Tag: sydney

• Cities with perfect climates

  Last year Nolan Gray mapped out “the cities of the world where you don’t need AC or heat.” And just recently he updated his data with the help of Guardian Cities for their “sweltering cities” series. As part of the study, they projected out average temperatures, in both the summer and winter, to 2059, showing which cities may become more dependent on air conditioning. The answer looks to be many.

  In his original study, Gray had 9 climatic categories, all of which were based on average high and low temperatures throughout the year. Category 1 was you definitely don’t need AC or heat. These cities are essentially perfect year round. And category 9 was you definitely need heat and AC. These cities are basically the worst places on earth to occupy from a climate perspective.

  Here is that climate classification system in lovely chart form (note his caption):

  

  The climatic utopias ended up being places like Bogotá, Guatemala City, Lima, Mexico City, San Diego, São Paulo, and Sydney. The worst places were the southeastern United States, Central Asia, and northern East Asia.

  But one factor that is not included in the study is humidity, which Gray rightly points out has a meaningful impact on comfort. Toronto, for example, is classified in his system as category 7. Heat needed. But AC definitely not needed. Personally, I would bump us up to category 8: AC preferred, but not needed.

  Still, this is an interesting study. There are relatively few cities with so-called perfect climates. And I have always found these sorts of climates fascinating because they empower a very different kind of relationship to outside spaces.

  2018.08.15

• Homes built in the past year

  

  I’m on a flight right now reading the latest issue of Monocle Magazine in a seat that barely accommodates the length of my femur. This month’s issue has their annual ranking of the top 25 cities in the world.

  Munich is first, which is not unusual for their ranking methodology. It generally scores well. Quality of life is high. Crime is low. The economy is strong. Beer gardens are fun. And you’re close to the Alps for snowboarding.

  One stat that caught my attention — and it’s not included for all of the cities — is the number of homes built in the past year. Presumably this is all housing units in the metro area — for sale, for rent, subsidized and so on.

  Here are their (clearly rounded) numbers. The order is as they appeared in the ranking, but again, not ever city included this stat.

  • Munich: 8,300
  • Tokyo: 150,000
  • Copenhagen: 5,000
  • Berlin: 11,000
  • Madrid: 1,600
  • Hamburg: 7,000
  • Melbourne: 5,100
  • Helsinki 4,400
  • Stockholm: 7,000 (18,000 in Greater Stockholm)
  • Sydney: 39,000
  • Hong Kong 17,000
  • Vancouver 22,600
  • Amsterdam 5,100
  • Kyoto 8,900
  • Dusseldorf 2,600
  • Barcelona 1,000

  Some of these numbers appear to stand out, such as the counts for Tokyo, Sydney and maybe Vancouver. But it’s hard to draw any conclusions around housing supply and housing affordability.

  Melbourne and Amsterdam allegedly have the same number of homes built over the past year, but according to Monocle the metro areas of Melbourne and Amsterdam have populations of 4.85 million and 2.4 million, respectively. This also says nothing about their growth rates.

  So which one is doing a better job of addressing housing demand? I’m not sure.

  But it was still interesting to see that Tokyo delivers somewhere around 150,000 homes a year. Tokyo is somewhat unique globally in that it’s a big city — one of the biggest — that somehow manages to gracefully balance both scale and quality of life.

  Photo by Elias Keilhauer on Unsplash

  2018.08.01

• Superstar or bubble?

  “The term “bubble” refers to a substantial and sustained mispricing of an asset, the existence of which cannot be proved unless it bursts.” – UBS

  Last week UBS released its 2017 Global Real Estate Bubble Index. At the top of the list was none other than Toronto, followed by Stockholm, Munich, Vancouver and Sydney. And at the bottom of the list was Chicago – a city that UBS feels is undervalued.

  Here is the full list of index scores:

  

  The UBS index is a weighted average of the following five sub-indices:

  1. Price-to-income
  2. Price-to-rent (fundamental valuation)
  3. Change in mortgage-to-GDP ratio
  4. Change in construction-to-GDP ratio (economic distortion)
  5. Relative price-city-to-country indicator

  If you look at their price-to-income benchmark in isolation, Toronto drops down to the middle of the pack along with Geneva and San Francisco. Hong Kong, London and Paris sit at the top with the most unaffordable housing. 

  Still, UBS credits “an overly loose monetary policy”, foreign demand, tight zoning, and rental market regulations for the eroding housing affordability in Toronto and Vancouver.

  One of the challenges, of course, is that the capital flowing into real estate is not all local – it’s also global. And many cities around the world are seeing high price-to-income multiples, perhaps because of that. 

  So exactly how much decoupling from local fundamentals should now be considered reasonable in our globalized world? And to what extent is this a result of “superstar economics?”

  Here’s an excerpt from the UBS report:

  The economics of Superstars explains why, in some professions, show business for instance, “small numbers of people earn enormous amounts of money and dominate the activities in which they engage.” By analogous reasoning, prices in the most attractive cities are expected to outperform average cities or rural areas in the long run. Hong Kong, London and San Francisco are exemplars of this theory.

  The intuition is that the national and global growth of high-wealth households creates continued excess demand for the best locations. So, as long as supply cannot increase rapidly, prices in the so-called “Superstar cities” are supposed to decouple from rents, incomes and the respective countrywide price level.

  I guess this is one of the reasons why bubbles are proven after the fact. If you would like to download a copy of the full UBS report, click here.

  2017.10.03

• So is this Brutalism or not?

  

  The Spaces just featured 21 Scott Street in Bronte (a suburb of Sydney) as its property of the week. (The home is currently listed.)

  Designed by MCK Architects, the home is also called the “Upsilon House” and was supposedly designed for a fashion-industry couple.

  Two things should immediately stand out to you about the house. One is how long and narrow the site and house are.

  Here is a lengthwise view of the main living floor:

  

  Based on the plans provided by The Agency (listing agency), the house is about ~3.9m wide. That’s because of its tight site. However, the clerestory windows that run the length of the house would provide ample light.

  The other thing that should stand out is all of the exposed concrete. The Spaces calls it “soft brutalism.” I personally love it, but I recognize that it’s not for everyone.

  In any event, it reminded me of a recent blog post by Witold Rybczynski in which he responded to the New York Times calling Habitat in Montreal a brutalist building. His rebuttal: that’s a gross over-simplification. Brutalism, in its truest sense, is about dramatizing the “rough character of concrete.”

  But I particularly enjoyed how he ended the post:

  “There is another litmus test of Brutalism. Buildings like Habitat remain popular with their users. If people don’t hate it, it can’t be Brutalist.”

  If that’s the case, then 21 Scott is certainly not Brutalism in my book.

  Images via MCK Architects

  2017.05.30

• What’s happening in Melbourne?

  

  I’ve never been to Australia, so take everything I’m about to say in this post for what it’s worth. I also don’t know much about Sydney and Melbourne, other than the fact that I’ve studied the latter’s laneways and the tremendous impact they’ve had on revitalizing the CBD.

  However, recently I’ve had a few close friends visit these cities for the first time and, since then, I have started noticing a trend. All of them come back and tell me the same thing, that they prefer Melbourne to Sydney. They say: “Yeah, Sydney is nice and beautiful and all, but it’s not all that exciting. Melbourne feels way more dynamic. Oh, and have you seen their laneways? You would love them.” That’s what they tell me.

  So that’s what I have in my head when I read that Melbourne is now the fastest growing city in Australia; that it’s one of the most liveable cities in the world; and that by as early as 2031 it could take Sydney’s place as the biggest city in the country. Below is a chart from The Australian. If you can’t see it, click here.

  #Melbourne could be bigger than #Sydney as early as 2031. What pulls population towards Melbourne? Cheaper housing!? https://t.co/rUg9rlXMP1 pic.twitter.com/iDFeJ737SB

  — Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) May 26, 2017

  //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Some argue that this is happening because housing is cheaper in Melbourne (median dwelling price of ~$700,000 versus ~$1 million). And some argue it’s because the jobs are there and the city has become a cultural and sporting destination. Whatever the case may be, net migration is estimated to be somewhere around 100,000 people per year.

  My own view – and I’ve made this argument before on the blog – is that we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of cool shit when it comes to cities. People vote with their feet more than ever today. And for a growing segment of the population, cities are a consumer good.

  Indeed, in 2001, Edward Glaeser, Jed Kolko, and Albert Saiz penned a research paper called the Consumer city, where they argued precisely that. The premise was that historically we have tended to think of cities as being centers of production, but we should also be thinking about them as places of consumption.

  Here’s an excerpt:

  “But we believe that too little attention has been paid to the role of cities as centers of consumption. In the next century, as human beings continue to get richer, quality of life will become increasingly critical in determining the attractiveness of particular areas. After all, choosing a pleasant place to live is among the most natural ways to spend one’s money.”

  This is why those coffee shops and cool laneways matter. Some cities have unfair natural advantages. Los Angeles has weather. Vancouver has mountains. Montreal has poutine. But for the rest of us, the amenities typically form part of the built environment. They are a product of our choices.

  2017.05.27

• World’s best city brands

  Resonance Consultancy – they do brands and strategies for places and products – has just released a new report called: World’s Best City Brands – A Global Ranking of Place Equity.

  With all of these sorts of rankings, it really depends on the research methodology being used and the rigor in which it is being applied. In this case, they evaluated each city based on “six pillars of equity”:

  1. Place: Perceived quality of a city’s natural and built environment
  2. Product: A city’s key institutions, attraction and infrastructure
  3. Programming: The arts, culture and entertainment in a city
  4. People: Immigration and diversity of a city
  5. Prosperity: Employment, GDP per capita entertainment in a city and corporate head offices
  6. Promotion: Quantity of articles, references of a city and recommendations online

  What’s perhaps unique about this study is that it combines measurable statistics with “visitor perception metrics” – data that they mined from social media. Here’s an excerpt from the methodology page:

  “Our team became interested in the way visitors and citizens themselves influence the identity and perception of cities. Increasingly, they do it through their evaluation of experiences on social media and via the comments, images and reviews they share with family, friends and people around the world. These opinions and attitudes, much more than traditional marketing, influence the way people perceive places today.”

  This is a fascinating shift for city brands and is something that we have discussed before on this blog. All of us are now involved in telling the story of the places in which we live and visit.

  The entire report is well done and worth a read. It’s also a free download (you’ll need to enter your contact info). But below are the top 10 world’s best city brands. Not really any surprises for me. What about for you?

  

  2016.11.08

• Prime property appreciation around the world

  Every year for the last decade, Knight Frank has published something called The Wealth Report. I’ve written about it before, but it’s basically a look at “prime property” and global wealth.

  As part of the report, they have something called the PIRI 100. It’s their “Prime International Residential Index”, which looks at luxury residential property prices around the world. They generally define “prime property” as being the top 5% of each market according to value.

  This year, the top 25 locations in their PIRI 100 are as follows (for the most part, the data is up to December 2015):

  

  Here in Canada, we like to talk about the insanity of the Vancouver and Toronto real estate markets. This list helps to put that into perspective. Even by global standards, Vancouver is at the top of the pack by quite a significant margin. 

  It’s worth noting that since this is a “prime property” index, it’s pretty safe to assume that the buyer profiles for these sorts of properties would have a significant international bias. So in a way, this list is really about global capital flows.

  Here are the bottom 10 locations on this year’s list:

  

  If you’d like to see the full list, click here.

  2016.05.09

• Medellín wins 2016 Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize

  

  Thanks to my friend Darren Davis, I just recently learned about something called The Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize.

  Named after Singapore’s first Prime Minister, the prize is a biennial award that honors cities who have made, “outstanding achievements and contributions to the creation of liveable, vibrant and sustainable urban communities around the world.” Along with the prize comes $300,000 (Singapore Dollars), which is about $287,000 Canadian as of today.

  The 2016 Prize Laureate is Medellín, Colombia.

  Over the past two decades, the city has transformed itself from one of the most dangerous cities in the world to one that has become a model for social inclusion and urban innovation. Here is a video that talks about the transformation. It’s a bit cheesy, but it does provide a high-level overview of their urban initiatives. A lot of them will serve as a reminder about the importance of urban connectivity.

  If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you may also remember that my good friend Alex Feldman (VP at U3 Advisors) wrote a guest post about Medellín after he visited the city for the World Urban Forum almost two years ago. That post was called, What cities could learn from Medellín.

  It’s worth mentioning that the runners-up for this year’s World City Prize were Auckland, Sydney, Toronto, and Vienna. In the case of Toronto, our “far-from-ideal transit” was specifically called out as a negative. Thankfully we are now working on road pricing, which will provide additional funding for transit. 😉

  Image by Jorge Gobbi

  2016.03.19

• The world’s top 10 cities for prime property

  This morning I read through a real estate report called Luxury Defined. It’s a look at the global luxury real estate market across “the world’s top 10 cities for prime property” and about 70 regional and resort destinations.

  It’s interesting to look at the trends and see how high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) are choosing to allocate their funds in residential real estate. Here are some of the charts and diagrams that caught my eye as I was going through it (you may need to zoom your browser in):

  

  If you’d like to download the full report, click here. It’s free, but you’ll need to enter your name and email address.

  2015.06.08

• Most people still want to raise kids in a house (not an apartment)

  

  Untitled by Lynne Meng on 500px

  https://500px.com/embed.js

  Yesterday I ran a quick 3-4 question survey on ATC called homes for families. The objective was to get a sense of people’s preferences for apartment vs. ground-related housing (house or townhouse) when it comes time to raise a family.

  The results are public so anybody can take a look at the data. At the time of writing this post there were already 70 responses. That’s not a huge data set, but the data is more or less what I expected to see. 

  Here’s what I found (if the data set was larger, I would have made charts):

  The vast majority of respondents were from Toronto. No surprise there. That reflects the readership of this blog, which itself can be quite Toronto-centric at times. (I’ve been trying to branch out more, I swear.) That said, I was thrilled to also see respondents from cities like Seattle, Denver, Chicago, Porto, and Sydney.

  Of the people who specified that they have kids, 11% live in an apartment. 17% live in a townhouse. And 72% live in a house. If you add houses and townhouses together, you get 89% of people with kids living in some kind of ground-related dwelling.

  Of the people who specified that they don’t have kids, 61% live in an apartment. 6% live in a townhouse. And 33% live in a house. This is the kind of split that I generally expected to see for Toronto.

  For the people who specified that they don’t have kids, they were then asked where they plan to move if/when they do have kids. 13% plan to move to another apartment. 8% plan to move to a townhouse. 33% plan to move to a house. 23% don’t plan to move (i.e. they are planning to stay put). And 23% don’t plan to have a family.

  Interestingly enough, 100% of the people who said that they were not planning to move, were already living in a ground-related housing unit (a house in almost all of the cases). So in reality – and if you exclude the people who don’t plan to have kids – about 83% of respondents expect to raise their kids in a house or townhouse.

  Again, this isn’t a big sample size, but the trend appears more or less flat. 89% of respondents who already have kids are already living in a ground-related unit. And when people were asked to project where they would like to be living once they have kids, 83% said they want a house or townhouse.

  Do you think these numbers accurately reflect consumer preferences in your city?

  2015.06.01