Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1292

Resiliency is an important topic in urbanist circles these days.

New York is working on a 10 mile “ Dryline ” to protect itself from future storms similar to Hurricane Sandy. And Miami Beach – one of the most vulnerable cities in the U.S. to sea level rise – is frantically building pump stations and raising its seawalls, streets, and sidewalks.

Here’s what the city’s public works director had to say via a  Curbed  article published about a week ago:

Miami Beach is planning to spend upwards of $500 million over the next five years on the pump stations and street-raising projects. “We are quite certain we are going to buy ourselves another 30 years, and we are hoping we are going to buy ourselves another 50 years,” Carpenter said.

According to Wired , sea levels off the coast of South Beach have risen by 3.7 inches since 1996. But over the last 5 years the high tide levels have had an average increase of about 1.27 inches per year!

This matters a great deal because of what South Beach would look like if sea levels increased by 2 feet (via the Miami Herald ):

It’s for this reason that Miami Beach has been working to alter its street elevations and install pumps – as many as 80 of them over the next 5 years – that quickly drain stormwater into Biscayne Bay. (The drains are equipped with backflow preventers so that the water leaves but doesn’t come back into the island.)

Here’s an example of a raised street and sidewalk (via  the Miami Herald ):

And here’s an example of a pump station (via Curbed ):

All of this strikes me as necessary work for Miami Beach. But I also think it’s important to keep in mind that all of this is patch work – regardless of how necessary it is right now. 

The bigger question is: what are we doing to stop sea level rise? That’s the only way we’re going to get to true, urban, resiliency.

It’s raining here in Miami Beach this morning. But the city is still buzzing with Art Basel and everything else that is going on right now.

It’s been interesting to learn about some of the measures that Miami Beach is taking to deal with flood risk. The city is highly vulnerable to rising sea levels.

A post on that topic is in the works, but I don’t have time for it this morning. So instead, I’d like to share some of my photos. Many of them are already on my Instagram .

I particularly liked the work of South Korean artist Chul Hyun Ahn . He works primarily with light and the perception of depth.

It’s no secret that Vancouver is way out in front of Toronto and many other cities when it comes to laneway housing. 

Good luck trying to get a laneway house approved in Toronto. They’re only allowed under rare circumstances where there is already an existing house in the lane and/or you’re willing to fight it all the way to the province.

But in Vancouver, it’s a different story. And they’ve even taken it a step further according to this recent Globe and Mail article by Frances Bula . The city recently approved small scale laneway apartments in the West End :

“The city, which created the possibility for laneway apartments when it approved a new West End plan last year, has approved the first four buildings with 47 units in total. Three are in this particular alley between Nelson and Comox on either side of Cardero, around the corner from Cardero Bottega and Firehall No. 6. Others are in the pipeline. Many more are expected.

They’re the first of a new kind of infill that planners hope will produce 1,000 new small homes in this popular downtown neighbourhood.”

Here’s a rendering from the article to give you an idea of what these laneway apartments might look like:

Readers of this blog have argued that Toronto doesn’t need laneway housing. There’s enough room for intensification elsewhere. 

But what is clear to me is that Toronto is continuing to build less and less ground-related housing . There’s little to no room for that. And what is left of our low-rise stock is becoming increasingly unaffordable.

So if we believe that social diversity is important for building a great city – which I do – then I think it behooves us to figure out how to not only increase the supply of new housing, but also increase its diversity. This is something Andrés Duany argued for in yesterday’s video post .

The biggest hurdle is community opposition. But below is how one of the neighbours in Vancouver responded to the proposed laneway apartments. He gets it.

“Dean Malone, who lives across the street from one of Mr. Sangha’s three projects, took the trouble to go to city hall to support it because the laneway apartments provide a way of creating new housing that isn’t a tower and isn’t a luxury development.”

What this also does is allow the private sector to do more before the public sector needs to step in with affordable housing subsidies. I believe that laneway housing will help, but not solve, the affordable housing problem happening in most of our cities. 

But every little bit helps. And this is one solution that many cities are simply ignoring.