Tag: urbanism

• Branding is part of city building

  Below is a good discussion with Aaron Renn about how to brand a city. I fully agree with two of the points he makes: (1) Not enough cities are thinking holistically about this topic and (2) tech startups, bicycle lanes, and craft breweries aren’t going to cut it as a strategy. Every city is focusing on that sort of stuff these days. Zero differentiation. Find something germane to your city and start building on it. If you can’t see the embedded podcast below, click here.

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  2018.04.30

• A unique taste in buildings

  

  A condo developer friend of mine once told me something along the lines of this: “Brandon, I have generally learned over the years that if I like something, it probably means the general public [our purchasers] isn’t going to like it. And that’s because if I like it, there’s probably something unique or quirky about it.”

  When he told me this it made perfect sense to me, because there’s a well documented taste divide that seems to exist between architects and design-types and non-architects and non-design-types (whatever this latter categorization means).

  A few years ago The Architects’ Journal published an article referencing a 1987 study that took a group of students – some architecture students and some non-architecture students – and asked them to rate the attractiveness of a series of photos containing both unfamiliar people and buildings.

  What they discovered was that most people had similar views on the attractiveness of the people. I guess hotness is somewhat universal. But when it came to the buildings, the viewpoints were completely opposite. The architecture students’ favorite buildings were what everyone else disliked the most.

  The conclusion in the article: “Professionals are, empirically, the very worst judges available of what people want or like in the built environment.”

  Photo by Simon Goetz on Unsplash

  2018.04.28

• Toronto is finally ready to permit laneway suites

  Some of you might remember that last summer the city refused my laneway house/suite here in Toronto.

  Well that was last summer and this is this summer.

  On May 2, 2018 – which just so happens to be my birthday – Toronto and East York Community Council will consider a staff report for a City-initiated Official Plan Amendment and Zoning By-law Amendment that would permit laneway suites in the Toronto & East York District.

  Here are a couple of excerpts from the summary section (full report, here):

  This report recommends establishing a planning framework to permit laneway suites on lands within the Toronto and East York District that are designated as Neighbourhoods by amending both the Official Plan and City-wide Zoning By-law.

  A second unit can take many forms but is generally considered to be subordinate to the primary dwelling unit on a lot. Second units are an important part of the City’s rental housing stock. Laneway suites are one form of second unit.
  

  This report contains a detailed planning rationale for the introduction and regulation of laneway suites within the Toronto and East York area and discusses the policy implications and intent of proposed performance standards and criteria. 

  These performance standards and criteria intend that laneway suites will provide a new form of ground-related, rental and extended family housing that will fit appropriately within the scale of established Neighbourhoods, and limit their impact on the existing physical character, while contributing to the growth of the City’s rental housing stock.

  What a thoughtful birthday gift. Thank you.

  2018.04.23

• The challenges of the metropolis beyond Habitat III

  This morning I woke up to an email from the Urban Ecology Agency of Barcelona. They are a public consortium dedicated to urban sustainability and made up of the City Council of Barcelona, the Municipal Council and Metropolitan Area of Barcelona, and the Barcelona Provincial Council. The email was about this upcoming “urban congress” taking place in Barcelona from May 22-24:

  

  Sadly, I have no plans to be in Barcelona next month. But if any of you are based or traveling there, the conference is all about the future challenges that cities will face and about contributing to the new urban agenda. The main topics are: sustainability, city planning, social cohesion, and competitiveness. 

  Habitat III – which is in the title of the conference – was a United Nations conference on housing and sustainable urbanization. It took place in Quito, Ecuador in October 2016. However, it forms part of a much larger framework around sustainable global development. More info here.

  Barcelona is also one of my favorite cities, so I am happy to share this one with all of you. If you’d like to register for Post-Habitat III, head over here.

  2018.04.19

• Tim Hortons is moving its HQ to downtown Toronto

  Yesterday it was announced that Tim Hortons would be moving its corporate headquarters from Oakville, Ontario to downtown Toronto. 

  They’ll be taking 6,000 square meters of space in the PATH-connected Exchange Tower and moving all 400 employees by the end of this year.

  I’m more of a Starbucks coffee drinker, but I am interested in this move. Here’s what their president, Alex Macedo, had to say about it (quote from the Financial Post):

  “Consumer trends are changing very fast. We want to remain an innovative company,” he says. “We want to be able to react to guest changing behaviours so we thought being positioned in Toronto would allow us to do that.”

  This is a good follow-up to a post I wrote back in April 2015, which talked about the trend of companies moving from the suburbs to downtown Toronto. I guess that is still happening.

  2018.04.18

• Hamilton’s Pier 8

  In December of last year, the City of Hamilton launched an RFP process to find a team (from the list of prequalified bidders) to develop a new urban community at Pier 8 along the waterfront. The ambition is somewhere around 1,500 new residential units and approximately 13,000 square meters of commercial and institutional space.

  That process has narrowed the pool to 4 teams and 1 will ultimately win the exclusive right to develop the new community. Here are the teams, along with a link to their submission materials, including a short video that I understand was a requirement of the RFP.

  – GulfDream (link)

  – Tridel (link)

  – Urban Capital / Core Urban / Milborne Group (link)

  – Waterfront Shores (link)

  This is a super exciting project for Hamilton. So I would encourage you to take a look at the presentation materials. At this point, you only have until Tuesday, April 17, 2018 to provide any comments to the City’s evaluators. If you’d like to view the boards in person, you can do that this Monday and Tuesday in the main lobby of City Hall.

  2018.04.15

• New York City’s retail vacancy problem

  The New York Post has some interesting articles, here and here, on the growing retail vacancy problem in NYC. (Thank you Michael for the link in the comments this week.)

  The vacancy rate on Amsterdam Avenue in the Upper West Side is said to be around 27% and it is said to be around 20% on a stretch of Broadway in Soho. It has become such a problem that Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to implement some sort of retail vacancy tax:

  “I am very interested in fighting for a vacancy fee or a vacancy tax that would penalize landlords who leave their storefronts vacant for long periods of time in neighborhoods because they are looking for some top-dollar rent but they blight neighborhoods by doing it,” he said on WNYC. “That is something we could get done through Albany.”

  But this is based on the assumption that greedy landlords are simply holding out for exorbitant rents. It doesn’t consider the fact that, maybe, there is simply too much retail space:

  Only a few grasp the true scope of the problem. Vornado Realty Trust titan Steven Roth said we can only cure the national plague through “the closing and evaporation” of up to 30 percent of the weakest space — which would take five years.

  All of this, of course, has me thinking about the future of ground floor main street retail. What are your thoughts?

  2018.04.11

• Meet Replica

  Sidewalk Labs is currently building out a platform called Replica that will support them in their development plans here in Toronto. Replica is: 

  “a user-friendly modeling tool that uses anonymized mobile location data to give planning agencies a comprehensive portrait of how, when, and why people travel in urban areas.”

  Here is a preview of the Replica dashboard showing a section of Main Street in Kansas City. I hope the animated GIF shows up for you.

  

  The platform uses a combination of mobile location data (~5% of the population) and on-the-ground checks, typical stuff like manual traffic counts and transit boardings.

  The goal is to understand in real-time who is using a street, as well as how (driving? cycling?) and why (going to work?).

  Their introductory blog post obviously stresses the importance of personal privacy, but I am curious how they determine where people are going.

  I suppose if they pair journeys with destinations (and the durations at those destinations) they can make reasonable assumptions around the why.

  I think the benefits to all of this are clear. But does any or all of this worry you from a privacy standpoint?

  2018.04.07

• Half of Toronto condos completed last year became new rental housing

  

  Shaun Hildebrand (Urbanation) and Benjamin Tal (CIBC) published a report today called, “A Window Into the World of Condo Investors.” In it they revealed that last year (2017 data) no less than 48% of the Greater Toronto Area’s newly completed condo units were closed on by “rental investors.” In other words, almost half of the units became new rental supply.

  This stat was not surprisingly turned into clickbait-y type headlines like, “Half of Toronto condos bought last year were by investors”; whereas an alternate headline might read: “Half of Toronto condos completed last year became new rental housing.” Not as jarring, I know.

  In any event, there are a bunch of other interesting stats in the reports. Here are a few of them:

  – 80% of all new home sales in the GTA last year were condo.

  – Average resale condo prices (per square foot) increased by 26% last year and rents grew by 9%.

  – Over 20% of condo investors purchased their property with no mortgage.

  – Average down payment made by investors was 20%; non-investors were closer to 15%, likely because of mortgage insurance and other factors.

  – Out of the condo investors who took possession in 2017 with a mortgage, no less than 44% are in a negative cash flow position – meaning their rental income isn’t covering their carrying costs. 

  – The returns, which the report calls exceptional, have been coming in the form of price appreciation.

  – As a stress test for the market – what if all these negative cash flow investors suddenly sold their condos? – the report also estimates that if you took all of the rental investors who closed in 2017 with a mortgage and who are in a negative cash flow position greater than $500 per month, it would represent only 3.4% of the total annual supply of condos (both new and resale product).

  If you would like to check out the full report, you can do that over here.

  Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

  2018.04.06

• The Great Recession only paused suburbanization

  According to newly released US census data for 2010-2017 – which Brookings analyzed here – the “back to the city” movement appears to have peaked in 2012. (This is something that we’ve looked at before on the blog.)

  Here is a graph from Brookings showing the annual growth rate for urban and suburban counties. Note how growth in the “urban core” peaked in 2012 and how growth in both the “emerging suburb” and “exurb” have increased since then.

  

  The other finings from Brookings are that growth has slowed in large metropolitan areas (small metro areas and non metro areas, on the other hand are up) and that people are continuing to move from the Snow Belt to the Sun Belt.

  If you look at population gains and losses from 2016-2017 for the 100 largest US metro areas, the only Snow Belt gainers within the top 20 are New York (15th), Columbus (19th), and Boston (20th). Dallas, a Sun Belt city, was first with a gain of 146,000 people.

  So what’s going on? The narrative is that soon as the US economy and housing market recovered from the Great Recession of 2008, the trend lines simply reverted back to business as usual: sun and sprawl.

  2018.04.01