holiday month (presumably summer), this number is believed to increase to over 300:

  

  Finally, looking at Park City, Utah, it has 8 permanent centi-millionaires and this number is thought to increase to over 100 during the winter snowboarding season. And to be clear, this transient population figure only includes people who own a second home there. It does not include rich people paying US$3,700 per night to stay at Deer Valley. That’s pretty good for a small town of only 8,500 permanent residents.

  

  To check out the full list of 97 cities, click here.

  2023.04.22

• California has a plan for 2 million new homes

  On July 1 of this year, a new California bill, called the “Affordable Housing and High Road Jobs Act of 2022”, will go into effect. And the goal of this legislation is to significantly increase the supply of new homes in the state by allowing multi-family construction on lands that are currently zoned for commercial uses.

  On some level, it is of course curious that there even needs to be this bill. Because what we are effectively saying is, “hey, we should allow people to build a mix of uses on our main streets and with high enough densities that we might actually be able to support transit.” Why was this not always the case? (Rhetorical question.)

  In the words of architect and planner Peter Calthorpe, who was recently interviewed here in ArchDaily, this is a “landmark piece of legislation” that has “received very little attention.” So that’s why we’re talking about it today.

  Calthorpe was actively involved in crafting this legislation, and his work apparently started with different scenario land-use models. The first experiment looked at a 43-mile stretch of El Camino running from San Francisco to San Jose (pictured below). And what they found was that this one strip alone could accommodate somewhere around 250,000 new infill homes.

  

  To put this into context, the state of California is currently building about 140,000 new homes each year, through a roughly equal (1:1) split of multi-family and low-rise single-family. Already this represents a shift, as supply used to be slanted (3:1) toward low-rise. (I don’t know when exactly this was the case, but Calthorpe mentions the figure in his interview.)

  Moving on from El Camino, Calthorpe and his team then ran a similar exercise for the five-county inner Bay area. And here they found that some 700 miles of commercial land could produce up to 1.3 million multi-family homes at “reasonable densities.” This was then expanded to the entire state of California and the number increased to 10 million new homes.

  Of course, as we have talked about before on this blog, not all of this land might actually be feasible for development. Sometimes the math doesn’t work even at a zero land cost; you might need a negative land cost in order to pencil a new development. Meaning, you might need to be paid, perhaps through some sort of subsidy.

  So what Calthorpe and the team did was use MapCraft to quickly run development feasibilities on the above sites. They had it run 6 different pro formas using local rents, construction costs, city fees, and so on. And what they determined was that this 10 million number drops down to 2 million when you apply the economic realities of the world.

  As a disclaimer, I’m not at all familiar with MapCraft. But I’m going to take this number at face value and say that this is still a lot of new homes. And this is what people are hoping for come July 1 of this year.

  Image: HDR / Peter Calthorpe

  2023.04.08

• US public transit ridership since March 2020

  

  Consider the following stat: 65% of all transit trips across the US in 2019 came from just 6 metro areas: New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia. Not surprisingly, these are all places with dense and walkable urban centers. In other words, they have built environments that are conducive to the use of public transportation.

  While we know that more people working from home has been bad for transit and that agencies across the world are facing deep holes in their budget, I continue to come back to two things. One, we have not yet reached a post-pandemic equilibrium. We are still making our way back to the office. And two, the single most important thing when it comes to transit ridership is land use.

  If we want more people to take transit, then we need to build our cities accordingly. That means streets people actually want to walk on, and a lot more density.

  2023.03.31

• More on soft story buildings — a Q&A with structural engineer James Cranford

  As I mentioned yesterday, I am not a structural engineer. However, my friend James Cranford is. He is Principal at Stephenson Engineering and he was nice enough to answer a few of my questions about soft story buildings (storey if you’re Canadian).

  BD: What is a soft (or weak) storey building? And why is it such an important design challenge, even in a very un-seismic city like Toronto?

  JC: A soft storey refers to any level in a building that has LESS capacity than the level above. This means it has both less strength to resist loads and less stiffness so that it will move more than the levels above. Soft stories are one of the most significant challenges that many modern building designers face because they are one of the most likely ways that a building can fail catastrophically if not properly designed. A soft storey failure occurs when the building hinges above the weak level and the columns below can no longer support the load of the building above as they become overstressed and loaded in ways they were never meant to act. This leads to a sudden, often pancake type collapse that is likely to bring down the entire building.

  

  We see potential soft storey issues most commonly in mid to high-rise residential buildings that have either amenity or retail spaces at the ground floor. These are spaces that by nature are large and as open as possible. During design, the structural engineer needs to recognize this and compensate for the lost capacity in other ways. This is usually done through a combination of increasing the capacity of the remaining walls and adding new walls at the weak level that fit with the building layouts.

  BD: What does the Ontario Building Code mandate in terms of soft storeys?

  JC: The OBC generally does not permit soft stories in any form for buildings where people are likely to live, work or play. In critical infrastructure like hospitals which must remain fully functional in the event of a major earthquake, the OBC goes further and does not permit any ‘lateral force resisting elements’ like shear walls or steel frames to be discontinuous below. This means that if you have a wall on the 5th floor of a hospital, that wall must exist with equal or greater capacity on EVERY level below, without exception.

  BD: How much more stringent is British Columbia, where there is greater seismic risk?

  JC: The requirements in the British Columbia Building Code (BCBC) are almost identical to those in Ontario in this case. However, the seismic design forces will be much higher based on the potential for much larger earthquakes, so while buildings will generally be designed for a higher seismic capacity, they must be proportioned similarly to prevent soft stories.

  BD: Speaking generally, what is usually required structurally in order to retrofit an existing soft storey building so that it can properly withstand things like earthquakes?

  JC: The most common way to retrofit a soft-storey is to increase the capacity of the weak level. In smaller buildings this can usually be achieved by adding new ‘lateral-force-resisting elements’ like shear walls or moment/braced frames until the overall storey capacity matches or exceeds the capacity of the levels above. On larger buildings this becomes more complex, as the loads are much higher and simply adding capacity may not be either feasible or practical. Therefore a full structural analysis is usually required to find a solution that can be tailored to the unique structural and architectural conditions. This often involves a combination of increased capacity and the introduction of ductile detailing which will allow the building to dissipate seismic energy. This can be roughly thought of as a ‘bend but don’t break’ approach to surviving an earthquake.

  In some jurisdictions, the extreme risk caused by (many) homes built with soft stories has prompted local governments to intervene. The City of San Francisco (as well as many other municipalities in California) have enacted ordinances requiring home owners to assess and upgrade their properties, including single family home with garages a the lowest level, to reduce the risk of soft-storey failure in an earthquake.

  BD: Thanks for this, James.

  I don’t usually do Q&As on this blog, so let me know in the comment section below if you found this one valuable and if you’d like to see more of them.

  2023.03.07

• San Francisco’s transportation agency doesn’t love autonomous taxis

  Cruise, the autonomous taxi service owned by GM, is working toward offering 24/7 service in San Francisco. I wrote about that here. And so it recently came out with some supportive data suggesting that between September and November of last year, it completed 2,800 rides covering some 27,000 miles, and that it did so without a major collision or injury.

  The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, however, disagrees. They are opposing Cruise’s service expansion plans, and have reported 92 incidents where Cruise’s autonomous taxis have obstructed traffic, caused delays to transit, blocked lanes and, apparently in two cases, driven over firehoses.

  These two things are not all that surprising. Firstly, autonomous vehicles are still in their infancy and they are known to do silly things. Part of this, I’m sure, is because they’re programmed around road and life safety. And so if they don’t know what to do, they’re going to default to what is deemed safe, even if it means blocking a lane or obstructing traffic.

  Secondly, transit agencies are suffering in our post-pandemic world. So this is an obvious and understandable case of self-interest. And it’s not new. But at the same time, we’ve all seen this movie many times before, from Napster to Uber. Progress is disruptive. But does it really make sense to stop?

  2023.02.03

• The inclusionary zoning paradox

  What do you get when you have some of the most stringent affordable housing requirements in the United States? You might think that you get lots and lots of affordable housing, but that is not the case in San Francisco. Paradoxically, you still get some of the most expensive housing in the United States. And part of the reason for this — according to this inclusionary zoning review committee — is as follows:

  Of all 40 scenarios, only four, all of them ownership-based, penciled out while satisfying the inclusionary program. Many of the projects that were designated as feasible, or came close to it, were smaller. That could be because larger structures use more expensive union labor and tend to contain advanced safety systems, like elevators that can operate during fires, said Strachan Forgan, principal at SCB, an architecture and design firm.

  Among the 20 that were rental projects, only one was shown to be feasible, but it did not satisfy the city’s mandatory inclusionary policy. While not yet ready to make recommendations, the committee members accepted the findings as accurate. Multiple development experts who reviewed the analysis for The Chronicle said it appeared to be well done.

  What is often missing from analyses about inclusionary zoning is how many projects it makes infeasible as a result of the requirement. It is not no-cost affordable housing. There are real costs and real impacts. But we like to tell ourselves that this isn’t the case because, at the end of the day, we’re not really that serious about building more housing and building more affordable housing. Too inconvenient. Too disruptive.

  2023.01.27

• Our current public transit problem/opportunity

  Over the past few years, I have been writing about the fall off in public transit ridership that we have seen as a result of the pandemic. Most recently, I mentioned it in my predictions for 2023.

  This topic doesn’t seem to get a lot of air time, but it is a problem. Because the standard way to operate a transit system in North America is at a loss.

  According to this recent WSJ article, the average fare recovery ratio across the US is somewhere around 1/3, with the remaining 2/3 of operating costs being covered by public money.

  (Somehow Japan has figured out a way to make money on rail.)

  During the pandemic, federal aid was disbursed in order to maintain service levels. The MTA in New York, for example, received $15.1 billion. But these aid packages will eventually run out, and ridership has yet to fully return:

  New York’s subway system has regained about two-thirds of its pre-pandemic ridership with about 91 million trips in November, according to the MTA. But that is about 50 million fewer rides than in November 2019. Officials worry usage has stalled out at that level.

  In San Francisco, the Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART, recorded 3.7 million trips in November—a little more than one-third of the ridership before Covid.

  The obvious answer is likely to be a combination of service cuts and/or more public money. But an even better answer would be to use this opportunity to figure out how to make our transit systems a little more Japanese.

  That is, let’s make them more financially sustainable. And yes, that is going to necessarily involve looking at how we build around and on top of transit.

  2023.01.09

• What happened in 2022 and how I did on my predictions

  It has become tradition around here that at the end of each year I write down my predictions for the following one. And in 2022, I did that here. The overarching point of writing something like this down publicly is not necessarily to be right (because you can do that through obvious predictions). The point is to dedicate time to thinking (which is oftentimes hard to do throughout the year), to search for non-obvious things, and to generally be okay with being wrong. So I plan to do this again in the coming weeks for 2023.

  But first, let’s see how I did with my 2022 predictions:

  1. COVID: I argued that 2022 would be the year that the pandemic becomes endemic and it reaches a point where it no longer factors into decision making in the same way that it has since 2020. Some of you may disagree whether this is a good thing, but I would still say that this happened, at least in this part of the world. I started the year in lockdown here in Toronto and I ended the year having taken multiple overseas trips where testing was no longer required. (Right)
  2. Return to office: I was kind of close. I thought that the majority of people would be back in their offices by September. I didn’t say that hybrid/flex work was going to disappear, but that we would see a great return. That did happen, according to my super scientific Jimmy the Greek Reopening Index. But if you look at the latest swipe card data for the 10 largest US cities, average occupancy is hovering just below 50%, which is not a majority. (Wrong)
  3. Recreational/fringe housing: I felt very strongly that we would see a pullback in residential real estate this year, specifically recreational properties and properties in tertiary markets. This 100% happened, but I’ll be honest in that I was not thinking about the interest rate hikes that we saw. I just saw it as a pandemic bubble. I also thought that apartment rents would do very well and surpass pre-pandemic levels. This happened in many markets. (Right)
  4. Return of travel: Yup. (Right, but maybe too obvious?)
  5. Intensification of single-family home neighborhoods: This continued to be an important topic in 2022. Did we see some a tipping point-like moment, like I had predicted? I think it depends on the market, but here in Toronto we did see things like Bill 23, as well as additional efforts on the part of Mayor John Tory. (Right)
  6. Autonomous vehicles: Progress was made this year. You can now hail an autonomous taxi in places like San Francisco. But I also thought that this would be a fantastic year for Uber as the world reopened, and that they’d finally become profitable. As of Q3 of this year, that had not happened. (Wrong)
  7. Public transit and micromobility: I got the public transit ridership piece correct. I assumed that ridership levels would remain depressed. Perhaps an obvious one. But I also figured that e-scooters would be one of the main beneficiaries. While it is true that e-scooters remain very popular, particularly with French people, we did see ridership decline in the US, as the availability of cheap capital waned. (Mostly right)
  8. NFTs and augmented reality: There’s a lot happening in this digital world and I continue to be incredibly bullish. But we are certainly in a “crypto winter.” I also thought that Apple would announce something big related to augmented reality this year, but supposedly that has been pushed to next year. (Wrong)
  9. Climate change and carbon prices: I thought that the price of carbon on the EU’s Emissions Trading System would surge this year. It did not. Right now it’s looking like it’ll end up being fairly flat for the year. Of course, I also had no idea that Russia would do terrible terrible things to Ukraine, which has had dramatic impact on energy markets. (Wrong)
  10. More crypto (Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Solana): Well, I got this last one really wrong. ETH is down ~70% over the last year relative to the US dollar. I was not predicting a “crypto winter.” And I did not know that Sam Bankman-Fried was operating a weird cult-like ponzi scheme out of a penthouse in the Bahamas. None of this changes my views on crypto, but I was still wrong in 2022. (Wrong)

  Looks like I’m somewhere around 5/10.

  Stay tuned for my predictions for 2023. In the meantime, if any of you have predictions of your own, I would love to hear from you in the comment section below or on Twitter.

  2022.12.23

• Cruise expands autonomous taxi service in San Francisco

  Cruise, which I wrote about earlier this year, has just announced that its autonomous taxi service will soon be available to the general public 24 hours a day, across all of San Francisco. Initially the service was only available between 11PM and 5AM (when traffic volumes are lower), and in certain parts of the city. It was also free to use. In total, the company now has about 300 AVs operating across San Francisco, Austin, and Phoenix. And it has been charging for rides since June of this year.

  If you’re curious about what it’s like to ride in one of these, check out the above video.

  2022.12.06