How to fix the American housing system

27 10 2010

I came across this Cyburbia forum post which offers several suggestions (some rather radical) on how to fix the current American housing system and the in-affordability and risks associated with it.    As a Canadian, I definitely enjoyed the first suggestion of mirroring our Canadian housing system which limits risk.  While our housing system is far from perfect, the percentage of foreclosures over the past two years is certainly much much lower than in the United States.   Although the rest of the conversation degrades throughout the post, it is refreshing to hear several different well thought out and honest suggestions.  Do I think any of the suggestions have any chance of actually coming true?  Probably not, but it’s not without possibility.  If you’re too lazy to click on the link, i’ve listed the different suggestions below:

1) Mirror the Canadian system

2) Nationalize the mortgage subsidy system

3) Re-examine securitization

4) Limit debt of one home purchase per person

5) Focus on financing landlords rather than homeowners


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Arcade Fire Presents the Suburbs

21 09 2010

I am a big music junkie and listen to a wide variety of music.  But I have to admit that the Arcade Fire probably rank as one of my favorite, if not my favorite band.   Their most recent release, The Suburbs is not only a stellar album, but also provides some incredible depth on suburbia as well as the state of the current modern world.   The sixteen songs on The Suburbs depict the suburban sprawl not only as a poor planning choice but also as a place of nostalgia where many of our current 20 and 30 year old’s grew up.  Despite all this, I was still shocked to see that the San Francisco based planning blog ‘SPUR’ wrote a post regarding this new Arcade Fire album.  The post covers the album in great depth and certainly made me dig deeper into the lyrical content of the album.  Anyways, if you are at all a fan of good music or are interested in hearing an album that portrays the suburban life so well, I recommend checking out Arcade Fire’s ‘The Suburbs’.

You can purchase the album here.


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Seattle’s Pioneer Square: Tourist Haven or Old Town Ghetto?

20 09 2010

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Laughing Squid

Any visitor or tourist who has traveled to Seattle has likely found themselves in Pioneer Square.  For those unfamiliar with the neighbourhood, Pioneer Square is the somewhat famous old town district of Seattle with a beautiful array of late 19th century buildings.  The neighbourhood has a number of art galleries and attractions that make it a popular day time destination for both tourists and locals alike.  Sounds pleasant, doesn’t it?  Yet, Pioneer Square has had to deal with an enormous amount of homelessness and drunkeness for decades.  This is primarily due to two reasons: the neighbourhood is home to a large number of homeless shelters and bars.  Both of these problems could be forgiven to a degree if it weren’t for the fact that they have both caused Pioneer Square to be quite dangerous.  On Yahoo! Answers, I found a question in which an individual wanted to know the most dangerous part of Seattle.    What neighbourhood was mentioned the most?  Pioneer Square.

How can a neighbourhood have such a juxtaposition and why isn’t something being done about it?  Many American (and Canadian) cities would love to an old town district like Pioneer Square.  It’s rather large and most of the buildings are well preserved.  Yet, crazily, the city allows such a promising neighbourhood to become a danger to anyone who visits.  It’s actually quite shocking since Pioneer Square is the type of neighbourhood that would likely be the safest almost anywhere else.

So what can be done?  The number one thing is to move the shelters.  It has become quite clear that the sheer number of homeless shelters has a strong influence on the violence in the neighbourhood and thus most if not all need to be moved.  One amateur but pretty logical suggestion would be to space out such institutions.  Secondly, a higher police presence needs to be there, especially around closing time for the clubs and bars.   Finally, there needs to be stricter enforcement on the number and concentration of bars and clubs.  While these establishments may be well to do, the sheer concentration of them may have a strong effect as it increases the concentration of drunkeness to a very small area.

Pioneer Square is a beautiful neighbourhood that truly has an enormous amount of potential.   With some increased effort and awareness, it could be made into one of Seattle’s most livable places.  Yet, if the violence and homelessness continue, tourists and locals alike may one day stop visiting altogether.


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Vancouver the greenest Olympics yet, but could Sochi 2014 be the dirtiest?

6 03 2010

Vancouver garnered a lot of attention for it’s commitment to energy efficiency during the recent 2010 winter Olympics.  Certainly, this commitment will help the city on a global scale and will help it grow it’s already incredibly green reputation.  Yet, according to this article on Fast Company, the 2014 winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia may actually become the dirtiest Olympics yet.  According to the article, Sochi has already managed to contaminate it’s water, destroy wildlife habitats and cut down thousands of trees in preparation despite the Olympics still being four years away.  What is even more interesting (or shocking) is that Sochi was able to get the Olympics at all as it did not outline much of a sustainability plan.   Many of the recent Olympics have already gained a strong amount of negative attention, most notably Beijing in 2008, but  is it possible that Sochi 2014 could end up being the dirtiest?


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Downtown Highrise Condos: The Good and the Bad

23 02 2010

Here in downtown Toronto, you don’t have to walk far to find yet another construction site for a new ‘luxury’ highrise condominium project.   However, this isn’t just isolated to Toronto.  Around North America, Australia and even some parts of Europe, the construction of large scale condominium developments is in full force throughout the downtowns of many major urban centers.    This resurgence of living downtown has certainly had some positive effects on the urban fabric of these downtowns.  These residents help any number of businesses throughout the downtown and help to create a real center again in many of the major cities throughout the world.  The larger number of residents throughout the center of the city also provide it with increased safety and a larger retail presence.

Yet, all this comes with a price, especially when every little bit of space is now being replaced with yet another condo tower.  In Toronto, this is very much a reality.  The condo projects in the City Place development is a prime example.  City Place is a massive multi-building development on the west side of downtown Toronto.  In theory, the project seems like a good idea.  The project tries to create a neighbourhood atmosphere for it’s residents while providing those that live in City Place with easy access to the downtown and some spectacular views from their condos.  Yet, is a project like this too much?  Walking around City Place provides a different reality:  a neighbourhood full of giant similiar looking glass condo towers providing absolutely no sense of place and no sense of scale from street level.

But the faceless feel of some of the condos isn’t the only issue.  All these private ‘luxury’ condo developments are closing off many prime sites throughout Toronto that could be used for something more public.  Greenspace is an obvious choice, yet in the case of Toronto, the real need for the city are an increase in attractions that attract both locals and tourists alike.   Instead, these highrise condos provide another skyscraper that can really only be enjoyed by those that live there.

In the end, while there is absolutely nothing wrong with the development of many of these new downtown condominium projects, it is perhaps the sheer number that is most alarming.  While more and more condo towers get built, it creates a downtown that is less commercial and more residential and a downtown that is less public and more private.


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The Ruse of the Creative Class

19 01 2010

Richard Florida, the man behind both “The Creative Class” and “Who’s Your City” is set to unleash his next book “The Great Reset” in April this year yet has come under a bit of fire according to a recent article by the American Prospect entitled The Ruse of the Creative Class.  For the past several years, many cities have taken the advice of Florida to help attract a growing base of educated workers.  Yet, in a recent article by Florida, he discussed perhaps a more somber topic:

“We need to be clear that ultimately, we can’t stop the decline of some places, and that we would be foolish to try. … Different eras favor different places, along with the industries and lifestyles those places embody. … We need to let demand for the key products and lifestyles of the old order fall, and begin building a new economy, based on a new geography”

What does this mean exactly?  Well, in simple terms that while cities and regions like Silicon Valley or Boulder, Colorado continue to thrive, there is no stopping the decline of cities such as Detroit and Buffalo.  Certainly, such dire news doesn’t sit well with those city administrators of such rustbelt cities and why should it?  As David Lewis of the University of Albany stated

“What [Florida's argument] ignores is that [bypassed] places have sunken infrastructure — not just in roads and buildings and sewers but the stuff that matters”

Certainly, it can be argued that there is still a great deal of value in these declining communities, but if there is one thing for sure, it’s that Florida’s advice back during his ‘Creative Class’ era may be obsolete.


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Dubai meltdown rattles the world again

30 11 2009

Image Taken By Flickr User CJSharpe

If you follow business at all, i’m sure by now you are fully aware of the recent financial meltdown that has arisen in Dubai.  On Friday, Dubai World, an investment company that manages many of the high profile businesses in Dubai has declared what might be called a debt freeze on the $60 billion it owes.  My question is this: is anyone actually surprised by this?  From a completely urban design point of view, the city was essentially building from a momentum that was completely unsustainable with little regard to it’s environment (a desert) and also the long term urban livability of the whole city.  The city seemed to be more or less an urban playground for the rich.  While it is enviable that the rulers of Dubai tried to use the money earned from oil to create a city profitable in it’s own right, the way it was planned seemed very short-sighted.  Dubai seemed to the exact type of place that was going to suffer when a recession hit.   I doubt anyone is surprised.

For anyone unfamiliar with the recent events in Dubai, I refer you to the news story on Yahoo!


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City Planning with Special Reference to Planning of Streets and Lots

17 11 2009

Discovering Urbanism has an posted excellent blog post on the 1916 textbook ‘City Planning with Special Reference to Planning of Streets and Lots’ by Charles Mulford Robinson:

City Planning with Special Reference to Planning of Streets and Lots by Charles Mulford Robinson was a standard textbook during the early stages of the professionalization of planning in America. Written in 1916, it only shortly followed the first formal attempts at land use planning and the creation of local planning commissions. The textbook continues the transition from the traditional urban form evident in the Garden City movement to prescriptions for a more thoroughly modernized city. Robinson was more aware of the potential and needs of the automobile than Raymond Unwin, although he still held on to the traditional notion that the street was the most important public space in urban areas. He attempted to deal with this tension by differentiating streets from each other and districts of a city from each other

This blog post touches deeply on the concepts of the hierarchy of streets and zoning outlined in the book.  Perhaps the most interesting point is on the history of zoning.   ‘City Planning with Special Reference to Planning of Streets and Lots’ discusses the uses of zoning back in the early 20th century:

There’s a common narrative about how zoning unfolded in America. First, planners needed to find ways to separate dangerous and unhealthy factories from the places where people lived. Once the legal basis for this tool was secured, it was eventually employed to separate businesses from residents. The final stage of zoning was to segregating different kinds of people from each other. That’s how we reached where we are today.

Is that last stage of zoning really surprising?  When you put this into context of the time, it makes perfect sense.  Later on, author Charles Robinson explicitly describes why such zoning was used:

“Both poor and rich are probably happier in their own environment, among their own kind, where each can live his own life in his own way, without covetousness or odious comparison.”

Robinson brings both the concepts of hierarchy of streets and zoning together when he discusses the fact that zoning helped designate wider streets for commercial zones and narrower streets for residential ones?  If you look at your own city, how many of these concepts still exist?  Can you see past evidence of concepts that may no longer apply to today’s cities.


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Toronto Life Square: Toronto’s Greatest Urban Tragedy of the 21st century

28 10 2009

toronto_life_sqaure

Having lived in Toronto for the past 3 or so years, I have seen the development of the Toronto Life Square building (formely known as Metropolis and recently renamed to the rather boring 10 Dundas East) turn from a project full of so much potential to another reminder exemplifying why Toronto will remain second class among world cities.  The building itself is hard to miss: Standing tall at the corner of one Toronto’s busiest intersections (Yonge and Dundas) and filled with a number of different sized lit advertisements, the building certainly helps solidify the square’s reputation as the Times Square of Canada.

However, simply taking one step into the building reveals how unfulfilling the result really is.  Those that enter are greeted with the exact same array of shops and eateries that they would fall in any Canadian shopping centre (Starbucks, Subway, Shoppers Drug Mart, Future Shop, etc.).  This is a building that was originally supposed to be host to Wolfgang Puck, Disneyquest and the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.  All of these tenants backed out during the construction phase for various reasons, but were never replaced with something that would make the square something distinct.  The only redeeming feature of the building is the rather large AMC theatre on the top two levels.  The theatre may still be second fiddle to the other major downtown theatre (Scotiabank Theatre), but it certainly adds a solid and somewhat different presence to the building.

The most alarming (and most recent) bit of news involving the building is the name change.  No longer does the name portray an image of being the heart of the city (Toronto Life Square).  The building now has a non-descript name (10 Dundas East), as if it were some non-descript building in the city center.  In the end, it seems that a number of unfortunate events have led the building to it’s fate.  From the outside, it is quite impressive (in an overwhelming and commercial kind of way), but it’s short life span has unfortunately been plagued with let down after let down.  What could have been the real entertainment heart of a city is now just another shopping mall.


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Why does Toronto suddenly smell like garbage?

1 07 2009

toronto_garbage_strike

So I had a bit of trouble figuring out what to write about this week, so I thought i’d show you a picture I found by Flickr user nixie highlighting the recent pain us Torontonians have been having.  As of the past week, many of Toronto city workers, including their garbagemen have been on strike leaving the city full of garbage and a little bit stinkier than usual.  Although I understand that the city is trying to cut down on garbage during the strike, covering the public garbage cans with saran wrap and informing people they can’t use the garbage is just plain stupid.  First of all, it inspires people to litter.  Secondly, it is very easy to remove and start using the garbage cans again.  Well, both things have happened.  There is far more litter on the street and the garbage cans are still being used as if there were never out of service signs in the first place.  Hoping this strike  ends soon…


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