Tag: urbanism

• Seattle vs. Vancouver

  

  A reader recently shared an article with me called: Why Seattle builds apartments, but Vancouver, BC, builds condos. Thanks for that.

  It’s a good summary of the differences between these two markets and why over the last five years less than 4% of all new residential units built in Seattle have been condos. The story is obviously very different in Vancouver.

  It’s also a good reminder that incentives matter. Capital has a funny way of flowing to where the returns are greatest.

  Chart: Sightline Institute

  2017.08.17

• A story about Toronto

  

  Marcus Gee of the Globe and Mail recently published “a made-up story about Toronto that never appeared, but should.”

  It goes like this:

  Toronto city hall is pressing a prominent developer to put up a taller building.

  Mayor John Tory is telling Big City Condo Corp. that the condominium it has planned for the downtown corner of Maple and Oak streets is simply too small. The proposal calls for a 25-storey residential tower. Mr. Tory said it could easily rise to 40 or even 50 storeys.

  He dismissed complaints from locals who said the tower would overshadow the neighbourhood and put too many more cars on the street. The intersection is well served by public transit, with two lines crossing there. The mayor called it a golden opportunity to create urban density.

  He insisted the city must build up instead of out if it wants to avoid more sprawl. “We love tall buildings,” he said. “We need more of them. We can’t keep spreading out and out and out. We need to grow up, and I mean that quite literally.”

  Again, this is made-up. And if you’re from Toronto, you knew that. 

  We are still grappling with the urban intensity that should come along with being an important global city.

  Photo by Redd Angelo on Unsplash

  2017.08.16

• Why dynamic road pricing is inevitable

  

  The Economist recently published an article called: How and why road-pricing will happen. If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that there’s been lots of talk and support

  over the years

  on this blog for dynamic road pricing.

  It’s politically unpopular, but it’s an incredibly rationale way to deal with traffic congestion. 

  In Singapore – home of the world’s first congestion charge zone (1975) – they constantly monitor traffic congestion. As soon as average speeds drop over a three-month period, they simply raise the charge. Congestion gone.

  We know this works, but for many reasons road pricing is highly divisive. According to The Economist, there are a few reasons why this is going to become a bit more politically palatable.

  For one, the take from gas taxes and vehicle duties has been declining in Britain over the past couple of years. Electric vehicles will only exacerbate this trend. So governments are going to be forced to look elsewhere for money.

  Secondly, traditional tolls and congestion charges are becoming increasingly ineffective. Today in central London, private-hire vehicles are said to make up about 38% of all car traffic – almost double the share of traditional black taxis. 

  These are cars circling around the city, picking up passengers. Blunt charges based on suburbanites entering the city in the morning and leaving in the afternoon is simply not capturing the way that many of us move around our cities today.

  In other words, urban mobility is undergoing dramatic changes and the revenue and congestion management tools are going to need to adapt. If you’re interested in this topic, check out the full article here.

  Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash

  2017.08.16

• The Hong Kong window ledge

  

  My friends at the architecture practice Valente Rodgers told me something fascinating about the Hong Kong real estate market last night. Both partners worked as architects in Hong Kong for a number of years.

  In Hong Kong, you’re allowed to deduct certain projecting windows from your calculation of Gross Floor Area. 

  This is provided they’re a certain height above the finished floor level, they don’t project beyond certain distances from the outer face of the building’s structural elements, and so on. The precise measurements seem to vary depending on things like the building’s use.

  Since space is such a precious commodity in Hong Kong, it shouldn’t surprise you that lots of developers and architects take advantage of this. The result being a proliferation of these projecting window ledges all across the city. 

  It’s a phenomenon that happens in many cities when a perfectly legal loophole is found in the land use policies.

  In Toronto it used to be solariums. You could also deduct these from your overall GFA, which means a lot of them them got built in condos and apartments of a certain vintage.

  In New Orleans it was the camelback house. These were houses with a single storey toward the street and a second storey toward the rear of the property. This was done because property taxes were assessed based on the height of the house as it met the street. Pushing the density toward the rear of the lot meant homeowners weren’t taxed more. 

  I find these outcomes fascinating because they have absolutely nothing to do with architectural intent and everything to do with trying to optimize within a given framework.

  But what’s even more interesting about the Hong Kong example are some of the downstream externalities.

  Firstly, it sounds to me like these projecting windows have become a normal part of underwriting projects in Hong Kong. Meaning, if you don’t factor in these projections, you’re effectively giving up free GFA. (Can anyone familiar with the HK market confirm this?)

  However, building these projections also means you can’t do unmodulated and clean floor-to-ceiling windows. And if that’s the desired aesthetic, somebody has got to be willing to pay for that “luxury.” So arguably there’s a socioeconomic dimension to having and not having this ledge.

  Secondly, because space comes at such a premium, these ledges are fully taken advantage of and furniture makers have responded by designing pieces that can dovetail with them.

  Below is a photo of a bedroom in Hong Kong that I found on bohemia.life:

  

  This may be a custom bed and I don’t know how deep that window projection is, but it begins to show you how valuable these ledges can be from a space perspective.

  I think we should try and come up with a name to describe these sorts of built form phenomena. If you have any ideas, please drop them in the comments below. And if any of you are familiar with the HK market, let me know if I’m off the mark with any of the above.

  Photo by Jason Wong on Unsplash

  2017.08.12

• The city refused my laneway house

  

  This afternoon I stood up at the Committee of Adjustment (Etobicoke York) to present the laneway house proposal that Gabriel Fain Architects and I have been working on for the past year and that I have been working on since 2009.

  But before I could start I was told that Councillor Palacio had just submitted a last minute letter to the Committee. I was given a few minutes to read it, but the big bold “REFUSE” was probably the only word I needed to read.

  I was then asked if I had read planning staff’s report. I acknowledged that I had read it and that I was aware that they were also recommending refusal of the application. I also noted that a number of my immediate neighbors sitting behind me were also opposed to the proposal.

  That’s how my presentation started. 

  At this point you might be wondering: why bother?

  I stood up today because, as most of you already know, laneway housing is something that I feel strongly about. This isn’t just about my individual project. I mean, why do all of this work for one small dwelling unit? For me, this is about city building and trying to affect positive change. (I would also love to live on a laneway.)

  I could go on here about how the proposal was shorter than other existing structures on the lane, how the FSI was in check, how we had carefully studied shadows, and how planning staff had already supported greater densities and multiple dwellings on lots of similar size in the area. 

  But that’s not what today was really about.

  Today I heard loud and clear that whether the proposal was a laneway tiki hut or a 2 storey laneway suite, the community did not want more people living in the area and they most certainly did not want more renters living in the area.

  My message to the Committee was that in my humble opinion this is inevitable. Look to Vancouver. Look to Edmonton. Look to many other cities. What we are debating today, or at least what we should be debating today, is what these laneway houses or suites or tiki huts are going to look like.

  Right or wrong, our proposal was an attempt to answer that question. We looked carefully at what others had done before us, including our friends at Lanescape and Evergreen, and we proposed something that we believed was sensitive to its context.

  We were unsuccessful.

  But here’s the silver lining. At the end of it all, and right before a motion was made to refuse the application, one of the committee members said something very impactful. He more or less said: “I agree with you. This is inevitable.”

  Sadly today was not that day.

  I would like to thank everyone who came out today and everyone who got up to speak in support of laneway housing. It meant a lot to me. Some of you are also readers of this blog and it was great to meet you in person. Thank you.

  2017.08.11

• From retail to logistics

  Over the past few weeks we’ve been talking about the future of the mall on this blog. It’s a topic that I’m very interested in.

  Yesterday the Wall Street Journal published an article talking about the trend of converting retail/shopping facilities to logistic centers. 

  Here’s an excerpt:

  “In Mesquite, Texas, FedEx Corp. next month will open a 340,000 square-foot distribution facility on what once was the site of the former Big Town Mall. Located along U.S. Highway 80 in Texas, the mall declined after newer malls were built nearby. It was demolished in 2006 and the land was later rezoned for industrial use.”

  It turns – and we’ve talked about this – that good retail locations are also good distribution locations. They are usually located close to humans and infrastructure.

  Here’s another example from the article:

  In North Randall, Ohio, Amazon.com Inc. is considering the site of the former Randall Park Mall as a fulfillment center, according to Port of Cleveland, a local government agency focused on spurring job creation and economic growth in Cuyahoga County. Amazon didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
  

  For a short time when it opened in 1976, Randall Park Mall was the largest shopping center in the world and had been “a thriving heartbeat” for the local economy, according to Mr. Davis. But the mall closed in 2009 as stores struggled with fewer shoppers.

  Assuming this trend continues and people continue to buy things online, one has to wonder about the placemaking that should or needs to happen in these areas.

  2017.08.10

• Skip-stop

  After Junction House was announced, an interesting discussion emerged on Twitter around 2 storey suite designs.

  There are, of course, many examples of multi-level apartments in the city. There’s 75 Portland by CORE Architects. There’s District Lofts and Mozo by architectsAlliance. And there’s Village by the Grange (pointed out during the discussion), which has a number of 2 and even 3 storey suites.

  Another example that was raised by Gil Meslin is 14 Blevins Place. Now demolished, Blevins Place was designed in 1955 and completed in 1957 as part of the Regent Park South urban renewal project. It was designed by the British-born Toronto architect Peter Dickinson and by Page + Steele.

  In 2005, prior to its demolition, the building was identified as a listed heritage building, but it was never elevated to a designated heritage building.

  Perhaps most notable about the building are its “skip-stop corridors” and its 2 storey suites. See below images taken from this Heritage Impact Assessment by ERA Architects.

  

  The reality is that modern architecture has had a long history of employing multi-level units and skip-stop corridors. Le Corbusier and Oscar Neimeyer were said to be experimenting with them as far back as the 1930s.

  But I think most would agree that Toronto is a very different city today compared to what it was in the 1950s. Some still believe that no child should grow up in an apartment, but I disagree with that belief system. I lived in an apartment as a kid and somehow I survived.

  2017.08.07

• Introducing Junction House

  

  Earlier this week I posted this teaser photo on social (full photo above) and said to stay tuned for a big announcement. Well, that announcement is here and you can read all about it over on the Globizen blog. Please let me know what you think in the comment section below.

  2017.08.05

• Just put up a sign

  Back before the 2008 financial crisis, I did a short stint working for a real estate developer in Dublin, Ireland. 

  Most of our projects were in Ireland, but our consultant teams were sometimes from all over.

  One day we were having a meeting with our architect from Germany and we started talking about a particular project’s green space.

  But this wasn’t the sort of green space that was supposed to be actively used. It was a green space that, I guess, you were just supposed to look at and admire for its greenness. 

  So one of my Irish colleagues asked, while referencing the proposed design: “How are we going to keep people off the grass?”

  Our German friends didn’t immediately appreciate the concern and responded with: “What do you mean?”

  Irish: “How will we stop people from walking and hanging out on the grass?”

  German with serious face: “Oh. We will put up a sign.”

  At that point, every Irish person in the room just started laughing and more or less said: “Yeah, that’ll never work.”

  Cultural differences can be subtle.

  2017.08.04

• Editions of Edition

  A few weeks ago Surface Magazine interviewed Ian Schrager. If you don’t know who Ian Schrager is, you should look him up. He started Studio 54 in New York (along with Steve Rubell) and is largely credited with inventing the boutique hotel genre. His latest project is Edition Hotels, which launched in London in 2013 and in Miami in 2014.

  What I found particularly interesting about the interview are the “serious snafus” that Edition experienced at the outset. There was a project in Waikiki and a project in Istanbul. Both failed. Here’s a guy who invented the genre and had partnered up with Marriott to pioneer a new brand. And it wasn’t until Edition London that they were able hit their stride.

  I say all of this not to poke fun at their failures. Nobody should do that. Poke fun at not trying instead. My point is the exact opposite. To create something new and amazing, such as Edition, you often have to subject yourself to a few scrapes and bruises along the way.

  2017.08.02