Toronto’s Director of Urban Design, Harold Madi , recently did a 20 tweet series on boulevards. And since today is Gardiner East day , it seems appropriate to share it with you all. Thanks to Shawn Micallef for using Storify to put it all together neatly. If you can’t see all the tweets below, click here .
That’s the second largest inventory of apartment towers in North America – many or most of which are in car-oriented suburban neighborhoods.
Of course, Toronto continues to build a lot of towers. But this second and current wave of towers is quite different than the last. Virtually all of them are now condo (as opposed to rental) and most are concentrated in central neighborhoods that are generally well-serviced by transit.
This has created a lot of positives for the city. It brought more people into the core to live, which in turn brought more retailers and employers into the city. It has created what I believe is a more vibrant and exciting 24/7 city.
But this return to city centers (as well as the economic spikiness it has created) is now well established both in Toronto, as well as in other cities all around the world. Every real estate conference or panel you go to now talks about Millennials and their desire to be in walkable communities. We got it.
And relatively speaking, those kinds of communities aren’t that difficult to create when you’re infilling city centers. Certainly not at this point. The street grid and bones are usually all in place. And the urban form is often conducive to transit.
The real challenge – and thus opportunity – for Toronto and lots of other cities is how to urbanize the (inner) suburbs and in particular these “towers in a park”. If you follow this space, you’ll know that there’s a lot more that we could be doing .
How do we rethink their relationship to the rest of the city? How do we better connect them through transit? How do we plug them in economically? In my opinion, these are far more difficult tasks. But they’re important ones for the long-term success of our cities.
This morning I read through a real estate report called Luxury Defined . It’s a look at the global luxury real estate market across “the world’s top 10 cities for prime property” and about 70 regional and resort destinations.
It’s interesting to look at the trends and see how high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) are choosing to allocate their funds in residential real estate. Here are some of the charts and diagrams that caught my eye as I was going through it (you may need to zoom your browser in):
If you’d like to download the full report, click here . It’s free, but you’ll need to enter your name and email address.
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Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly.
