Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 350

New York City is set to become the first in the US to implement a congestion charge (a form of road pricing). I first wrote about this back in 2018 , and then again in 2019 , but now it is looking more and more like it may actually happen sometime next year.

I think all urbanists agree that this is an important step in the right direction. But some are now worried that New York isn't going about it in the right way. Here is an excerpt from a recent Vice article by Aaron Gordon:

With all these plans, you could be excused for thinking New York is doing congestion pricing—a potentially transformative policy that would be a first in the nation—right by not only charging drivers to access some of the densest, most valuable land in the world, but also giving them alternatives. Unfortunately, New York isn’t doing that, and in fact looks set to completely screw up congestion pricing so badly it may discredit the policy in a way that makes it harder for other cities to adopt it. Rather than approaching it as a lynchpin to a wide-ranging effort to reshape Manhattan’s relationship to the private car, congestion pricing has become solely about money—specifically, paying off enough of the credit-card bill New York has run up with a variety of ill-conceived and poorly-executed projects that it can get more credit cards.

You can rightly say that this is decades in the making. Mayor Bloomberg first proposed the idea back in 2007 , and I'm sure there were others before him with a similar idea.

So Gordon raises a valid point: It's important that NYC gets this right. Otherwise, it's going to be that much more difficult for other North American cities to even think about implementing road pricing.

For the full Vice article, click here .

We're no longer in Paris. We've been back in Toronto for about 3 weeks now. But the pictures live on and I finally got around to processing all of the ones that I took on my Fujifilm X-T3 (23mm f/2).

At the beginning of this month, between Sep 2 and Sep 4, the research company Nanos conducted a random survey asking Canadians about their views on housing . The survey reached 1,044 adults and you may find the results interesting:

• Nationally, three in five Canadians "support" or "somewhat support" decreasing the number of immigrants coming into Canada until housing becomes more affordable. (The feds plan to welcome 500,000 immigrants per year by 2025.)

• The provinces that are the most in support of reduced immigration are the Prairies (65%), and the province with the lowest support is BC (52%).

• 82% of Canadians are "opposed" or "somewhat opposed" to building new housing on land currently set aside as green space. Of this group, 64% responded with "opposed".

• 55% of Canadians "support" or "somewhat support" giving tax incentives to private developers to build new rental housing . The highest support for this is in BC (61%), Quebec (60%), and among Canadians 55 or older (55%).

• However, this support flips when Canadians are asked about giving tax incentives to private developers to build for-sale housing . 58% of Canadians are "opposed" or "somewhat opposed" to doing this.

These last two points took me a second to decipher, because the wording in the article is "new rental units" and "new homes." Naturally, I initially read these two things as being the same thing. New rentals are new homes. So what are they trying to say here?

My assumption (in the above) is that it's a housing bias coming through and that a "new home" equals a for-sale low-rise house. Hmm. We really need to be more mindful of the semantics in our housing vocabulary.