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.
Our first shoring rig was delivered and setup today at Junction House. A second one is on the way shortly.
It will take a couple of months to complete all of our caisson piles. If you’d like to learn about how shoring is constructed, check out this “explainer” from UrbanToronto.
It was also an absolutely beautiful day here in Toronto — not a cloud in the sky. So here are a few photos from site.
I had a discussion with a friend of mine over the weekend about what it takes to masterplan a successful retail main street. We talked about street networks, storefront sizes, the impact of Toronto’s PATH on ground level experiences, and a bunch of other things. Ultimately, we both agreed that this is really not an easy feat to accomplish. More often than not, we screw it up. Many of the most cherished retail spines in this city rely on buildings that were primarily built during a different era. They’re old stock.
All of this got me wondering:
Some people responded by saying it doesn’t exist. Hmm. Is our track record that bad? Let’s dig a bit deeper and expand the scope of this question. What are some of the best retail streets around the world that comprise of buildings that were all or mostly built in the last 50 years? I would love to hear from you. Please leave any responses and/or thoughts in the comment section below. I plan to look at this topic in more detail and share specific examples in the coming weeks.
At this point, it is well known that I am a big fan of neon. It is something that we have obviously worked to incorporate into our Junction House project through things like our rooftop placemaking sign (it’s actually LED), our collaboration with local artist Thrush Holmes (his work incorporates neon), and the neon popup gallery that we hosted last year in collaboration with the Downtown Yonge BIA and Neon Demon Studio. So it was no surprise that a friend of mine sent me an ArchDaily article this morning talking about how neon lighting shapes architecture.
What I like about the piece, and the pictures it includes, is that it emphasize the spatial qualities and potential of neon. For a lot of us, neon has come to represent brash advertising. Neon is bright. That was and is great for advertising. But that association has been changing. Even cities like Hong Kong, which have for so long been synonymous with neon, are starting to lose that form of advertising. I’m not saying that loss is a good thing. But I do think that we are now seeing neon being used in completely different ways. It has become more creative. It has become architectural.
Below is an excerpt from the ArchDaily article that speaks to this same idea. But what you really want to do is shoot over and look at all of the photos.
Yet because neon is so fundamentally associated with signage, which can feel limiting or kitschy for some architects, it is often neglected. Rudi Stern writes further that “Unfortunately for many architects, neon is the last shoddy pink ‘pizza’ sign they have seen, and they summarily reject a medium that offers great promise as a spatial and environmental element.” Thus, despite its historical and commercial associations, neon has the potential to be even more than retro symbols or cosmopolitan phrases. Abstract designs, atmospheric colors, and the kinetic properties of light combined can completely alter a space even without references to a historical aesthetic or explicit messages. In the images of the With.It Home below, BodinChapa Architects have used neon in a non-representational way to create a stunningly memorable James Turrell-esque room that is simultaneously tranquil and radiant. Neon light has the power to completely transform a room even if used in as simple a way as lining the corners of the ceiling, due to the unique properties of light in conversation with the sense of space itself. If architects can move past its commercial associations and investigate its relationship to architectural space, neon can become an even more powerful atmospheric element than it is already.
Photo by Yuiizaa September on Unsplash
This week, Toronto City Council approved the largest ever one-year expansion of bike lanes in the city — a total of 40 km. It passed 23 to 2. Here is a map of the approved routes:
The Bloor West extension is being accelerated. This will take the Bloor Bikeway out to Runnymede and High Park in the west (close to our Junction House project).
New expansions of the network in the core include Bloor Street East, University Avenue, Dundas Street East, and Danforth Avenue (which also happens to connect another one of our development sites on Dawes Road).
Bloor, University, and Dundas are expected to be among the first installations. The idea here is to have them mirror some of our subway lines and fill the mobility gap as many people shy away from transit in the short-term.
All of this wouldn’t have happened without COVID-19, at least not this quickly. I’m certainly not happy about a pandemic, but as a car owner and fair-weather cyclist, I am happy about these new bikeways and I am happy that we were compelled into action.
The talk this weekend in Toronto is about how everyone is jamming into downtown parks — like Trinity Bellwoods — to enjoy the beautiful weather and drink outside with friends.
Some, including our mayor, are “extremely disappointed” by this selfish behavior. Others are chalking it up to those hipsters. And others, such as Richard Florida, are being highly sympathetic: these are young people who live in small urban spaces and they are clamoring for some green space. Let them be human.
This, of course, is a debate that is playing out not just here in Toronto, but all around the world as we flirt our way into a reopening. Videos of the Lake of the Ozarks were making the rounds on Twitter when I last checked.
I’m not here to pass judgement or predict a second wave (though a few waves are probably inevitable). I’ll leave that to the epidemiologists. The silver lining to all of this, I think, is that it is a clear demonstration of just how persistent urban life remains in the midst of this pandemic. The desire to be around other humans is a powerful force of attraction.
Here is an excerpt from a recent FT Opinion by Ben Rogers called, Cities are not dead — they will get younger:
Cities have always worked particularly well for young people. They flock to them to build up vital social and professional networks, meet their mates and learn how the world works. Around the world there is massive unmet demand for city homes and workspace. The idea that the centres of London, Paris and New York will turn into tumbleweed towns is fanciful. The age composition of these cities might change, but people and business will still be jostling for space near the centre.
In Toronto this weekend, that jostling for space played out on the grass of Trinity Bellwoods Park.
Photo by Adrien Olichon on Unsplash
On Saturday, Toronto closed a few of its major roads, including Lake Shore Boulevard West, to provide more space for outdoor activities and social distancing. A number of “quiet streets” were also created last week. These now only allow local vehicular traffic. This, of course, isn’t anything novel. Most cities around the world have been reallocating their public space in the wake of this pandemic, with many hoping that some of these changes will stick.
I rode my bike out to the Humber Bay Shores on the weekend (where I took the above photo) and it was clearly the fix that we needed. Our current waterfront trails simply cannot safely accommodate the volume of people who are out right now on the weekends. I reckon that, under normal circumstances, a good percentage of these runners, cyclists, and rollerbladers would probably be on a patio drinking. That’s not possible right now, so demand for outdoor activities is way up. (Entirely unproven theory.)
But as is always the case, changes like this make a lot of people grumpy. Traffic got backed up on Lake Shore and the regular “war against the car” narrative flared up. I’m not sure where all these cars were going, but they were out in the sunshine trying to go places. So we have a situation where the reallocation of public space has flipped the supply and demand imbalance to another user — drivers. Now it’s us versus them: “Isn’t there already more than enough room on those big bike trails?”
I’m frankly tired of this never ending debate, which is why I have argued before that we could use better data and better metrics. How many people are we moving with the decisions we are making? How many people are we accommodating per square meter of space? Where are users of this public space coming from? What performance standards are we trying to meet and/or maintain? What is the most equitable allocation of a finite amount of space?
But perhaps I’m naive to think that people might listen to facts.
Today I am going to talk about 3 things that recently happened and/or that are on my mind.
Sidewalk Labs pulled out of Toronto. I think this is sad. A lot of people have said that they’re surprised, but not surprised. The official reason is that this unprecedented environment has made it financially infeasible for them to develop the 12-acre site, while still adhering to their core principles. I don’t have any inside knowledge of the situation, but I can’t help but think that this is probably just an opportune excuse. They were getting beat up pretty badly by Toronto on all fronts, even though they had put forward an incredibly ambitious development proposal. As I said before, I can’t imagine many (or any) “conventional” developers coming forward with something like this. The last plan I saw was 1/3 non-residential, and 40% of the residential component was to be priced below market. And never mind all of the other innovations that were being contemplated.
In other tech news, Uber just led a $170 million investment in Lime (the micromobility scooter company). I think this is smart — both from an overall mobility standpoint and, selfishly, as a shareowner of $UBER. It is being reported that this round of investment values Lime at about $510 million. This is a 79% decline from April 2019 when it raised its last round. So presumably, Uber is getting a pretty good deal here. The bet is that the urban landscape demands multi-modal transportation solutions, everything from bikes and scooters to cars and public transit. There is also an argument to be made that in the short-term, our post-pandemic world is going to gravitate toward individual mobility and away from things like public transit. I’ve heard a few people say that, as we re-open the global economy and try to maintain social distancing, we’re going to face two major mobility bottlenecks: transit and elevators. Sounds like more testing would be a prudent idea.
Above, I was very careful to say “in the short-term” because I think the narrative that is emerging around the demise of urban density is entirely overblown. Few of us are clamoring to jump back into a mosh pit right now (perhaps a metaphorical mosh pit), but I also don’t believe that we will suddenly look to sprawling Brasilia as a source of urban inspiration. While it is true that “disease did shape architecture in the 20th century” (Alex Bozikovic wrote a good piece on this over the weekend) and that there have been oscillations in terms of how we view urbanity, I also know that this isn’t the first pandemic that our cities have lived through. The Hong Kong flu of 1968 is thought to have killed one million people around the world after, allegedly, emerging in one of the densest cities ever created. Hong Kong’s relationship with Beijing is a tenuous one right now, but it still remains one of the world’s most important global cities.
Perhaps cities are more resilient than we give them credit for.
Photo by Touann Gatouillat Vergos on Unsplash
The Wall Street Journal reported today that the median home price across the United States rose 8% year-over-year in March to $280,600. One explanation for this is that while, yes, demand did drop off, so too did supply and that has led to a shortage of available housing. The other possible explanation is that these March deals were papered earlier in the year (or late last year) when most of us were blissfully unaware of what was about to happen and so the real impact of this pandemic isn’t yet showing up in these numbers.
Let’s drill down.
The Toronto Regional Real Estate Board also released numbers today, but for the month of April. Not surprisingly, residential resales across the region are down by 67% compared to April 2019. The number of listings is also down by a similar amount (-64.1%). Overall though, pricing remained relatively flat (0.1% increase). And by overall I mean for all housing types and for all areas of the region. There are larger variances within specific areas and for certain types. See below.
Drilling down even further, my friend and agent Christopher Bibby noted in his monthly newsletter over the weekend that transaction volumes in the central (resale) condominium market are down some 85-90%. So the market is effectively at a standstill. Those who do not need to sell or move are justifiably deciding not to right now. But just as Warren Buffet got on stage over the weekend — with some great flowy hair, I might add — and told us in Times New Roman never to bet against America, I am not about to bet against Toronto. This too shall pass.
I just subscribed to Kirsten Dirksen’s YouTube channel. She makes videos about simple living, self-sufficiency, and small homes, among other things. She has nearly 1.3 million subscribers and her videos have almost 500 million views. I think many of you will really enjoy her channel.
The above video is about an apartment in Lapa, Lisbon that was renovated by architect João Gameiro. Originally constructed in 1819, the top floor space had been pretty badly neglected. João renovated it by striking, what seems to me like, the right balance between old and new.
Some of the other homes featured on her channel include a laneway house in Toronto, a tiny floating home in Berlin, and an off the grid cabin in Joshua Tree.
The MIT Senseable City Lab recently asked: How does urban morphology affect the solar potential of cities? If you assume that transparent photovoltaic cells are on the way and that building facades are soon going to become a place where we generate solar energy, then this is actually a pretty interesting question. Are some built environments naturally better suited than others?
To answer this question, they looked at the “urban surfaces” of ten cities, including New York, Singapore, Toronto (pictured above), Hong Kong, Paris, as well as others. These surfaces included roofs, facades, and ground planes.
What they, not surprisingly, discovered is that you need a lot of exposed facades to get the numbers up. And so the cities that come out on top in terms of annual solar irradiation are cities like New York and Singapore. They have a lot of tall buildings, but they also fluctuate in height, giving greater exposure to the facades.
All of this is potentially relevant because — if building facades become a big deal for solar — it could start to inform how we plan our cities. In fact, I would go so far as to bet that, over the long-term, solar energy will have a greater impact on urban morphologies than this current pandemic.
Image: MIT Senseable City Lab
