Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1145

There’s lots of talk these days about how technological innovation and globalization are taking our jobs.

Of course, these are not unreasonable concerns. The data suggests a hollowing out of the middle class and the threat of automation feels perhaps more real than over with the recent advancements in AI and robotics.

But here are 3 things to consider and discuss:

1) It doesn’t feel realistic to believe that the jobs which went overseas will ever return en masse – as nice as it may sound to argue that. They went overseas to take advantage of a particular cost structure and those motives haven’t changed.

2) It is not guaranteed that technological innovation will destroy more jobs than it creates. In fact, historically the opposite has often been true . The jobs that were lost by technological innovation were replaced by new / more jobs and greater economic surpluses. For instance, think of agriculture.

3) But could this time be different? If we are indeed entering a new economic period, then it strikes me that 1), above, becomes even further away from the right solution. Some of the proposed solutions include universal basic income and a robot tax  (links to interview with Bill Gates).

In Toronto we have something known as Development Charges. In the US, they are more commonly referred to as Development Impact Fees, which in my view, lends a certain precision to their intent.

The idea behind these fees is that they account for some or all of the off-site public costs required to serve a new development. Initially this meant utilities, but today these fees usually include everything from transit and parks to child care and pedestrian infrastructure.

According to Wikipedia , the first impact fees were implemented in Hinsdale, Illinois in 1947. By the 1980s, impact fees had become a universally accepted mechanism for funding the costs associated with growth.

Not surprisingly, there’s substantial case law around impact fees. One of the concepts that comes up a lot is this idea of essential or rational nexus. That is, can the fee(s) be rationally linked to the impacts of a particular development?

One well known example is Nollan v. California Coastal Commission (1987) . 

The Nollans proposed to build a 2-storey house within the exact same footprint of their current 1-storey house. As an approval condition, the Coastal Commission wanted a public easement across the beach in front of their house.

The U.S. Supreme Court sided with the Nollans and held that the development exaction (public easement) was not adequately related to their new development (additional storey). A “rational nexus” did not exist.

If you’re interested in this topic, the American Planning Association has a policy guide on impact fees available on their website.

The MIT Senseable City Lab recently developed something called the Green View Index. It is a measure of a city’s tree canopy. Below are the GVIs for Boston (18.2%), Geneva (21.4%), London (12.7%), and New York (13.5%). You may have to zoom in.

And here is a screenshot of Toronto. We have a GVI of 19.5%.

The index was developed by methodically scanning for trees in Google Street View panoramas. The reason street view was used – as opposed to aerial photography – was so that they could capture the human experience at street level.

All of MIT’s interactive city maps can be found here . It’s also interesting to pan around and see which neighborhoods are the greenest – particularly if you are familiar with the city.

One thing I noticed is that large green spaces such as Central Park, High Park, and Stanley Park don’t show up as very green. And that’s because the index uses car-based street view data. I feel like these green spaces should count for something though.