Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1144

Earlier today Richard Florida published a piece in CityLab called: Anatomy of a NIMBY . The article cites a recent paper by Paavo Monkkonen (of UCLA) that focuses on the relationship between NIMBYism and housing affordability – a much talked about subject these days.

More specifically, the paper identifies “four different strains of NIMBYism” and then offers up some possible solutions, which include things like a more inclusive process and better data. I’ve publicly supported these kinds of approaches on this blog many times before.

But in addition to the above, I wanted to point out two other ideas from the paper and Florida’s article.

The first is about shifting land use decisions up to the regional level, and maybe even the state level. This one is particularly timely given that there’s a lot of discussion in Toronto right now about shifting land use decisions in the exact opposite direction – from province (OMB) to city.

The second is a suggestion from Yale professor David Schleicher  that he refers to as “tax increment local transfers.” Essentially, the idea is to somehow allow current residents to participate in the future tax revenues generated from new development in their neighborhood.

There’s lots of interesting reading buried in the above links.

A new “bicycle house” recently opened up in Malmö, Sweden . It is a 7 storey apartment building that has been designed entirely around the bicycle. It’s called  Cykelhuset Ohboy .

Bicycle house means:

- There’s no parking for cars in the building. Apparently it’s the first building in Sweden to do that, which is surprising to me. I thought that would be more common.

- All of the access corridors were made wider so that it’s easier to maneuver your bike around, larger bikes can fit, and there aren’t any access issues when bikes are left outside of your apartment.

- All of the doors in the complex are 10cm wider than they need to be (and have door openers). The elevators are also larger and open up on both sides so you don’t have to turn your bike around.

- The building is equipped with cargo bikes and kid friendly bikes so that you can grocery shop and wheel your family around. The building does have larger family sized apartments and, according to Copenhagenize , the building is fully occupied.

In most, if not all, condo buildings here in Toronto, you’re usually not allowed to take bicycles in the elevators. And bikes sitting on balconies is considered a highly undesirable outcome.

But clearly that’s just one frame of reference for how the world should work.

I just discovered Steve Randy Waldman’s blog called Interfluidity and, more specifically, a post he wrote called: “ Home is where the cartel is .” I am now following him.

He starts off by saying that housing is a bitch, which is just him saying that urban housing is a difficult problem to solve. A truism for this audience.

He doesn’t profess to have all of the answers, but he does write a thoughtful piece that covers, among other things: the “market urbanist” (supply-side) solution to solving housing affordability, the reasons why the “housing cartel” will never approve of this, and the inherent contradiction between housing as an investment and housing as a sustainably affordable good.

He also offers up Singapore and Germany as examples of two very different housing markets. It reminded me of a tweet I retweeted this morning which shows Germany as having the 2nd lowest homeownership rate (45%) among OECD countries.