Tag: urbanism

• The best party in town!

  Friend: Ever go to Jilly’s?

  Me: No, actually.

  Friend: Same.

  Me: What about you? [Addressed to random guy in elevator]

  Random guy in elevator: I’m from Portland. I don’t know what you’re talking about.

  I went to check out the new Broadview Hotel last night in Riverdale, Toronto. (Riverside if we’re being pedantic.)

  Originally built in 1891 and most recently a boarding house with strip club at grade (Jilly’s – the best party in town!), the building was acquired in 2014 by developer Streetcar and turned into a “58-room boutique hotel and charismatic gathering spot.” The soft opening was July 27, 2017.

  Official website here. Lots of interior photos here.

  Besides the pink neon above the lobby bar (which is obviously great), I really like what they did in the stairwells. Credit to Supermilk Studio. Here’s a photo I snapped last night while trying to find the WC:

  

  Each floor is painted with murals that pay tribute to the building’s history, from the early days of Dingman’s Hall to its most recent iteration as Jilly’s.

  Interestingly enough, the building originally served as an important social hub for the community, though it did not initially house a hotel. On the ground floor was a bank (see, there’s a long tradition of this) and above it were offices and grand meeting halls.

  It wasn’t until the original developer sold the building that it was converted to a hotel and granted a liquor license. It’s worth noting that this conversion is said to have faced stiff community opposition. A hotel that serves alcohol to people? Not in my 1906 backyard.

  With the reopening of the new Broadview Hotel this summer, you could argue that east of the Don River is once again regaining its grand gathering spot. And the feeling I got when I stepped foot inside the hotel last night was that it was time. The demand was latent and, yes, condos wouldn’t have cut it.

  At the same time, this is obviously bigger than the east side. There are many who don’t know this building’s infamous history. Jilly’s? What’s that? Time to go for a walk in the stairwells.

  2017.07.30

• Laneway house support map

  I posted the following image to Twitter this morning:

  

  It’s a map of some of the people who support my proposed laneway house (in midtown Toronto) and have signed their name at lanewaylove.com.

  To me, this is an incredible demonstration of the kind of broad-based support that exists in this city today for laneway housing/suites.

  I met with some of my neighbors last week to discuss the proposal and one of them said to me: “I can tell that you’re genuinely passionate about this idea.” 

  My response: “You’re absolutely right. I am. This is not just about my singular project or the money. This is about something much bigger for the city.”

  Clearly, many others see that as well. 

  I know that there’s been a lot of laneway talk on the blog over the past few weeks and months. It’s been on my mind as I prepare for my project’s hearing next month.

  For those of you who have no interest in laneway housing/accessory dwelling units, rest assured that the laneway content should subside (a little) after the summer.

  2017.07.29

• Less is more

  The Wall Street Journal recently asked: Venice Beach Is a Hot Place to Live, So Why Is Its Housing Supply Shrinking? 

  According to Issi Romem, chief economist at BuildZoom, it’s because Venice Beach is the toughest place in America to build housing.

  Here are some numbers from the WSJ:

  “The Venice Beach population is shrinking even as the local economy has boomed. The neighborhood had about 27,000 residents in 2015, about 3,800 fewer than in 2000, according to U.S. Census data. At the same time, the ZIP Code has added 4,000 new jobs, according to Jed Kolko, chief economist at employment website Indeed.”

  And here is a chart that speaks to the relationship between housing prices and housing supply:

  

  Housing supply, alone, isn’t going to solve all of our problems. But it certainly matters. Also, what’s up with Chicago?

  2017.07.29

• Where’d the night go?

  I’m a few months behind on this one, but back in April the CBC published a documentary called: Where’d the night go? 

  It’s about Toronto’s grassroots music community and “DIY venues”, all of which are under pressure as a result of rising real estate values and an overall crackdown on illegal venues. This is a perfect example of what Jane Jacobs was getting at when she said that new ideas require old buildings. 

  If you can’t see the video below, click here. When I watched it, I got stuck watching 3 pre-roll ads. Sorry if that happens to you as well.

  //www.cbc.ca/i/caffeine/syndicate/?mediaId=924601923901

  2017.07.27

• Only 9% of new homes sold last month were low-rise single-family

  

  BILD (the Building Industry and Land Development Association) just released its June 2017 data for the Greater Toronto Area’s new housing market. You can read the full release here. But I would like to point out a couple of things:

  About 91 percent of the 6,046 new homes sold last month were multi-family condo apartments in high-rise and mid-rise buildings and stacked townhomes, while only nine percent were low-rise single-family homes.

  The average price of available new condo apartments continued to rise with an increase of more than $22,000 from May. June’s $627,000 average price marked a 34 percent increase from a year ago. The average available unit was 845 square feet with an average price per square foot of $742. A year ago, the average price per square foot was $587.

  From this, it’s once again clear that Toronto is in the midst of an incredible transformation from a low-rise city to a more vertical city. New supply on the low-rise side of the market is heavily constrained.

  I get the sense sometimes that many people in this city, and others, believe that access to a low-rise detached house should be a right. Go to school. Get a good job. And then buy that house with a backyard. 

  The data speaks to a very different reality.

  Photo by Victoria Heath on Unsplash

  2017.07.25

• Architecture pour tous!

  In 2015, Studiolada Architectes (of Nancy, France) completed a 117 square meter home for a retired couple. On the firm’s website they call the project: Réalisation d’une maison individuelle à Baccarat. 

  Here are two photos (1 exterior and 1 interior) via the architects:

  

  Most of the house is finished in wood. It was a modest build costing 174,361 € in total before taxes. The house itself cost 146,506 € and the standalone garage cost 20,245 € (both before taxes). The balance of the costs seem to have gone to exterior landscaping.

  If you consider only the house, that works out to be about 1,252 € per square meter or about 115 € per square foot. Speaking of reasonable.

  What’s particularly interesting about this project though is that after it was completed the architects published what they call a dossier de synthèse en Open Source (click through to download) – effectively an open source file of all the project’s documents.

  Included are all of the plans, assembly details, construction photos, and even the entire construction budget. The ambition was to build an affordable and sustainable house and then make all of the information publicly available so that others might replicate what was done.

  I think this is great.

  So I’ve decided to publicly commit to doing the same for my proposed laneway house. If and when it gets built, I will document and publish the entire journey – including all development/construction costs – and make it freely available on this blog and probably elsewhere.

  I got a bit of flak (on the internet) for calling my laneway house a “prototype” project. But that’s truly what I want it to be for Toronto. Hopefully sharing more, rather than less, information will help it to serve that purpose.

  2017.07.25

• Second Nature

  There is a deep connection between skateboarding and cities. Skateboarders are constantly surveying the built environment and looking for new and creative ways to engage with it. I think it’s a beautiful way to experience cities. (Sadly, we often respond by making it illegal.)

  The below video is a perfect example of this connection. It’s a 20 minute documentary about pro skater Janne Saario (of Finland) who eventually went on to become a successful landscape architect. Here is his firm. And if you can’t see the embedded video below, click here.

  [vimeo 46685196 w=640 h=360]

  2017.07.21

• Gigantic shopping machines

  

  This morning I gave a presentation and participated in a design charrette that was organized by B+H Advance Strategy about the “mall of the future.” (See photo above.) It’s a 2-day event and I was only able to stick around for a few hours in the morning, but I think it’s great that B+H Architects takes the time to research and get a deeper level of understanding in the areas in which they work. Great design demands that.

  The way the charrette was structured was around a handful of future scenarios. The idea being that it’s impossible to accurately predict the future, but it is possible to play out different possible futures to see what you get. I’m looking forward to seeing what the teams ultimately come up with at the end. I would also be really curious to hear your thoughts in the comment section below.

  But before we decide on what malls are going to become in the future, it’s perhaps useful to think about how they got their start. The man largely credited with inventing the fully enclosed mall typology is a man by the name of Victor Gruen. He was a Vienna-born architect who moved to the US in 1938. 

  In the words of Malcolm Gladwell:

  “Fifty years ago, Victor Gruen designed a fully enclosed, introverted, multitiered, double-anchor-tenant shopping complex with a garden court under a skylight—and today virtually every regional shopping center in America is a fully enclosed, introverted, multitiered, double-anchor-tenant complex with a garden court under a skylight. Victor Gruen didn’t design a building; he designed an archetype.”
  

  The most interesting thing about this story though is that Gruen’s initial hope was that the mall would urbanize America’s suburbs. The garden court was supposed to be a kind of town square. And his broader vision included a mix of higher density uses surrounding the perimeter. But in reality the opposite happened: The mall helped to further suburbanize America.

  However, as our malls begin to show their age (or die) and as we relearn to appreciate walkable urban environments, mall landlords are increasingly thinking mixed-use and higher density. And ironically, many of the plans probably don’t look all that dissimilar to Gruen’s original ideas. So maybe one possible future is simply the one that Gruen wanted to create all along.

  Image: Kinetic Commerce

  2017.07.19

• From self-storage to urban logistics

  

  I have long told myself that if I ever needed to rent self-storage space, it would mean that I own too much stuff and that I need to get rid of some of my shit. But I recognize that there are many reasons why someone might need extra storage and I recognize that the storage market in the United States alone is something to the tune of $30 billion a year.

  Here is an interesting case study about the storage company MakeSpace, which to-date has raised almost $60 million in equity funding. Their model is likely one that you’ve heard of or used before. Instead of you yourself going to the “self-storage” facility, they do the pickup and delivery. So they call themselves a logistics business, like Amazon, except that it works in reverse. Instead of you receiving deliveries, they take your stuff from your home back out to their warehouses.

  Because of the route management software that they’ve been building over the last 4.5 years and because there’s enough density in the areas that they service, their pick-up and drop-off routes are apparently profitable. You no doubt need a certain amount of scale for that to happen, but they seem to have it. By the end of this year, they expect their reoccurring revenues to be in the $10′s of millions. That’s coming from the volumes of green boxes you see at the top of this post.

  What’s particularly relevant for this audience are the built form and real estate implications. Because their customers aren’t physically visiting their facilities, they’ve been able to locate all of their distribution centers on the outskirts of the cities in which they operate. And because of this, their physical real estate costs are said to be less than 50% of traditional self-storage firms and they believe this number will trend to around 20% as volumes continue to grow.

  All of this has me thinking about some of the other implications of the on-demand economy on cities and on real estate.

  Image via Both Sides of the Table

  2017.07.18

• The past and the future on Armstrong Avenue

  

  I spent this evening driving around Toronto with an architect friend of mine looking for laneway houses. (Late summer sunsets have a wonderful way of extending the day.)

  I think most people would be surprised by how many of them are hidden away behind our streets. I think of laneways as a forgotten third layer behind our major avenues and smaller streets.

  One of my favorite laneway houses, pictured above, is Armstrong Avenue by Taylor_Smyth Architects. It’s a bit unusual in that it’s exceptionally large for a laneway house (2,200 square feet). But that’s because the building was originally built as a dairy (1912).

  What’s interesting about the house is that from the outside it looks rather nondescript. Okay, it looks raw and rundown. Here is a closer photo:

  

  But then inside, it looks like this. Modern. Clean. Polished. And light-filled.

  I’m not suggesting that this should or could become a repeatable model for laneway housing in Toronto. Again, it’s a unique circumstance. But I think contrast is an extraordinary poetic device. And in this case, it speaks to both the past and the future of this city.

  2017.07.18