Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 444

It is an overwhelmingly positive thing for cities when you can somehow figure out how to turn a site like this (which looks to have been a single-family home):

Into 13 homes and new ground-floor retail that looks like this (non-Google street view images can be found here ):

This particular example is at 752 High Street in Thornbury , which is an inner suburb of Melbourne. Designed by Gardiner Architects , the build has 4 floors of residential, a 5th floor rooftop amenity, and a single elevator with a single wraparound staircase. It was also constructed out of cross-laminated timber.

For more about that process, here's a short video :

https://youtu.be/b-688Jvjmwk

If you watch the video, you'll hear the architect talk about how his firm had been working on this project for about 8 or 9 years. I have no idea the backstory and I'm not about to speculate, but clearly 8-9 years is far too long for only 13 new homes. And the reality is that we often don't make it easy to build this kind of infill housing.

Broadly speaking, if you're trying to encourage this scale of housing, I think at a minimum you want to look at 3 things: (1) the planning permissions need to be flexible and as-of-right, (2) you need to look at the local building codes to see if there are any obstacles in place that don't necessarily make sense for this typology, and (3) you want to look at the impact fees being levied.

It's hard not to imagine our cities being better off having more apartments like High Street.

There is a very common story that plays out in cities. It starts with an area that has seen disinvestment and is probably a little seedy and/or dangerous . This creates an environment where rents and real estate as a whole are relatively inexpensive. New, cool and creative businesses start to move in (attracted by said inexpensiveness) and the area begins to turn around. Eventually it becomes suitable for institutional-type investors, and this ultimately leads to everything becoming expensive as a result of demand outstripping supply. Gentrification complete.

The great irony of this story is that you sometimes, or oftentimes, lose the very things that made the area cool and interesting in the first place. Here is an example from Miami :

The result has been a property speculation boom that, when combined with the city's relatively low wages, put many  businesses and residents on the street . Asking rents for industrial space, for instance,  went up by 53 percent  in the last year alone. Nobody can afford to buy, let alone rent, adequate space for a music venue because so much land has been snapped up by outside investors with a predilection for  grand, "world-class urban" designs . 

And for some areas, it is arguably the result of a careful and deliberate plan that was put in place nearly two decades ago:

Teele's commissioner district in the early 2000s included both Park West and the historically Black neighborhood of Overtown. At the turn of the millennium the area was blighted and crime-ridden thanks to years of racist, regressive policy decisions from segregation to redlining. His plan was simple but incredibly effective. He spearheaded a campaign to revitalize the area by granting a limited number of 24-hour liquor licenses to clubs like Space. Dozens of venues rose up on and around 11th Street, including vast, multi-room clubs like Metropolis, live venues like Studio A and Grand Central, and more intimate spots like Vagabond. Sporadic police raids also gave the area a druggy, dangerous reputation, inadvertently raising its allure. 

This reoccurring arc has led some people to conclude that cities and/or areas seem to want to follow a kind of binary outcome: they're either dying or they're too successful. Why can't we just have urban homeostasis? I don't think this is necessarily always the case. Cities go through cycles just like any other market. I also know that it's complicated. But I do feel strongly that we need to be mindful that part of what makes cities such wonderful places is that they are factories for new ideas and creativity.

I can't remember when or exactly how he said it, but YouTuber Casey Neistat once described New York City as an incredible island (Manhattan?) where misfits from all over the world come to do whatever the hell they want. And that part of the reason for this is that nobody cares what you do, because everyone is just so damn busy. You could certainly argue that New York isn't what it used to be. But the lesson here remains the same: Cities are at their best when they allow humans to create, build, experiment, and express themselves.

And oftentimes a great place for that is in a space that nobody else wants.

I don't know if any of you have had a chance to play with ChatGPT yet, but it is pretty incredible. Here is something that my friend David Fitzpatrick, who is a planner, tweeted out :

https://twitter.com/_DavidFitz/status/1600886386734682112?s=20&t=nxrqQJM8AQ6unugSs7eP9w

There is really no way of telling that AI produced this. It sounds natural and, in this particular case, it also feels like it understands that this is an ongoing debate: "the by-law may not provide enough flexibility to allow for..."

It's a good thing I don't write for a living.