Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1302

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Lately I’ve been having discussions around the future value of parking spaces in urban centers. So yesterday I tweeted out this poll:

Will parking spaces in cities become more, or less, valuable in the future? 💸 #AThisCity

— Brandon G. Donnelly (@donnelly_b)

November 4, 2015

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The sample size is very small, but for what it’s worth, there are some/many people who believe that urban parking spaces will become more valuable in the future.

This is a reasonable assumption. 

Over the last couple of decades here in Toronto, I would guess that parking ratios for new multi-family developments have probably fallen by more than half. It used to be that you had to build 1 to 1.5 parking stalls for each unit and now we seem to be sitting somewhere close to 0.5. Although, there are also exceptions and some projects today are getting built with no parking.

So given that the supply side of urban parking spaces seems to be getting constrained and many cities are actively trying to encourage other forms of mobility, it’s not unreasonable to believe that parking stalls will only become more valuable. That’s why a new underground spot in Toronto might cost you $60,000 today and why  some spots in New York can even fetch a $1 million . 

But this assumes that the demand for parking will remain more or less the same. What if it doesn’t stay the same? What if we were to experience a tipping point that rearranged urban mobility? What if the cost of driving became so high that people stopped driving at scale? In these scenarios, the demand side of the equation would change.

If you’re a regular of this blog, you probably know what I’m going to say next. But already I can think of two innovations that would contribute to the above scenarios: Uber and driverless cars.

Uber’s goal is to continually drive down the cost of transportation and eventually get you to no longer own a car. They know very clearly that the demand for transportation services is highly elastic and that the cheaper they get the more you will use them. And the way they get cheaper is by continually increasing the utilization rate of their drivers/cars. An idle driver/car is the enemy.

Of course, the other way to drive down fares is to remove the driver all together. And once you’ve done that, there is, in theory, no reason that a car should ever sit idle – like they do today. (The utilization rate for my car is around 2%.) And if a car is never sitting idle, then why would you ever need to park it? Certainly you wouldn’t need to park it as often as you do today.

All of this isn’t going to happen tomorrow, but I believe – despite the supply constraints – that we are going to end up with excess parking spaces in our cities. And that will mean that they are going to be perceived as less valuable than they are today. I also believe that it will eventually seem silly to drive your own car. 

What do you think?

For whatever reason, some of the people living in high-rise buildings believe that if you flick a cigarette butt off a balcony that it will magically disintegrate on the way down. It’s either that or they don’t give a shit about anyone else.

Because if you happen to live in or manage a building which has patios or terraces at the base of tower, I bet you have this problem:

Above is a picture of a Belmont cigarette burning through the tarp covering the wooden harvest table on my patio. 

It’s a destruction of property, an environmental concern (many butts end up in stormwater drains), and a pretty scary fire hazard. I know of many incidences where thrown cigarette butts have started fires in a high-rise building. It happened last year in my mother’s building.

However, the frustrating thing about this problem is that it’s exceptionally difficult to stop. I know this because I sit on the board of my condo building. The typical response is for management to send out notices to all the residents asking them to stop doing this. But frankly, that does nothing.

So if any of you know of a company or service (or have a product idea) that can help with this, please contact me . But if no such company or service exists, I am positive that you could create it today and sell to almost every condo corporation and property management company that have a condition where terraces or patios sit below a tower. Because inevitably, there will be someone upstairs throwing butts.

Many buildings have a similar issue with dog poo. People simply don’t pick up after their dogs. So some property managers have started taking stool samples of every dog who lives in the building. That way they can easily determine which residents aren’t picking up after their dogs. I guess that’s what it takes to get some people to give a shit.

Of course, this isn’t a problem just in buildings. Cities in general are always fighting litter. That’s why you see ideas like this pop-up:

#neatstreets , idea geniale per ridurre i mozziconi sulle strade pic.twitter.com/udbV7IH9AW

— Else Project (@ElseProject_)

October 14, 2015

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This particular one (in London) was designed to stop people from throwing their cigarette butts on the street. Instead, you use your butt to vote. In this case: England vs. Australia.

We talk a lot about big ideas here on Architect This City. What driverless cars will mean for cities, how laneway housing could help with housing affordability, and so on. But the smallest ideas can also matter a lot for city building. Sometimes we forget that.

I have a new favorite blog that I think you might all enjoy as well. It’s called BT | A | Works and it is the “architectural and urban research and development division” of Bing Thom Architects in Vancouver. 

I think it’s it’s important to have people in a firm who are researching and experimenting with ideas beyond the day-to-day tasks of a job. So I was excited to discover their work this morning.

Their most recent post is a look at ownership patterns of single family homes sold in 3 west end neighborhoods in Vancouver from September 2014 to February 2015 (a 6 month period). These are some of the most expensive areas in the city and, collectively, they found 172 properties sold with an aggregate value of around $520 million.

Given the presence of foreign buyers in Vancouver’s real estate market, one of the things they then did was identify “non-anglicized Chinese names” on the title records. This means names like “Li Xian”, but not names like “Andrew Shui-Him Yan”, because the anglicized first name suggests that they are probably not a new immigrant or probably not living abroad.

Here’s what they found:

In total, 66% of the properties in the sample (172 properties) were associated with a non-anglicized Chinese name. And for properties over $5 million, the percentage jumps to 88%. The other interesting thing worth noting is that 23% of the registered owners declared their occupation as “homemaker/housewife.”

I thought this would serve as an interesting follow-up to the post I wrote about a month ago called, Is Hongcouver better off than Vancouver? If you’d like to see the full BT | A | Works presentation, click here .