Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 695

These days, everybody seems to be talking about the 15-minute city -- Bloomberg , Treehugger , the Financial Times , as well as countless others. While not a new concept, it is a moniker that is easier for most people to digest. COVID-19 has also created the right backdrop for the moment that it is currently enjoying.

The 15-minute city is a polycentric and somewhat decentralized approach to urbanism. It is about encouraging and creating multiple centers of urban activity near where people live. The idea being that everybody should have most of their essential services within a 15-minute walk of their home. Put even more simply, it's about creating an urban environment where people can live locally.

The benefits to this are numerous. It encourages more compact forms of development, which in turn encourages people to rely more heavily on active modes of transportation such as walking and cycling. The result is less commuting, less carbon emissions, more time, and likely better health outcomes given the reliance on active mobility.

Indeed, living in a walkable urban community is something that I personally put a huge value on. If I can't walk out of my home to go grab a coffee and something to eat, it's probably not the neighborhood for me. But at the same time, I don't think we can ignore the fact that there are powerful centralizing forces present within our cities.

As Natalie Whittle points out in this FT article from the summer , new technologies -- from the telegraph to the internet -- have always elicited predictions that humans would now flee cities and move to the countryside. While it is true that there are other technologies -- everything from the streetcar to the automobile -- that have allowed us to decentralize to a greater extent, most of us are all still bound to cities.

In fact, you could argue that the opposite of decentralization has played out. As we have transitioned to a knowledge and information economy, the returns to being embedded within cities and within a particular place have only become greater.

Take for example the phenomenon of " collab houses " that has been playing out in Los Angeles for some time now, including during this pandemic. Collab houses are typically LA mansions where clusters of young people come and live together in order to create content for platforms like YouTube and TikTok. It's like a big dorm for creators. And supposedly the biggest one is Hype House .

What's fascinating to me about this phenomenon is that it reinforces two things. One, if you want to be rich and famous (emphasis on famous), Los Angeles is seemingly still an important place to be. And two, if you really want to be at the top of your game, it's apparently not enough to be in the same city as other likeminded individuals; you also need to be under the same roof, bouncing ideas around and pushing one another.

So what does this all mean? Well, maybe this time is different and we are all currently living through a reorganization of how we will live, work and play. Or, maybe this time isn't all that different. And the 15-minute city, while an important goal, won't be the be-all and end-all of modern city building.

Photo by Lukas Geck on Unsplash

If I have learned anything from this pandemic it is that, when push comes to shove, Torontonians will eat pretty much anywhere. On sidewalks. On streets. In white tents that masquerade as outdoor dining. And in many other little urban crevices.

I am only half-joking, because the reality is that this pandemic has pried us away from the status quo and forced us to reconsider how we allocate and how we occupy many of our public spaces. There will be some positive outcomes on the other side of this.

To that end, a new city building effort has just been announced here in Toronto. (Alex Bozikovic of the Globe and Mail wrote about it here in "Rebirth of the Promenade".) The vision is called "University Park" and the team behind it includes the landscape architecture firm PUBLIC WORK , the non-profit Evergreen, and the Michael Young Family Foundation.

What they want to do is transform Toronto's University Avenue into something akin to La Rambla in Barcelona -- except better:

Our vision brings together patches of public green space that are currently disconnected and inaccessible in order to create a signature destination in the centre of our province’s capital. By making minor adjustments to the existing roadway on University Avenue and converting only 9.5 acres of city-owned asphalt into native landscape, pedestrian walkways, bike paths, and cultural installations, we can create a 90-acre park that spans from Queen’s Park all the way to the waterfront.

It's about time. My only request is that they include small sidewalk crevice where I might be able to sit and enjoy a chicken burrito and a glass of wine. To learn more about University Park and to subscribe to their newsletter, click here .

Image: PUBLIC WORK

Richard Voith and Jing Liu of Philadelphia-based Econsult, along with a bunch of other smart coauthors, have just published a working paper looking at the effects of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) on home prices. More specifically, they looked at the impact that LIHTC-financed properties have had in Los Angeles -- both in low-income and high-income neighborhoods, as well as when it's the first LIHTC development in the area or a subsequent one. Some of you might be assuming that low-income housing is likely to create downward pressure on home prices. But the authors found the opposite to be true. Below is the paper's abstract. If you'd like to download a copy of the full working paper, you can do that over here .

Abstract : While there is widespread agreement about the importance of the Low-Income Housing
Tax Credit (LIHTC) in addressing the country’s affordable housing needs, there is less certainty about the effects of LIHTC-financed properties on their surrounding neighborhoods. A growing body of research has largely refuted the argument that affordable housing properties in and of themselves have negative effects on local property values and increase crime rates. Several key questions remain essentially unanswered, however. First, for how long do the observed spillover benefits of LIHTC construction last? Second, does the development of multiple LIHTC properties in a neighborhood have an additive, supplemental effect on surrounding conditions, or is there a threshold at which the concentration of such properties – and the predominantly low-income individuals they house – negatively affects the neighborhood?

In this paper, we focus on Los Angeles County, a large, diverse urban area with significant affordability challenges. Drawing upon both public and proprietary property sales data, we conduct interrupted time series analyses to ascertain whether property value trends differed prior and subsequent to the introduction of a LIHTC-financed property in the community. We find that LIHTC properties positively impact surrounding housing values across the spectrum of Los Angeles’ neighborhoods. Further the concentration of multiple LIHTC properties in a neighborhood additively increases housing prices up to ½ mile away. Finally, these effects though of greater magnitude in lower-income neighborhoods, are fully present in high-income neighborhoods.

Image: Econsult