Tag: urbanism

• The density delusion

  Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox recently published a piece in the Orange County Register called, “California’s housing crisis and the density delusion.” I’m sure you can guess where this is going, even if you don’t follow the work of Joel Kotkin. But if you do, you will know that he is an ardent supporter of suburbia and the single-family home.

  Here is an excerpt from the article:

  In reality, the YIMBY’s suggestion that new, dense housing will improve affordability for all is patently absurd. Decades of densification in Los Angeles has seen ever higher rents, displacing low-income, especially minority households. Many former transit customers have been driven to lower-rent areas with less transit service, precipitating a massive decline in ridership, even as billions continue to be spent building new rail lines. The Wiener Bill [my link, not theirs] could exacerbate this trend, and likely increase the need for low-income housing, already well beyond the capability of public coffers.

  I fully appreciate the argument that high-density housing isn’t for everyone and that we shouldn’t be “forcing everyone back to the ‘glory’ days of the city of tenements.” But I disagree with many of their points, including the argument that density doesn’t encourage transit ridership. Density isn’t everything, but it’s an important something.

  The article is definitely worth a read, particularly if you disagree with their positions. That’s how you avoid confirmation bias. I was trying to keep that in mind as I read it. Maybe it worked.

  2018.03.14

• Last-mile electric scooters — will they work?

  I’ve been hearing a lot about Bird recently. Perhaps it has something to do with the $15 million Series A round they raised last month (February 2018) and the $100 million Series B round they announced earlier today.

  A “Bird” is small electric scooters that look like this and can be rented from your phone for short haul trips. They are currently available in Santa Monica, Venice, UCLA, Westwood, and San Diego, and they are intended to be ridden in existing bike lanes.

  What may be particularly interesting to this blog audience is the fact that Bird is calling itself a “last-mile electric vehicle sharing company.” The pitch: 40% of car trips (in the US?) are less than 2 miles long. Let’s replace those using electric scooters.

  One of the first things that came to my mind is that this feels more accessible than cycling. Cycling to work can be a commitment. You have to think about your attire and the sweat factor, among other things.

  Would you agree?

  2018.03.10

• You can now buy a new home, online

  My friend Matthew Slutsky runs a company called BuzzBuzzHome that allows you to search for new construction homes. This week they launched a feature that allows you to put down a deposit on a new home – online – with your credit card. It’s live right now for the Barra on Queen in Kitchener, Ontario.

  I know that Matthew and his team have been working on this for years (I saw earlier demos), and so I wanted to publicly congratulate them on the blog. I’m not sure who their competitors are right now, but this feels to me like one of the first online real estate marketplaces where you can actually just hit “buy now.” Huge accomplishment.

  I am sure many of you will have objections that we will hear about in the comment section below. But I have little doubt that this is the future. People used to say that the masses aren’t going to buy clothes online because of the need to try things on. I own suits that I have purchased online. People will buy real estate online.

  The more important question: When will it go mainstream?

  2018.03.09

• RioCan REIT announces new residential group

  On Monday, RioCan REIT announced its new residential brand: RioCan Living. This is the group that will now be responsible for redeveloping the 43 properties within their portfolio that they have identified as having intensification potential. Here’s how they are describing the new brand: “RioCan Living delivers best in class purpose-built rental units and condos along Canada’s most prominent public transit lines.”

  It has been interesting watching RioCan over the last 6 months. In the fall they announced that they would be selling off somewhere around $1.5 billion of their portfolio to rebalance toward Canada’s six largest markets, and in particular the Toronto market. And with this recent unveiling it is clear that they are doubling down on transit-oriented mixed-use communities as a way to future-proof their retail portfolio against disruption.

  Major markets. High-density. Transit-oriented. This shouldn’t surprise any of you. Here is a link to their latest investor presentation in case you’re curious.

  2018.03.06

• Those wretched rear houses!

  Chris Bateman does some terrific sleuthing in the Globe and Mail this week to determine that the girl pictured in the below photo, dated May 15, 1913, is Dora (Dorothy) Cooperman – daughter of Morris Cooperman, a clothing presser.

  

  Dora is standing in front of 3 wood-framed “rear houses” located behind 21 Elizabeth Street in an area known then as St. John’s Ward, or simply, The Ward. Behind her is City Hall, which we refer to today as Old City Hall. 

  If you’re familiar with Toronto, it shouldn’t take you long to figure out that she is standing in what is today the middle of Nathan Phillips Square in front of (new) City Hall. 

  The Ward no longer exists today, but as far as neighborhoods go its history is one of the most interesting. It was a high-density and mixed-use precinct that served as an important landing ground for successive waves of immigrants until it was deemed a slum and ultimately cleared. I wonder what it would look like today had it remained. Perhaps a bit like Kensington Market.

  It housed the Irish fleeing the Great Famine in the 19th century and was the center of Toronto’s Jewish community until the 1920s. The Cooperman family came from Kiev and identified as Jewish.

  There are so many interesting aspects to the above photograph. Everything from Dora’s pose to the juxtaposition between her surroundings and the grand (old) City Hall in the background. (Sidebar: I would like to try and recreate this same perspective. Would anyone like to model?)

  I also wonder why the city required a report to wake them up to the squalor that was living out in the Ward when they could have, presumably, just looked out their west facing windows.

  In 1911, Charles Hastings and Arthur Goss published what Batemen describes as a “landmark report that stunned civic officials, who had long ignored the poverty on their doorstep.” Hastings was the city’s medical officer of health, and Goss was the’s city first official photographer and author of Dora’s above portrait.

  One of the interesting things that Bateman explains about this report – and this is really the point of today’s post – is that it supposedly called out one particular housing typology as being highly problematic: rear houses. 

  These were houses that existed off the main street and could only be accessed via a laneway, like the one Dora is standing in. Today we would call them laneway houses. And so this report is evidence of over a century of anxiety around this particular housing type.

  It is obvious why overcrowding would have been deemed a serious problem at the start of the 20th century, but now one has to wonder how influential this report may have been in establishing the tone around these “rear houses.”

  Whatever the case may be, Dora’s story is an example of the role that this typology has played in housing people of modest means throughout this city’s history. It is also interesting, but perhaps not a coincidence, that affordability continues to be a part of the pitch around laneway housing and laneway suites. 

  Dora lived in a laneway house.

  2018.03.04

• Hmm…architecture and basic income

  

  Albert Wenger recently published a post on his blog about architecture and basic income. Albert is a venture capitalist and is currently working on a book called World After Capital, which I have mentioned before on this blog. He is also an advocate of basic income as a solution to the growing inequality that the modern economy seems to be producing.

  In this latest post he wades into the world of architecture with two assertions that I would like to respond to today. The first is that with basic income the current trend of everyone piling up in large cities will end. We will decentralize in search of cheaper land on the outskirts of cities. And the second is that affordable housing could perhaps be produced with a more open source approach to architectural drawings and new construction.

  In terms of his first point, I’m not entirely clear why someone earning a basic income would suddenly decentralize. In the comments there is some discussion about how retirees, on a fixed income, often move outward in search of more affordable housing. I understand that phenomenon, but I am not convinced in this scenario. 

  There has been lots of talk about the demise of cities because of new technologies and other factors. But agglomeration economies have proved, again and again, to be a powerful centralizing force. Let’s also not forget about the environmental impacts of large scale decentralization, which would only be partially mitigated by the widespread adoption of electric vehicles. 

  Secondly, you can build a house without an architect. The issue isn’t that good bathroom details are hard to come by. Some of the bigger issues are likely the availability of land (decentralization, I guess, is supposed to solve this); construction costs (it’s a highly inefficient process that generates copious amounts of waste); and the immense regulatory burdens imposed on new construction (process, time, and costs).

  All of this stemmed from a visit that Albert did with a group of architecture students who are researching the relationship between architecture and basic income. I would be very curious to see what they produce.

  What are your thoughts?

  Photo by Mathyas Kurmann on Unsplash

  2018.03.03

• Are we entering a new era of tech-driven city building?

  

  Emily Badger of the New York Times published an interesting piece yesterday talking about the tech industry’s current obsession with trying to fix cities. And there are certainly many problems to fix.

  Staying true to tech and engineering parlance, there’s lots of talk of optimization. How do you technologically optimize a city, for things such as affordable housing?

  There’s no doubt that many of you will sympathize with this statement: 

  “To planners and architects, all of this sounds like the naïveté of newcomers who are mistaking political problems for engineering puzzles.”

  But naïveté is not always a bad thing and with all of the money sloshing around in this industry, there’s also no doubt that this is likely a new era of city building.

  The article ends by quoting JD Ross, the 27-year old co-founder of Opendoor – a startup that we have discussed many times before on this blog and is now valued at over $1 billion.

  It is him saying that he wants to figure out how to put $100 million into this space as soon as he can figure out the right target to optimize for. “It’s better than buying a Bugatti.”

  Of course Sidewalk Toronto – which is mentioned a few times throughout the article – is already a perfect example of tech infiltration.

  But I think Dan Doctoroff gets it right when he posits that the real naïveté will come from disrespecting urbanist traditions.

  Photo by David Alacaraz on Unsplash

  2018.02.25

• My Piece of the City

  A friend of mine just sent out a group city builder email about My Piece of the City, which is a new documentary that is screening all weekend here in Toronto at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

  The film is a critique on the revitalization of Regent Park, told through local residents and their efforts to stage a community musical (which happened in real life).

  The Daniels Corporation, in partnership with Toronto Community Housing, is the developer and builder for the entire 69 acre community. The Daniels Foundation also funded the musical and this documentary.

  But, despite this backing, the Globe and Mail has said that it remains a “healthy critique” of this entire process. And the trailer certainly gives you that impression.

  I am sure that this documentary will be of interest to many of you, so if you would like to grab tickets for this weekend, you can do that here.

  2018.02.24

• Become a Sidewalk Toronto Fellow

  Sidewalk Toronto is currently looking for “12 smart, creative, and caring people who are interested in the future of Toronto’s waterfront and how we [Sidewalk Toronto] can responsibly incorporate technology to improve urban life.”

  Each Fellow will complete a 2-day orientation session in Toronto; 6 days in Amsterdam and Copenhagen; 5 days in New York City and Boston; 3 days in Vancouver; and then do a final 2-day working session back in Toronto before presenting their takeaways.

  This feels like a response to the criticism that Sidewalk Toronto wasn’t doing enough to listen to the community and that it simply wanted to build a tech-infused neighborhood that could serve us more ads – but it’s cool nonetheless. 

  If you’re between 19-24 years old and you live in Toronto, you can apply here. It sounds like a fun opportunity for young city builders. I know that I certainly would have been all over it when I was in that age bracket.

  2018.02.24

• Only 2 new single-family homes sold in Toronto last month

  Altus Group just released its January (2018) sales figures for the new home market in the Greater Toronto Area.

  – 1,251 new homes sold last month. 886 of these (or 70.8%) were condominium apartments (everything from stacked townhouses to high-rises).

  – This is down from 2,429 homes in 2017 and 2,118 homes in 2016.

  – Almost half of the new home sales (609 homes) came from Toronto alone. And almost all of these (607 homes) were condominium apartments. Only 2 new single-family homes sold in the city last month.

  – Benchmark price for single-family homes was $1,229,454, which is a 19.6% increase from January 2017.

  – Benchmark price for condominium apartments was $714,430, which is a 40.8% increase from January 2017.

  That last increase really stands out. I did a double take.

  But as we’ve talked about before, low supply and high prices seem to be pushing more buyers toward condos – and larger ones at that.

  Recently we’ve been seeing an increase in both average unit sizes and prices per square foot.

  According to Altus, sales of new single-family homes in the GTA last month were the lowest for a January since before 2000.

  2018.02.23